On the Rise
Any Young Mechanic

They’re fresh off a run of shows at The Great Escape and their first-ever performance at The George Tavern. The five-piece have played to audiences in this corner of the world before, with an appearance at Reading and Leeds Festival last year, and a performance at The Shacklewell Arms — all with no music released. Yet, as they continue to introduce their songs to fresh ears over ten thousand miles from their familiar circles, they report an evident sense of kinship. "It feels like we don't have to try and convince people of what we're trying to do," says violinist Thea Martin (they/them) of the band’s experience in the UK. “It's just immediately understood.”

This is not to say that Any Young Mechanic didn’t receive similar recognition as they moved through Adelaide’s tight-knit DIY creative scene. After all, it’s what brought them together. 

At the helm is vocalist and guitarist Sam Wilson, who met drummer Jay Eliot Mee at university while doing a popular music module back in 2019. The pair went on to make music together throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Wilson later met Martin in a creative writing course over Zoom and invited them to do session work on albums that he and Mee were working on, before they joined the band full-time in 2022. Just one year later, guitarist Luka Kilgariff and upright bassist Allan McBean — who Martin shared other bands with at the time — would be asked to join by Wilson, who was seeing their gigs and “knocked over by the creativity and talent on display”, as Mee puts it.

And collaboration was always the most viable option, as they'd find, namely due to the composition of the music circuit. "The thing to do in Adelaide, if you're going to really have any fun with the way the music scene is set up, is to start a band," Wilson explains. "Starting a solo project is not fun. Starting a bedroom project is obviously enjoyable through the internet, but it’s very hard to engage with the venues that already exist nowadays.”

Each member came in with personability, talent, and ultimately a willingness to experiment. Wilson grew up in Japan, and he spent a long time honing his craft with mid-tempo songs, but found that a change of tune was needed. “I thought I was the serious person,” he muses. “Playing mid-tempo to people who are seriously listening is very pleasurable. Playing mid-tempo to pubs where everyone is talking, and nobody gives a shit, is very frustrating.”

Martin grew up playing orchestral music, oriented towards classical training that kept them "between worlds, not really fitting in musically anywhere,” as they tell me. "I did not expect to be doing band music at all. I just got very, very lucky to be asked by some really nice people who had a vision for what they thought violin could add to their projects." Martin tested the bounds of what this could look like while playing in a noise rock band called Twine, during which they tapped into a novel sense of creative freedom. “I had complete permission to be loud and to make intentionally horrible noises, which was not how I'd grown up. It was about playing very technically perfect and recreating existing interpretations.”

For McBean, it was a similar process of finding where he fit, but with less rigidity, despite having a classical background himself. Curiously, he landed on embracing the inherent absurdity. "The bass is just such a goofy instrument," he asserts. "Meet other bass players, and it's all big jokes." He puts it more seriously a moment later: "Taking the lighter moments as seriously as the rest is a valid form of expression. If you can make something funny musically, that's the holy grail.”

The Adelaide scene offered a low-stakes space for the band to explore their growing dynamic, free from commercial pressure. "There was a lot of room for it," Martin says. "Just no one cared, which was quite nice, because it meant that we just kept pushing each other to make more and more interesting stuff." So, with a desire to shed constraints, string together a shared vision, and keep a tone of humour and lightness, Any Young Mechanic would land on constructing their own sound of contemporary folk; music of the people.

A key reference point that stood out to the band by this point was the Windmill scene in London, with bands like black midi and Black Country, New Road offering a wealth of new territory to tap into. “They’re kind of doing older guitar music in this really interesting and subversive way,” Kilgariff says of the appeal of the London bands. “It was refreshing for us to see that you can do weird stuff with guitars and make it really awesome and empowering.”

A Big Thief show at Melbourne's Forum, during the tour that followed Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You (which they collectively agree is Big Thief’s best record), expanded on those ideas of what the band could do. Most of the members were there, and can cite considerable impact from the experience. "We got to see this band operate at their creative peak, with no screen, no real production value outside of the fact that they were incredibly good musicians and incredibly in tune with one another," Wilson recalls. "That felt very liberating." 

Interestingly, the influences that Any Young Mechanic draw from  consistently look outward from Australia. "The kind of music I've always been into has always sort of come from these places, whether North America or Europe," Mee notes. "It was always my dream to bring our work here and have it not feel like a fish out of water. The joy of playing in this band is that everyone is so open to dreaming big and not being in the Australian mindset. Which isn’t necessarily good or bad, but different.”

In some ways, the mindset that Mee is referring to has small-town parameters. There’s a ceiling to what Adelaide can offer, despite its relatively heaving population. "There's no reason to be thinking commercially there," Wilson explains. "Because you don't see any benefits from it. You're just unhappy, and you're still not making any money. So the only thing to do is figure out how you want to sound. And then, once you've figured that out, go somewhere else.”

It sounds bleak, but facing the reality of how to work with Australia's infrastructure for musicians meant that Any Young Mechanic could establish a strong band identity. They played shows among the same circles of friends and fellow musicians, and punters, whose attention they had to learn how to earn. All the while, they were crafting a collection of songs behind the scenes with diligence.  Having developed a clear sense of who they are and what they wanted to say, the band are now gearing up to release those songs as their debut album, The Modern Shoe Is Ruining The Foot.

The album was finished nearly three years ago, and was recorded over the course of three days. Wilson notes that the third day was barely used, however, emphasising the natural urgency through which the recording process unfolded. They used no overdubs or edits, keeping everything live and committed to tape with the intention of capturing the authenticity of an ensemble of musicians with a marked trust in one another's abilities. They rehearsed ahead of the sessions, primarily in Mee’s childhood home, solidifying their rapport. “The rehearsals were incredibly important,” Wilson recalls. “It needed to be done. As soon as we stopped playing, we needed to know whether it's there or whether we need to record it again. There was no fixing it in post.”

