It’s operatic, fittingly, implying to the listener that what they’re in for is something innately theatrical and baroque – something that feels much grander and more showy than anything Hellions have done prior – though still patently sinister. The central artwork is framed in a ticket stub, this ghastly, authoritarian figure hovering pensively over a couple in the midst of a ballroom dance scene. So when it came to representing the grandeur and the stately, cinematic scope of Opera Oblivia, they looked to the aesthetic of…Well, actual operas. To that end, a big part of any Hellions album is the visual scheme surrounding it. Because, as he puts it, “All of the best stuff you can do in the studio comes from the feeling and the emotion of the moment it comes out.” Where he’d normally insist on listening to a band’s demos before they set foot in the studio, he went into the Opera Oblivia sessions mostly blind, which gave him an opportunity to tackle the record without any preconceived notion of what it needed to sound like – a lack of direction meant a lack of expectation. The process would end up having a critical impact on Edwards’ approach to production moving forward. We did lots of cool little Easter eggs like that – we tried to capture as many organic sounds as possible, then tweak them up and manipulate them.” And you can hear that at the start of ‘Bad Way’, right before the first verse. It was down in this empty concrete room underneath the studio, which we called ‘the dungeon’, and if you hit it, you’d get this big thundering sound. For example, there was a big, fluffy sofa that sounded fantastic if you hit it with the palm of your hand. “We got really creative with a lot of sound design. “We just broke down all the barriers and tried things that we normally wouldn’t, or that we’d normally hold back on,” he says. Speaking to BLUNT today, Edwards proudly declares Opera Oblivia as one of the best projects he’s worked on to date, citing the complete freedom he and Hellions had to explore their wildest creative fantasies. Opera Oblivia came to life over three weeks at Karma Sound Studios, where the band would wake up, soak in the view, smash out whatever fantastical ideas came to mind, then knock off with a cocktail or 12. Mere days separated the band’s transition from touring Indian Summer to demoing LP3, and when they landed in Bang Saray, Thailand to knuckle down with producer Shane Edwards (who’d been their unofficial sixth member since their earliest days as The Bride), they scrapped almost all of the material they’d hashed out in advance. And when the last impassioned, belting refrain of ’25’ echoes out, you’d be forgiven for thinking what you just listened to was the product of years spent meticulously tinkering away.īut lo and behold, Hellions managed to pull off the impossible. When the glittery and atmospheric lead-in on ’24’ kicks over to a crunchy, overdriven pound of a fretboard, it becomes immediately clear that Opera Oblivia won’t be your standard mosh-ready fare. It is, of course, Opera Oblivia: the landmark third full-length from the rip-roaring Sydney stalwarts in Hellions. It’s an angst-driven rock opera so monolithic that it makes American Idiot look like a ska record. Especially so if you’re a fan of Australian punk and hardcore – we got career-defining records from bands like Violent Soho, Trophy Eyes, Ceres and Hands Like Houses, not to mention cracking debuts from acts like Cursed Earth, Sly Withers and Camp Cope.īut there was one particular album that outright defined 2016 for Australia’s alternative scene – an explosively honest and poignant outpouring of raw human emotion à la tearing riffs and venomous punk fury, weaved around grandiose Queen-esque histrionics and Broadway balladry. When you look past the political turmoil, societal catastrophes and the seemingly neverending string of high-profile deaths, 2016 was a pretty good year.
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