DMA’s Interview

Australian nostalgic garage pop trio DMA’s are about to release their highly anticipated debut album Hills End. We caught up with acoustic guitarist Johnny Took who spoke about the release and their upcoming UK tour.


What does it feel like to finally be able to release Hills End?

We don’t have many songs out at the moment and we have reached the ceiling of where we can go just off an EP, so it is really exciting! It is kind of weird though as well because some of these songs have been around for a while and it has been a long time coming. I am just excited to show some new music to the people who have been supporting us and hopefully people who have not discovered the band yet can enjoy some of these new tunes too.


When did you start writing songs that appear on the album?

I wrote a song called Blown Away five years ago and we had Step Up the Morphine around a couple of years ago. It is a weird thing about the debut album because it’s all mix and match and you are picking from all these initial tracks. There are many great songs that we didn’t put on the album but we picked ones that worked together and were self-appropriate for the band we are right now. The newest track written is Melbourne. We finished tracking that a year ago, so the album has been sitting in the pipeline for a while.


Can you tell us some meanings behind a couple of songs?

Melbourne is about anxiety and depression. It is only called Melbourne because we wrote it in Melbourne. Another song Blown Away, for me personally, was when an old friend of mine went overseas. People are going to do their own thing and people are going to move on. Sometimes these things are out of your control, especially when someone is on the other side of the world and you cannot do anything about it, you just have to roll with it.


You have toured around the world even before releasing an album. How has it all been?

We are currently touring around Australia for St. Jerome’s Laneway Festival and the response from the first three shows has been surprisingly pretty good. We didn’t really know what to expect because we had not played in Australia for a while. Fans are pretty into it in the UK as well, especially at some of our gigs in London, Manchester and Glasgow. It is great fun speaking to them after the show.


On that note, what can you tell us about your upcoming UK Tour?

We are looking forward to changing up the live set. We just started opening the live set with a song called Timeless and it has been great! It feels appropriate to open the album with it and also the live set. I am looking forward to touring the UK when everyone has had a chance to hear songs like Timeless and Blown Away and can relate to them in a live aspect. That’s why we are so eager to get this album out!


Hills End is out February 26.