Spacey Jane are jetting to new heights

Just a few weeks before we connect over the phone, I find him playing a sold-out show to a very sweaty crowd at Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn. The place is literally shaking as finance bros and art girls and moms and dads alike jump around to Spacey’s biggest hits to date. Beers spill as the floor shakes and Harper blissfully blows out the speakers. It’s a groundswell.

When we finally have time for a proper catch up, Harper is settled down in Los Angeles. He’s been making a move over to the city – one of a few famous pilgrimages for up-and-coming acts – over the last couple of years, a process that proved remarkably rewarding and challenging all at the same time. A move of this magnitude – quite literally across the world – is bound to mess with a person in one way or another. But through the growing pains, Harper is focusing on finding his center of gravity and hoping to only come out stronger.

Spacey Jane started as a jam project between friends, as most good indie bands do. Harper, who grew up with a musician stepdad and playing in church groups, first got started in the scene through a high school band he formed with Kieran Lama, who now serves as Spacey’s drummer and manager. They were both from the same town in Western Australia and later moved to Perth for college.

“We just started jamming and trying to just go find some band members – anyone, really – because we didn’t know the scene at all,” Harper explains. Ashton Le Cornu, the band’s guitarist, found his way to the group after they’d cycled through a few trial players to find the right fit, while their first bass player Amelia (later replaced by the band’s now-bassist Peppa Lane) joined after meeting Ashton in a French class in uni.

Even now, friendship sits at the core of what Spacey does. In Harper's mind, being in a band wouldn't be possible without it. "In a lot of bands, there's like a member that's not that close. Or bands that can't fucking stand each other and fight a lot. There's all kind of setups. But we feel very lucky. Like, we've spent the last month in an Airbnb together, and it's been beautiful," he tells me. "There have been moments of teething pains ... But we've had most of the hard conversations, and we're at a place now where there's real mutual respect."

“Our first rehearsal was in this tiny, 30-square-foot room at Kieran’s college. We tried to cover, like Kings of Leon and Chili Peppers and all sorts of stuff,” he continues, explaining how far they've come since the early days. “As soon as we started doing it, it felt really good.”

Quickly, the group started gigging every week, exploring Perth’s house show scene and burgeoning psych rock scene, whose most notable exports include Tame Impala. “We just gigged and gigged and gigged and gigged … We played two or three shows a week for a year and a half before we got enough money together to go into a studio or record or anything like that,” Harper tells me.

Becoming a professional musician, though, was never really on Harper’s radar, at least at first. “I was discouraged from pursuing it in a lot of ways, as a lot of people are,” Harper continues. “I was studying engineering and finance in college, and I got two and a half years into that and I was flunking up bad. I was miserable.” With the band and a bar job in his back pocket, he decided to drop out and make music work. He didn’t have any career goals, and he was at a low. Music was his only real semblance of a path.

The risk paid off. Spacey quickly became an Australian sensation, building up from their Perth scene – which was, and still is, a creative incubator in the country – they quickly made the jump over to larger shows in Sydney and Melbourne, where they were able to get looks from label folks and reps from Triple J. And yet, just as things looked like they were taking off, everything also stopped.

“We had just quit our jobs because we had enough touring going on to pay a meager wage and focus on touring. We were halfway through a tour and had another relatively large one, our biggest yet at the time, booked for later in the year in Australia, and then lockdowns happened and borders closed. Initially, it was mass panic for us,” Harper remembers. But a little later on that year, a song off their debut record called “Booster Seat” took off (it now sits at over 100 million plays on Spotify), catapulting them to a new level of fame. After years of trying for victory, it had finally come.

