BACK ON A MAJOR LABEL, CONTENT WITH THEMSELVES AND CONTAINING SOME OF THE BEST MATERIAL THEY'VE WRITTEN? IT'S A BIT OF AN UNDERSTATEMENT TO SAY THE VINES ARE PLEASED WITH HOW THINGS ARE GOING WITH THEIR NEW ALBUM, AS LIZ GIUFFRE DISCOVERS FROM CRAIG NICHOLLS AND BRAD HEALD. COVER AND FEATURE PICS BY CYBELE MALINOWSKI.

The Vines are a band that had a spectacular ascent - and then a spectacular (apparent) decline. Like any audience for a circus, we watched as the talented group made it up to the top-part ambition, part ability, part pure guts and as they wobbled with delight and willed them to stay up and fall in equal measure. When the band did fall, we were not owed an explanation necessarily and certainly not such a personal one (the band disclosed Nicholls' battle with then undiagnosed neurological issues). However, in explaining in this way they gave their audience enough credit to make its own decisions about the members as people rather than as superhuman androids caught up on planet 'music business' or 'tortured artist. Whether or not we knew what the struggles were like personally, we had an idea how this was different to the standard 'rock stars behaving badly'. This was a fork in the road that wasn't on the map. Or, as John Lennon put it, "Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans". 

What was clear was how relatively little such a big thing has slowed the band in terms of making music. The Vines never really stopped, but rather just kept doing their thing a little differently, replacing touring with more writing and recording as Nicholls recovered. New album Future Primitive is number five to date, following Melodia (2008), Vision Valley (2006), Winning Days (2004) and the one that started it all, Highly Evolved (2002). 

"I've got a couple of hundred songs, without sounding too, you know, pretentious or big headed, but I've collected a lot of songs," Nicholls explains, referring to the elusive 'bottom drawer' of odds and ends that many songwriters have. Us mere mortals might imagine this is like a craftsman's workshop, with bits and pieces of tools and half-finished treasures, perhaps things to return to, but lead to a better final design.

For Nicholls the current finished 13 tracks on Future Primitive are songs that were drawn from "the period of about a year, just writing lots of songs... I wrote about 50 songs and we recorded 16 and ended up with 13." It's a process of hard yakka that he's always gone through, but has been the stuff we've never had told to us behind the 'saviours of rock and roll, born fully formed' narratives the industry loves so much. 

"Yeah, we get asked that quite a bit," chimes in bassist Brad Heald. "People seem to be under the impression that if we don't play or record that we're on holidays. But we haven't really stopped - we've kept writing, recording, doing demos..." 

When this writer suggests that talking about writing lots of songs in order to draw out a few isn't pretentious, but rather impressive, Nicholls is sweet, but slightly surprised. Songwriting's his job, so surely he must simply need to just do it a lot in order to do it so well. "In a weird way it is my job, yeah," he says.

Future Primitive has a depth and breadth that many of The Vines' rock revival contemporaries haven't bothered with, but in providing several musical left turns the band rewards the faithful, while also shaking them up a bit. There is enough old school Vines to re-establish the brand (like short and sharp single "Gimme love"), but with some real chances taken too, such as the title track, happy but hard with its slight electro edge. 

By way of explanation Nicholls offers, "We knew working with producer Chris Colonna [Bumblebeez] that we'd go a little bit more electric, have a little more electro stuff in there, but it wasn't as if it had to be totally different. So yeah, it's got some flavour to it." Heald adds, "I think in essence it's still a punk song, it's always been a punk song to us and we just made it sound a little more futuristic." As well, there's a strange, wild west - like "A.S.4", the fourth in the land's Autumn Shade songset (the previous three are scattered on other albums) and serving as a lovely lonely anthem for a lost Tarantino extra. "The ideas that kind of run throughout the songs is that they're all kind of lonely songs, they're kind of sad songs, but hopefully also beautiful as well," Nicholls states.

The real breakthrough is "Goodbye", a gem second to last on the playlist. It's a simple song performed without a safety net of studio trickery or lots of layers of effects and as such the beauty of the original idea remains, with the delivery gorgeous because of its flaws. "We really wanted that to be a simple song as well. We found with a lot of the other songs we were creating a lot of atmosphere, giving it a really spacey feel, but with that song we really wanted to keep that quite simple and have it just the song" explains Heald. However the real insight and pride in a job well done, comes from Nicholls. "I just demoed it simply in that way and then we just recorded it with a nylon string guitar and we didn't double track the vocals. I think the verse has the best melody of anything I've ever written," he says. "I noticed that my voice cracks at the end of the first two choruses and it's clean for the very last one and, yeah, I definitely noticed it and I wasn't sure, but it was nice not to have something double tracked and slick. It's got that emotion in it I think."

Such stories make the listener curious about what else has been happening in the life of the band and if songs like "Goodbye" are inspired by losing someone in particular. But Nicholls and the band don't offer as most songwriters do when there's such a direct link and, indeed, even when songs are constructed as love songs or lost songs, he's clear about there being a true feeling, but a fictional target. 

"A song like 'Candy Flippin' Girl' [one of the album's more upbeat, but directed offerings] , it doesn't really mean anything, that song's just a love song with a twist, but it was just a made up character, not for anyone specifically... Overall - and at this point - I feel overall pretty happy and positive." 

In addition to their own work, this was also proven with the band's recent appearance on Triple J to perform Gorillaz track "Clint Eastwood", a display of their own fandom and an insight into their varied listening palate like their cover of Outkast's "Ms Jackson" back in the day. It shouldn't have worked but boy, did it ever. "Well we loved that band since they started and I bought it when we first went to America to make our first album and I just listened to it all the time and thought it was cool. We really like Blur," states Nicholls, while Heald adds, "Yeah, we didn't really have to think outside the square for that one, we just really loved it."

The Vines are now signed to Sony, following stints at Capitol, Heavenly and Ivy League; changes that have seen the band see not only shifts in their own music making, but in that of the music industry generally. They express contentment with where they are in the machine, but not surprise that they're back here - and given that the album is solid and the band is tight, why should they be surprised? "Everyone's been really nice to us and everything's going well and we're just glad that they [Sony] are putting our album out soon so that people who want to can hear it," says Heald. "Most of our success has been on majors. Sony have been really supportive and a lot of people are working to get our songs out as far as they can and we can't argue with that." As for the machine itself, Nicholls is direct but playful in approach. "We try to do our best to explain our actions," he begins. When this writer suggests a need to justify themselves, he laughs gently and warmly. "Yeah, that's right."

WHO The Vines

WHAT Future Primitive (Sony) out Friday