SKEGSS
Pacific Highway Music
Out 10/18/24 via Loma Vista Recordings
Pacific Highway Music, the new album from Skegss, reintroduces the Australian band as the duo of Ben Reed (vocals, guitar) and Jonny Lani (drums) presenting their most masterful and fully realized work to date. The Byron Bay-bred band’s third full-length—the follow-up to their acclaimed sophomore album Rehearsal, which debuted at #1 on their homeland Australia ARIA Albums Chart and led to their first-ever Coachella appearance and a sold-out U.S. tour—brings a newly heightened creative energy to every aspect of their explosive yet introspective form of rock. Centered on Reed’s frenetic and playful lyricism, Pacific Highway Music ultimately finds Skegss exploring the more complicated elements of the human experience with sincerity, soul, and unabashed joie de vivre.
Skegss’ second full-length for U.S.-based label Loma Vista Recordings, Pacific Highway Music was created following the departure of co-founder Toby Cregan in 2023, and with producer Paul Butler (Devendra Banhart, Michael Kiwanuka, St. Paul & the Broken Bones). The album expands on the combustible riffs and euphoric rhythms of Rehearsal (an LP whose triumphs also include a Rolling Stone Australia Awards nomination for Best Record), but also finds Reed and Lani embracing a more experimental and free-flowing approach to its sonic architecture. “In the past I’d deprived myself of using things like synthesizers, not realizing how much texture and atmosphere they can add to the music,” says Reed. “Working with Paul felt like letting our guard down and completely opening up in terms of what these songs could be.”
Recorded at two iconic L.A. studios (The Village and Topanga Canyon’s Fivestar Studios), Pacific Highway Music partly owes its wildly unpredictable sound to the period of time Skegss spent cutting demos at Rancho de la Luna in Joshua Tree with studio owner Dave Catching (a musician/engineer known for his work with Queens of the Stone Age, Mark Lanegan, and more). “Sometimes it’s hard to explain what you hear in your imagination, but Dave was incredible at deciphering my rambling and finding exactly the right guitar to get the sound I wanted,” says Reed. “We were in the desert during a meteor shower so we’d jam all day and watch the sky at night, and the whole experience felt like magic as far as discovering new sounds for the album.”
Lead single “Spaceman” is a potent introduction to Pacific Highway Music, providing an immediate conduit to the expansive state of mind that sparked the album’s creation. Slow-building and strangely majestic, the gorgeously fuzzed-out track channels both weariness and wonder as Reed contemplates infinity and the relative inconsequence of our existence. “I don’t think we even have the capacity to comprehend the fact that the universe goes on forever, but there’s something beautiful about that,” says Reed. “It’s fun to go out walking at night and go on a little adventure in your mind, asking yourself those questions about what we’re all doing here.”
Pacific Highway Music sustains an unstoppable velocity even as the band confronts what Reed refers to as “the rollercoaster of emotions that come with being human.” On “High Beaming,” bouncy grooves and exuberant gang vocals merge in a tender tribute to the ones who keep us going when the world gets overwhelming. “I wrote that song as a thank-you to my girlfriend for how she helps me see things in a new way whenever I’m in a negative headspace,” says Reed. “Stuck In Cheyenne,” written after a mid-tour blizzard left Skegss stranded for days at a Wyoming truck stop, arrives as a gloriously punchy meditation on psychic inertia. And on “Out Of My Head,” Reed brings his gravelly vocals to a heavy-hearted track spotlighting his gift for spinning nature imagery into lyrics with a visceral impact (e.g., “Like a warm wind from the west/Smoothing out the ocean/I need one to blow into my head/And smooth out my emotions”). “Sometimes when you can’t stop dwelling on things from the past that you regret, the best you can do is let that door close instead of continuing to guilt-trip yourself,” says Reed. “It’s a song about making the decision to move forward, and recognizing that those battles can help you become stronger.”
Reed lists punk libertines like Iggy Pop and underground artists like Deepakalypse among his inspirations, and first immersed himself writing songs after taking guitar lessons from a neighbor at the age of 11. “I was always fascinated by music, but once I started playing I became obsessed with making up stuff of my own,” he says. As he broadened his musical palette with the help of surf-movie soundtracks, Reed began self-recording in his bedroom and creating entire comic books to accompany the collections of original songs he burned onto CDs to hand out at school. In 2013 he moved from his hometown of Forster to Byron Bay, where he reconnected with his childhood friend Lani and co-founded Skegss the following year. Although the band started out playing skate parks and pubs, they quickly ascended through the scene and made their debut at Splendour in the Grass within a year, famously drawing a crowd of 20,000 for their opening-slot set. Skegss’ 2018 full-length debut My Own Mess climbed the charts in Australia, earned an ARIA Award nomination for Best Rock Album, and gained widespread recognition in the U.S.—a major accomplishment that soon found the band selling out such famed venues as The Roxy in L.A. and New York City’s Bowery Ballroom.
In choosing a title, Skegss honor their roots by nodding to the Australian coastal road they’ve driven on countless of times (on tour and on frequent surf trips), while also reflecting the band’s deepened sense of purpose. “I’ve spent a lot of my life driving on the Pacific Highway, and most of the time it puts me in a bit of hypnotic state,” says Reed. “With this album I tried to be as honest as possible, but I also wanted to create the kind of songs that give you that same feeling—songs where you can shut your eyes, let your imagination take over, and drift off into another world that exists only in your mind.”