These constraints were largely practical — the album was grant-funded, made for around three thousand Australian dollars — but the band don't see this as disruptive. Instead, they acknowledge different great works that came together with minimal time to spare: Belle and Sebastian's Tigermilk, which was similarly recorded over a few days. Another Side of Bob Dylan, which was done in a night. 

And each member did their part to ensure that things could be completed with ease. "Everyone bringing chamber instruments makes me feel like I've got to think about the drum kit differently," Mee says of his experience. "If we're repurposing a contrabass or a violin from what it was built for, I want to carry that ethos with the drums.”

For Kilgariff, who also played banjo for the first time on the album, understanding restraint and remaining open to learning were paramount. “I’d never played banjo before this album,” he admits. “And it’s not that different from guitar, but I tried to be more of a student of the instrument rather than just strumming over it.”

“The biggest thing was knowing when not to play, and knowing that even if you're not playing, that doesn't mean you're not contributing," he continues. "In my head, it was like, if I'm not playing, then I'm not important. Some abandonment complex, I'm sure,” he laughs.

For Martin, the desire to live beyond a “conventional life” kept them committed to creating honestly, and bringing that energy to the final recordings. “I want to live in a way that allows me to make art truthfully, and I think that means detaching from a lot of those colonial dream ideas. I feel okay about doing that, and I feel that these are the people I want to do it with.”

McBean, similarly, reveals a sentiment of feeling legitimised as an artist, transitioning into a broader mode of self-expression across the songs that differed from his experience of the “classical music ringer”. 

And for Wilson, it all comes down to easing up on control and giving the music space to breathe with faith in those contributing to it. “I have started to feel confident in the fact that the reason these people are in the band is that they are the perfect people to communicate this work,” Wilson tells me. “They have the emotion, the intellect, and the education on their instruments to communicate what they want to communicate through the songs. They have better instincts than me.”

“I’ll listen to something that we’ve done on this record and think, I couldn’t sit down and write what that arrangement is,” he continues. “And that arrangement only exists because there are all of these people who are giving themselves entirely to their part of the song. You can write a lot of things, but you can’t write that.”

As such, The Modern Shoe Is Ruining The Foot cracks through what is regarded as the "cosy campfire" tropes of Australian folk, which is one of few mediums of communication not muddled by an unwillingness to be forthcoming — something that the band attributes to regional mentality. “People aren’t overly sincere," Kilgariff clarifies. “We don’t really tell you directly how we’re feeling. It’s sort of beating around the bush, or suffusing it with humour or sarcasm. People are quite uncomfortable being totally naked in that regard.” 

  Recording live saw Any Young Mechanic dare themselves to bare off. And equally, it was a response to the growing artifice that poses a bigger problem to organic creativity than natural, human inscrutability. "The closest thing to the reason why we wanted to make music the way we do is hating AI," Wilson affirms. “We just wanted to make the most human thing. Anytime I can hear a mistake in the record, I would have wanted to fix it up a few years ago. Now I just think: we're going to need more mistakes in music, because it might become the only signifier that somebody actually made this.”

In the band's desire to balance tradition with modernity, Wilson is equally clear about what he doesn't want the record co-opted by, however. "Things don't feel good right now for a lot of people, but that doesn't mean you should become conservative,” he says. Community is the thing we're being prevented from achieving because of modernity, as opposed to some conservative answer to it.”

The songs carry all of this without announcing it. Wilson distrusts the confessional mode, explaining, ”when you're being told exactly what's happening in a song, it's very hard to bring yourself to it”. They lean on carefully placed sarcasm and abstraction. Or as Martin responds, from an outside perspective, "You're very interested in saying quite specifically what you mean, how you really feel. But then it's using writing devices to do that in ways that are interesting; humour, or sarcasm, or anger, or abstraction.” 

This audible precision is depicted both lyrically and sonically on The Modern Shoe Is Ruining The Foot, observed from the math rock-inspired twinge of “There’s A New Place On The Market” to their live set staple hoedown, “My House Divides”. 

"It's nice to show there's breadth," Mee says, "Including not being pretentious and going, we would never play a hoedown. But also not just playing hoedowns." Wilson notes that the song is not actually about having one, adding: "A lot of the great pop songs are about fitting a concept that is quite sad or bleak into something that's really fun and danceable. That's a long tradition. We're just doing that.”

It’s all part of a broader, simple ethos for Any Young Mechanic. They’re making folk music, “for now”. And while they’ve had the songs underneath them for a while, Wilson is pragmatic about the wait. "If it had been truly up to us, it probably would have been out at the end of last year. But I don't think we'd be talking to you." 

And now, the band are in a space where it’s difficult to be stationary, having seen what awaits them on the other side. They also recognise that they aren’t the only band from Adelaide looking to take their music a step further, jokingly expressing a desire to just bring their scenemates on a plane over. “We always feel a sort of injustice about it, because there are so many great bands back there,” they agree. 

But if nothing else, Any Young Mechanic are leading by example. Their name alone comes from a line in “Hooray For Hollywood”, inspired by the song’s use in Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, as it critiques the idea of the promise of the Hollywood Dream, an appropriate fit for a band recognising the level of work required to supplement the “dream”.

"We were kind of in this small town," Wilson remembers, “We were rehearsing and rehearsing, and we thought, ‘If we can actually get it in front of people, I think we'll be all right.’"