Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever Endless Rooms

Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever’s third album was born out of lockdown sessions building ideas on GarageBand. With the Melbourne group unable to convene and jam—or tour previous album Sideways to New Italy—while COVID ran amok, files were swapped, each bursting with ideas and musical freedom. The result is RBCF’s most expansive album yet, one that came together in a flurry of creative excitement once the quintet were able to meet up and play together. While their trademark acoustic-driven indie pop is still in play (“Saw You at the Eastern Beach”, “The Way It Shatters”), there are new twists, such as the smoky ’70s grooves that permeate “Dive Deep”. Lyrically the group also explore new territory, with environmental concerns (“Tidal River” with the line “Jet ski over the pale reef”) and the horrific bushfires that engulfed Australia’s east coast in 2019 and 2020 (“Bounce Off the Bottom”) adding a discontented edge to the record.