As the world opened up, Spacey continued to grow. They kept gigging, released a second album, and realized what had started as a passion project was now a career. In Australia, they were at the top of the country’s cultural landscape, mainstays of its festival circuit and on the playlists of indie kids everywhere. Even to this day, Australia and Australian fans remain the band’s biggest champions. “There’s a real love of Australian music as a sort of patriotism around that thing,” Harper explains. “We feel like we are supported by Australian fans no matter where in the world we are, whether that’s physically being at the show or just cheering us on.” But more was possible. “We got to a point where it was a viable career in Australia and it was more than we could ever hope for. That was a platform then that we could use to pivot and look to do stuff in America and the UK,” he says.

Eventually, the time came for Harper to start scoping out the scene in L.A. It was 2022, two years after their initial breakout, and Spacey had already released a second, successful album and was looking to capitalize on a moment. At the time, Harper was dating an American, and he decided that going to spend some time on the West Coast could serve the dual purpose of reuniting him with his girlfriend and giving him a launch pad for songwriting sessions and music meetings.

“The second record was four months from coming out, it was done and dusted, and so it was time to start writing the next one,” Harper says of the period. That next record is If That Makes Sense, which was released on 9 May. “L.A. is so closely tied to this record. I basically lived [there] for three years. I went in very one track mind, like: ‘We’re making an album. That’s what the purpose of being here is. That’s what the purpose of my life is right now.’”

If That Makes Sense pulls its source material from the tension of that move. It balances fizzy guitars and airy, bouncy falsettos with lyrics about intense loneliness, loss, and tumult. These were, as Harper explains, the exact emotional poles he oscillated between as he found his way in the U.S.

The first few months, Harper says, were kind of like a holiday. But when the honeymoon wore off, the shock, he says, was “brutal.” The creature comforts he relied on in Australia – the same 100-person social circle he roamed in at parties and events, the gym he’d frequent, the cafes and restaurants and bars where he was a regular – weren’t there anymore. “You don’t even realize how that stuff is doing this thing for you the whole time. It’s helping you feel grounded and giving you a sense of identity. When you take that out, it’s so strange,” he explains. In America, everything was different. New ways to get a drivers license, no health insurance, finding the right spots to get groceries, were all little roadblocks he hadn’t anticipated.

There’s not necessarily one throughline to this album, rather vignettes of a life in transition. “I was just anxious all the time. I felt vulnerable and insecure," he remembers. The songs are the kind of things that could spill out of you in a monologue to an old friend after a long day. In a way, that’s kind of what they are. The record was written in part with fellow Aussie Sarah Aarons, who Harper says took him under his wing in L.A. Sat in her lounge with her tiny dog and boxes of takeaway, the pair got to work. Aarons, he says, helped him give shape to his vulnerabilities, processing romantic change and the weirdness of being untethered on a new continent.

“She knows me pretty well and knows exactly what I was going through and what I was dealing with throughout the process of making that record. I really am grateful to her for holding space for me, dare I say that,” he laughs.

Aarons’ presence on the record signifies more than just personal connection, though. She herself is one of the industry’s most esteemed pop talents – her credits include cuts with Gracie Abrams, Miley Cyrus, Noah Kahan, Mura Masa, Rachel Chinouriri, Tate McRae, and more – and working with her is a nod to Harper’s entry into the big leagues. If That Makes Sense is Spacey’s most polished and sonically ambitious to date. Songs like “Whateverrrr” and “Through My Teeth” feel arena-ready, the kind of infectious earworms that capture hearts and charts. Part of that is also thanks to the presence of producer Mike Crossey (who has contributed to records from The 1975), who pushed Harper and the rest of Spacey to take their time, trust the process, and experiment sonically in ways they hadn’t before.

With If That Makes Sense, Harper’s ultimate goal was just to “come out swinging.” In addition to being perhaps their best work of art to date, it’s also their most professionally ambitious. The group brought in new management to help with the transition – Lama had reached a limit to what he could do on his own while also drumming for the group – and introduce them to the ways and back rooms of the American industry. “We poured a lot into this record, emotionally and financially and just with our time. You can’t escape the sense of pressure around it,” he admits. “But, at the end of the day, it’s been nothing but awesome. It’s really incredible.”