A Chat with Damn Williams (27.05.26)
With the release of Dog Summer, Damn Williams expands from a solo songwriting vehicle into a fully realised band, delivering a record steeped in Australian storytelling, sharp observation and restless imagination. Across ten tracks, the Naarm-based outfit balances working-class realism with surreal symbolism, drawing on years of songwriting, collaboration and live performance. We chat with Damn Williams to discuss the album’s long journey, the stories behind its characters and what comes next for the band.
OSR: How would you describe Dog Summer to somebody hearing Damn Williams for the first time?
Damn Williams: In the abstract: It’s an album that sits somewhere between the local and the global; there’s a tension but also a concordance between the different universes that we all experience daily that’s expressed in the lyrics and sounds on display across the ten tracks that I think hold something for everyone who’ll give it some of their (much contested) attention. More casually, I’d just say it’s a fun record full of indie Australiana rock songs from a band that’s holding onto the classic feeling that only live music gives, while also doing something new and distinctive with it.
OSR: What was the defining moment where you realised the album was taking shape?
Damn Williams: There were quite a few moments along the way to realising the final album, from the first moments where the songs started to emerge when I was living in a sharehouse writing songs in the backyard and recording demos in a friend’s tiny backyard studio up the road – it was largely crafted in backyards I’m now realising. Then there was the moment after a solo show where Olmer expressed interest in playing bass and then the band forming around it. It was a long, slow process over many years from conception to creation with plenty of scrappy demos of me playing the songs along the way, but I always knew it had to be a group project to get the live band sound that the songs needed. Finally getting together in the studio at Head Gap – a legendary room that I always wanted to record at, that tragically burnt down shortly after – and hearing the songs come together in that space really capped it all off and made the album in its final form finally feel real.
OSR: Why was now the right time to turn Damn Williams into a full band project?
Damn Williams: It was really just a matter of things falling into place, having the right friends around me and a project that we could all get behind. We’d all been in bands in the past and know how much energy it can take, so none of us would put time into something that felt forced in any way, and I think we all feel really lucky to have been in the right place and time to start playing music together. We don’t take it for granted that we’ve got this shot at playing music together. We all work full-time jobs and life can be hectic, but when we make time to play music together it actually gives us energy, so that’s always a good sign that we’re onto something good. It’s actually snowballed into Olmer starting his own project, Baglicker, which James and I play drums and bass in, and Carla has her solo project Badskin, and another one in the works, so it’s nice how things sprout off and we can support each other’s creative lives. It’s one of the reasons we jokingly call it a family band, along with having our own “Williams” names within the group.
OSR: Which track on the album best captures the spirit of Damn Williams?
Damn Williams: They all express a different facet of it, but ‘Fighting Jack Dancer’ probably encapsulates the most of it. It’s the longest song on the record so that might be why, but it weaves together personal stories, childhood nostalgia and working-class struggle into itself in a bunch of ways. I started writing it when I was working as a gardener, not long after first moving to Naarm, which gave me my most vivid experience of a class divide to that point. We’d tend the gardens of all these McMansions in the rich suburbs, and during the day, when it’s just these armies of hi-vis-clad tradies maintaining these enormous grounds, building extensions and whatnot while the owners are either walled off inside the buildings or out playing golf or sitting in boardrooms. Although there was one guy who used to stand watching us, smoking cigarettes and trying to make us pick up dog shit off his lawn. At least he was hands-on. There’s also references to a musical that I had taped as a kid, and the term “Fighting Jack Dancer” is actually how my uncle told my father that he had cancer over the phone, so there’s a lot of disparate ideas that come together in the song that don’t necessarily make total sense when you explain them but hopefully feel cohesive all together in context.
OSR: The record feels deeply tied to Australian imagery and identity. Was that intentional from the start?
Damn Williams: It was intentional insofar as I was seeking to make something that felt authentic to me from the beginning. The first Damn Williams song I ever wrote was one called ‘Montague St’ that was about my grandparents on my mother’s side, from where I ended up appropriating the name Williams for the project. I learned a lot in that process about their story and the duality inherent to it. It led me to develop my voice and writing style in a way that felt like relaxing into it, finding my natural range as a singer and finding ways to incorporate the complexities that came up as a writer. It’s all emerged from there, and even still when I’m writing it feels like a process of investigation, unwrapping something rather than willing it into existence.
OSR: What inspired the surreal characters and symbolism throughout the album?
Damn Williams: As a consequence of following this principle of authenticity, I was led to interrogate identity, which is not particularly straightforward in the context of being a sixth-generation Tasmanian born from European convicts who colonised the place so horrifically in an episode that the population has hardly acknowledged, still let alone reckoned with. A lot of Australian fiction seems to deal with this difficulty by utilising a sort of magical realism that I don’t necessarily like, as it feels like a cheap way around the topic. But I guess I like to play on that trope so instead of dead ancestors emerging from a swamp dressed as a tree to pass on a message, a rusty old car just reminds you of the past or the main character simply identifies with oversized invasive land snails (which is actually something an online astrology website told me is my spirit animal), or something that seems surreal is actually just a reflection of business practices and advertising in the real world we’re living in, as in Kolkata Satellite Lite.
OSR: Were there any albums or artists you kept returning to while making Dog Summer?
Damn Williams: As the record took quite a few years to form, there were a number of phases where I was obsessed with different artists and records. For a long time towards the beginning I was immersed in Scott Walker’s entire catalogue and Gareth Liddiard’s album Strange Tourist. Then there was a period where I was deep into Guided By Voices’ two classic albums Alien Lanes and Bee Thousand, while also slamming The Last Waltz – particularly Joni Mitchell’s song ‘Coyote’ and Dr John’s ‘Such A Night’ – on repeat. Billy Bragg’s Life’s a Riot with Spy vs. Spy and Talking with the Taxman About Poetry also made appearances along the way.
OSR: What was the most challenging part of recording the album?
Damn Williams: We tracked the whole thing over two weekends; they were some pretty long days, and James was sick on the first weekend when we recorded all of the drums, so he’d probably tell you that was the hardest part. It’s impressive that he soldiered through and put so much energy into the performances, to be honest. I’d say the timeframe and organising everyone, including the three-piece horn section that we got in for it, was the biggest challenge for me. I get tired easily in group chats and mustn’t have been on top of the organisation because on horn recording day only one of them showed up on time, another went to the wrong studio and the third worked a night shift and arrived two hours late, so that was probably peak stress on my part.
OSR: How do you want listeners to feel after hearing Dog Summer front to back?
Damn Williams: I feel like it’s the sort of record that rewards repeat listens, so I’d hope they’d feel pulled into a world, curious about the stories that are alluded to along the way and intrigued enough to dive back in for another spin or to come along to one of our live shows, or get in touch to request a live show in their part of the world. That would be nice.
OSR: What excites you most about this new era of Damn Williams?
Damn Williams: Now with the album out and the band fully formed, it’s incredibly exciting to be working on new material as a group. I think everyone’s finding their niche in the band and having a lot of fun with it. It’s the most creatively satisfying experience I’ve felt playing music with others, and I’m excited about taking it on the road in the future, playing more and more live shows while developing new material together. We’ve just started; it’s strange to say, but I feel really lucky to be involved in my own project now that it’s taken on a life outside of myself.
Many thanks to Damn Williams for speaking with us. Find out more about Damn Williams on their website, Instagram, and Spotify.
