The Great Emu War Casualties are on the rise

Vocalist and guitarist Joe Jackson, bassist and vocalist Saskia Clapton, drummer Bibek Tamang, and synths and vocalist Cat Sanzaro are all from different parts of the world – Jackson is the only one from a different hemisphere. How these four came to be in a band named after the internet's favourite historical Australian facts begins with Clapton.

After discovering J-rock as a child in Sydney, she picked up the bass and in her teens began playing in bands around the city. A year later, she relocated to Japan to play in her beloved genre's birthplace but after her visa expired, Clapton headed back home and forged a musical friendship with two English musicians. After their visas ran out in 2015, she travelled to the UK with them, and "stayed there for like, two and a half years, and that band fucked off and blah, blah, blah," she recalls, waving it off. It was at this time that Jackson's then-band also imploded.

Liverpool-born Jackson discovered music after being coerced into picking up an instrument by his parents. "There's no real music in my family," he recalls. "I've got an auntie who paints, and that's it. I was a kid with no mates so my parents made me play the guitar because they thought that would make me friends, but it just made me weirder," he laughs. But it paid off as his teen years were littered with bands, including a Tenacious D covers band. "It was with a lad, Alex Gordon, in school. He was Jack Black, and I was Kyle Gass, and we would just do Tenacious D covers with two acoustic guitars."

After a brief stint matching their disparate loves of Arctic Monkeys (Jackson) and screamo music (Gordon), "We thought we were incredible. It was all indie upstrokes, and he had the big fringe, and he was screaming…I think I got booed off stage? It's all a haze. You repress that period." For all the questionable musical experimentation, Jackson did the most important part of any meaningful endeavour: "But I never stopped."

Their grounding came when Jackson met Clapton in Liverpool in 2017. A year later, the pair relocated after Clapton's work visa expired; first a brief stint in Amsterdam, but then to their current home of Melbourne, after, another visa expiration. Eventually, due to the pandemic restrictions, Jackson wound up being able to stay indefinitely.

It's here that Nepalse drummer Tamang entered the picture. A metal drummer by trade, explains Jackson, "He was in Perth, he was in Darwin, he was in Adelaide, and then he was in Melbourne…he's got the worst luck, he was in Melbourne just long enough to meet us, and then we got hold of him, and he couldn't go anywhere anymore." And then Melburnian Sanzaro joined to fill out the current lineup.

When I ask them what it was that made them gel, Jackson's quick to offer "desperation", while Clapton adds in "shared trauma". Chatting to the pair is a feast of Australian and British sardonic wit. It's the kind of quick-fire rounds that can only be established between two people who have found kindred spirits.

The unspoken element of The Great Emu War Casualties that comes into play is the Melbourne of it all. Each member has their hand in different external creative projects, as well as day jobs. According to Clapton, "It's the Melbourne way. It's very incestuous, everyone's in about five different things…I don't know why that is."

Working outside of the band has allowed them to see the real unification. For all of their nonchalance at the idea of being stuck with each other, there's an acknowledgement that the reason this project has weathered multiple moves and years. While in their other projects there may be clashing and far less amenable motives from other people, here, it's fun (with the occasional butting of heads – mostly from Jackson apparently: "Everyone's been a victim of me at some stage, and that's what's kept us all together.")

"We're quite similar personalities, which makes me really sad," Clapton deadpans. "I think if Bibek were on here as well, you'd just have a third face behaving in this way. The nucleus of the band for a long time has been the three of us, and we've kind of become a toxic relationship," Jackson adds.

While there's no doubt the personalities all align, when it comes to their creativity, the end product is usually the result of various demos and bits that they create separately. Bringing them together is where the alchemy finds its roots.

"We go into a room and try and flesh it out that way. There's often too many and depending on how much bandwidth we've got at any given time, or what our attention spans look like, that determines how many of these little ideas become songs," Jackson explains.

This process of theirs was born out of their beginnings. They began just before Covid, while everyone was already in different locations – including Tamang in Byron Bay. This allowed their process to become embedded in their individual lives, freeing them up to exist outside of the band. Over the course of a handful of EPs, from their 2020 debut Box Office Poison to last year's Permanent Resident, they've consistently honed and polished their darting rhythms and razor-sharp hooks.

Debut album Public Sweetheart No. 1 was the group's first chance to properly indulge their desire to focus on a singular project. As Clapton says, "It feels like a holistic work." They spent time together writing, demoing, and recording, as opposed to their usual "piecemeal" process, according to Clapton again.

This isn't the only change. Public Sweetheart No. 1 is loaded with polished, shimmering hooks that glow – despite Jackson’s self-reflection throughout the lyrics . "It's a strange opening gambit, I think, because it's different to everything that we've done elsewhere," he says. "Which is always dangerous, but it's a lot more personal than the EPs and things we've done previously."

The Great Emu War Casualties have often been deep-rooted in the humour that runs through their members. From song titles like "Dead Ibis Burger" to the handful of EPs like 2021's Vanity Project, the new album is the group's – and on an emotional level, especially Jackson's – chance to push things to a new level. But the overarching ethos hasn't changed. This isn't a group of starry-eyed, green teens; these are travelled and established musicians with a penchant for wicked humour and loving their passion.

As for where this leaves them now, Jackson believes it puts them in a better stead. "I think for me, it takes the pressure off," he says. "You asked whether the album is the thing? And it sort of is, but it's also just the next thing. I already know there'll be another next thing, so it helps to take all that pressure away," says Jackson.

Continuing, he adds, "It's not that it doesn't matter, I would love things to go really well, but when they don't – which they often don't – it's still all right, and it's nice. You can either use that as experience, use that as education…or repress it, which I do a lot as well. So that's fine," Jackson says, smirking.

"I think I'm just always trying to chase the perfect song, which hasn't happened thus far," Clapton says, adding her two cents on where the ambitions lie now. Jackson's quick to bounce from this idea: "I'm not writing the perfect song because you'll quit if I do, so for selfish reasons I'm making bad music, it's self-sabotage. I've actually already written the perfect song, Sas, I'm just keeping it on a hard drive," he laughs, to which Clapton quickly gets in the final word, harking back to his Tenacious D days: "The greatest song in the world?"