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May 05, 2020 By Christopher Roberts Photography by Peter Ryle Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever

Melbourne, Australia five-piece Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever are releasing a new album, Sideways to New Italy, on June 5 via Sub Pop. Now they have shared another song from it, “Falling Thunder,” via a video for the track. The video features vacation footage shot by Jamieson Moore, a friend of the band, in Italy, specifically Sicily, Sardinia, and the Aeolian Islands (which is the ancestral homeland of the band’s Tom and Joe Russo). Watch it below.

In a press release Tom Russo says “Falling Thunder” is “about pushing on through the relentless march of time, against the constant cycle of seasons. And the way people change and relationships change. It’s set in that time when autumn is turning into winter and the trees are getting bare.”

Tom also had this to say about the video: “Our friend Jamieson Moore shot the footage of Sicily, Sardinia, and the Aeolian Islands on her phone while on vacation last year. The Aeolian Islands is also where my and Joe Russo’s ancestors are from. We were also planning to shoot the band playing in Eolian Hall in Melbourne (it’s a community hall founded by Aeolian immigrants). We got some practice footage but by the time it came to shoot the band, we were on lockdown. So it’s turned out as a kind of a love letter to a particular place.”

Sideways to New Italy is the band’s sophomore album and the follow-up to 2018’s debut album, Hope Downs, also released via Sub Pop. Hope Downs was our Album of the Week, one of our Top 100 Albums of 2018, and our #1 Debut Album of 2018.

Sideways to New Italy also includes “Cars In Space,” a new song the band shared in February via a video for the track co-directed by fellow Aussie musician Julia Jacklin with her regular collaborator Nick Mckk. “Cars In Space” was one of our Songs of the Week. When the album was announced they shared another new song from it, “She’s There,” via a video for the single. “She’s There” was also one of our Songs of the Week.

The band features singer/songwriter/guitarists Tom Russo, Joe White, and Fran Keaney, as well as bassist Joe Russo and drummer Marcel Tussie.

The album’s partial namesake, New Italy, is actually a village near New South Wales’ Northern Rivers, which is an area Tussie is from. A press release announcing the album described the town: “A blink-and-you’ll-miss-it pit-stop of a place with fewer than 200 residents, it was founded by Venetian immigrants in the late-1800s and now serves as something of a living monument to Italians’ contribution to Australia, with replica Roman statues dotted like souvenirs on the otherwise rural landscape.”

Keaney had this to say about the album in a previous press release: “I wanted to write songs that I could use as some sort of bedrock of hopefulness to stand on, something to be proud of. A lot of the songs on the new record are reaching forward and trying to imagine an idyll of home and love.”

In February 2019 Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever shared a new song, “In the Capital” (it was one of our Songs of the Week) and released it as a 7-inch ia Sub Pop. The B-side, “Read My Mind,” was also shared in April 2019 via a video for the track (it was also one of our Songs of the Week). Neither song is featured on Sideways to New Italy.

Read our 2018 interview with Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever.

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