Little Red’s is one of the more encouraging success stories in recent Australian music. Basically, five guys with a thing for harmonies and '50s rock sass began opening for big-name indie acts and building buzz in the lead-up to their debut album. Listen to Little Red penetrated the ARIA Top 30 and made the catchy little retro band a festival fixture. Now with second album Midnight Remember about to drop, Little Red look and sound older and no longer confine themselves to the ’50s and ’60s for inspiration. Instead, songs jump through the decades, tied together by choice harmonies and a thirst for pop purity. It’s a world-wise record with a newfound range, from the tempestuous build of ‘All Night’ and ska swagger of ‘Lazy Boy’ to the gospel-tugged ballad ‘Going Wrong’ and blue-eyed-soul falsetto of ‘Forget About Your Man’. It’s an record to bring home to your parents.

In between the unveiling of the frightfully catchy lead single ‘Rock It’ and the release of Midnight Remember, guitarist/singer Adrian Beltrame spoke to TheVine in detail about the album. Perhaps because there are so many vocalists and songwriters in the group, he often refers to Little Red in the third person. Oh, and he’s already thinking about the band’s third album.

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I feel like there’s a few divergent influences happening on the new album compared to the first one. There’s more indie rock and more ’80s in there, and what seems like a big Beach Boys influence. Do you think that’s fair to say?

I guess so. There’s a lot of influences in the band. Everybody tries to bring their own thing. I think also the producer, Scott Horscroft, had a big hand. Some stuff that kind of sounds ’80s, it wasn’t something we went in to specifically make it sound like that. Like some of the drum sound. It’s hard to say, really. It’s definitely true what you say, but I’m not sure how to explain where it all comes from.

It’s quite a varied album. Were you ever worried that the songs were too different?

When we were demoing the album and first met with Scott, we said to him that was one of our concerns, that a lot of the music is very different. But he almost encouraged that, and we went with the idea that each song has to be its own little world: make it what it is and then it would work. And I think it did. I think there’s some sort of consistency. I hope so.

There are unifying things too, like the harmonies and the production.

Yeah, I guess you’re right. There’s harmonies on every track, I think. That’s kind of the same as our first album.

You mentioned the songs being their own little worlds. Is it like that already when you have multiple songwriters in one band? How does that process work?

Most of the guys do their songwriting at home by themselves. Then we come together and help each other. [Guitarist/singer] Dom [Byrne] has a hand in helping a lot of songs get finished. We all throw our ideas together. It’s worked as long as the band’s gone so far. I know some people write together, but it seems to work this way for Little Red.

Were there songs that didn’t make the cut as you were writing this record?

Yeah. I mean, we have a lot of songs, even from the [era of the] first album, that we haven’t used. It’s hard to say what’s gonna happen to a lot of them, because a couple of the other guys have their own little side projects where they have played some songs that didn’t make the album. There’s a couple of songs I would have liked to have on the album that didn’t make it, just for some reason or other. But yeah, it’s good to know that there’s not a shortage or anything. It sounds a bit silly, but we’ve already got some things ready for the third record, I think.

The scale of your gigs increased hugely with the success of the first album. Do you think playing those bigger shows and festivals influenced the music you’ve made since?

I think it did. The first record, in a way, was very naïve and recorded pretty much live, all together singing and playing. This one, there’s many bits in many of the songs that we worked over in rehearsal to get the arrangements as powerful as they could be. There’s certain bits where it comes out of a chorus and things drop out and kick back in again. We definitely worked on the arrangements of songs to make them translate live.

Even though there’s five people in the band, the arrangements can be quite stripped down, especially on a song like ‘Rock It’…

Absolutely. Even though it does sound like a produced album, it is pretty stripped back. It could have been much more produced, but we wanted it to have really strong beats and bass and strong vocals. Those are really the first things people hear, I think. With ‘Rock It’, Dominic wrote that song and the arrangements didn’t change at all from the first demo recording he had. It’s just got that bass line and the key line flowing around it. That’s one example of an arrangement where we deliberately wanted to keep it very minimal.


Little Red - 'Rock It'

Why did you choose that as the lead single?

I think it was pretty obvious that it was the best song to introduce the new Little Red sound. I think the next single is gonna be ‘Slow Motion’, which is another piano-driven song. It’s hard because we could have gone with a few different things, but it happened to be the one we thought was the most instant and recognisable sort of song.

Of all the songs, ‘Place Called Love’ is most like how you guys sounded when you first started, like that ’60s rave-up thing. Was that left over from that era?

No, it wasn’t. But you’re right, it does sound a bit like something from the first album. We could have put even more stuff like that on there, but we just didn’t have enough room to put everything we wanted on the album. That’s one of the few tracks we didn’t use a click track for, and so you can really hear Taka [Honda] playing the drums. I really like that one, because it sounds like a bit of garage. We just wanted to get a bit of a balance between the new and the old Little Red, really.

How shocked were you by the success of the first album?

I don’t think we were shocked at all, really. We knew that what we were doing was something a bit different, and we knew that if we just got out there and played as many gigs as we could and played them with as much spirit as we could, people would respond. And they did. So it wasn’t surprising at all.

I was wondering if part of the band’s aim is exploring pop songwriting, and how it can have this timelessness and really broad appeal to it.

Absolutely. It’s just a very powerful medium. I don’t think any of us go a day without listening to music. It’s kind of hard because just personally I like so many different kinds of music. One day to the next, I wish I could be in a band that sounds like this and then sounds like that, and just do everything I could. But it’s hard to keep it all in one band and infuse all those influences at the same time. But y’know, we’ve done our best. (Laughs) I think that we’re gonna get better still. I think the third record is gonna be another leap.

How do you envision the third record? Obviously it’s this intangible thing in your head at the moment, but how do you think it might be different?

Look, it’s impossible for me to say. It’s just gonna be the same, like what you’d expect from Little Red. I think this record has still very much got the spirit of the first record. It’s just a bit more of a mature record and it’s recorded a bit better. At this stage, I just think the third record is gonna be another leap. It’s gonna have the same Little Red vibe.

Midnight Remember is out Sept. 10 on Liberation. Little Red is touring through October.

Doug Wallen