We Are A Team
Don’t be shocked, but Ceres have made an album about love.
Gone is the dark night of the soul that propelled 2016’s Drag It Down On You, replaced with a desire to spread positivity in the world via their third full-length, We Are a Team.
“That was the whole reason for this album to be,” says frontman Tom Lanyon.
You can hear it from the first line of the record – “I’m gonna get happy” – to the swooning, string-laden closing track “Something Good” with its refrain, “I think something good’s gonna happen”.
“We Are A Team is not this dark, at the bottom of everything kind of record. It’s a more uplifting thing.”
With the exception of two songs – Stay Awake and Collarbone, 2011 – Lanyon wrote the album between February and September 2018, when Ceres gathered in a house in Apollo Bay with producer Tom Bromley (guitarist for UK outfit Los Campesinos!) and Grammy-nominated engineer Andrei Eremin (Chet Faker, Tash Sultana) to record We Are a Team.
Setting up in a seven-bedroom house on an idyllic rural property without phone reception or internet, for 16 days they “all completely lost [their] minds”.
“Everyone fought,” chuckles Lanyon. “But everyone was firing on such creativity and trying to do the right thing, and everyone has strong opinions. It was a struggle to get it done. But I think that means we care and we tried our hardest. I’ve never worked on anything as hard.”
Turn the volume up hear the wind howling through the house’s rafters; at the end of Something Good you can detect the sound of it creaking. The fact that the house became a part of the recording tied in nicely with the album’s themes, as the property belongs to the family of Lanyon’s partner and was a favourite location of her late father Viv, the namesake of the album’s lead single.
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“For us to make a record about that family’s niece or daughter in that house is pretty incredible,” says Lanyon.
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While the album might mark a shift thematically for Ceres – which formed in 2012 and is completed by guitarist Sean Callanan, bassist Grant Young and drummer Frank Morda – musically We Are a Team continues the band’s ability to create stirring, life-affirming indie-rock anthems, albeit with a more nuanced, mature songwriting flare that reflects the roadwork and emotional growth of the past three years.
