In conversation with Pacific Avenue

Words by Kasia Krawczyk

Back in London with their second album, Lovesick Sentimental, Pacific Avenue are learning how to turn Australian pub-rock energy into something big enough for the other side of the world.

There is a particular kind of excitement that comes with starting over somewhere completely new.

For Pacific Avenue, Australia is home. It is where the band grew up, where they played the small pubs that became some of their favourite venues, and where “Flowers” eventually reached No. 1. The UK is different. The rooms are different. The crowds are different. The distance from home is enormous.

And yet, standing on the other side of the world and looking out at people who have turned up specifically to see them, the feeling is surprisingly familiar.

“It feels good to be on the other side of the world,” the band says. “It’s pretty crazy, people rocking up to come and see us, so yeah, we’re stoked.”

Tonight, Pacific Avenue are playing London’s The Garage. It is the fourth show of their current tour, following dates in Dublin, Glasgow and Birmingham, and the band have arrived with a new record to introduce to a growing international audience.

Lovesick Sentimental is their second album, but it doesn’t sound like a band desperately trying to prove that their first success wasn’t a fluke.

Instead, it sounds like a band figuring out what happens next.

Their breakthrough came with “Flowers”, a song that took Pacific Avenue to No. 1 in Australia and helped establish them as one of the country’s rising rock acts. The danger after a moment like that is obvious: make the same record again, chase the same feeling, try to recreate whatever happened the first time.

Pacific Avenue chose another route.

The new album is recognisably theirs, but it is also a little more grown-up. The band describe their first record as more “surfy and laid-back”. This time around, they wanted something more mature and rock-oriented, something that reflected the people they had become rather than simply repeating who they had been.

“It was just like a more matured version of us,” they explain. “Us growing as individuals and as a group.”

That distinction matters.

Because Lovesick Sentimental isn’t simply a record about falling in love. It is a record about what happens when love gets complicated.

There is heartbreak. There are relationships that don’t work. There are mistakes. There are moments of looking back and realising that perhaps you weren’t entirely innocent yourself.

Some of the songs come from personal experiences. Others are stories. Sometimes the line between the two is deliberately blurred.

The band are particularly interested in the less flattering side of relationships — the moments when you recognise that perhaps you haven’t been the best version of yourself.

“Some of them are looking at where maybe we haven’t been so great in relationships,” they say, “and kind of been like… trying to recognise that.”

It is a surprisingly mature perspective.

Rather than simply blaming someone else for the end of a relationship, there is an attempt to ask a more uncomfortable question: what if I contributed to the problem?

The answer, ultimately, is to try to do better.

“Trying to make yourself better as a partner or a person in general.”

“We love a responsible man,” comes the response.

“We try. We try.”

The exchange is funny, but it also captures the tone of the album. Pacific Avenue aren’t approaching heartbreak with the solemnity of a band convinced every failed relationship is the end of the world.

There is self-awareness.

There is humour.

And there is the sense that growing up means being willing to look at your own mistakes.

Growing into the songs

The interesting thing about an album is that it doesn’t necessarily remain the same album after it leaves the studio.

Once the songs are released, they become part of other people’s lives. They are played in bedrooms, cars, headphones, bars and eventually concert halls. A lyric that meant one thing to the person who wrote it can mean something completely different to someone singing it back from the crowd.

Pacific Avenue have begun to experience that transformation themselves.

Their relationship with Lovesick Sentimental hasn’t changed dramatically since its release, but, if anything, the record has grown.

Playing the songs repeatedly has given them another dimension.

“I feel like they kind of end up meaning more to you the more you play them live,” the band says.

That is one of the strange privileges of touring: repetition doesn’t necessarily make a song smaller. Sometimes it does the opposite.

The more often you play it, the more you notice.

The audience becomes part of the song’s story.

“Deeper meanings come out of them as you’re seeing other people’s reactions and that sort of thing.”

It is also one of the reasons live music remains so important to Pacific Avenue.

The studio can capture a song.

A live show has to make it matter.

And tonight, in a London room thousands of miles away from where the band started, they have another opportunity to do exactly that.

From “Flowers” to Lovesick Sentimental

There is inevitably a before and after “Flowers” when talking about Pacific Avenue.

A No. 1 single can change the scale of a band’s ambitions almost overnight. It can introduce the music to people who have never heard the band’s name before and create expectations about what comes next.

But the band don’t describe the second record as a reaction to the success of the first.

Instead, it feels like an extension.

“The album just evolved from ‘Flowers’, from what our original sound was,” they explain.

The important word is “evolved”.

They weren’t trying to throw away the past.

They were trying to grow beyond it.

The first record had a more relaxed, surf-influenced character. Love Sick Sentimental pushes further into rock while retaining the melodic sensibility that made the earlier material connect.

The band were finding their way.

Not only as songwriters, but as people.

“We just grew together,” they say, “and we were just sort of finding our way as musicians.”

That process is audible in the record’s emotional perspective. The songs aren’t necessarily interested in presenting love as something clean or uncomplicated.

Love can be exciting.

Love can be embarrassing.

Love can make you behave badly.

And sometimes heartbreak forces you to look at yourself more honestly than you would like.

That messiness is precisely what makes the album’s title feel appropriate.

Lovesick Sentimental suggests romance, but with a knowing wink. It acknowledges the melodrama without pretending it isn’t real.

The UK is a new beginning

There is a different kind of pressure that comes with playing internationally.

At home, a band carries history with it. The audience knows where you came from. They may have seen you in tiny venues before the bigger stages arrived. They understand the progression.

In the UK, Pacific Avenue are building that history from scratch.

The audience is smaller for now, but the band aren’t disappointed by that.

Quite the opposite.

There is something exciting about having to earn the room.

“I feel like our best times, or best memories as a band, were like the small kind of pubs growing up in Australia,” they say.

Those rooms taught them something that can’t necessarily be learned on a festival stage.

You have to hold people’s attention.

You have to make them move.

You have to make them care.

“If there’s a big festival or a big audience, it’s kind of easy to make a large crowd dance,” they explain. “But you really got to work to hold a small room.”

That is the challenge they have found themselves embracing again in Britain.

The UK isn’t simply another territory to tick off a tour schedule.

It is another place where Pacific Avenue have to introduce themselves.

Another audience to win over.

Another room to hold.

And there is a particular satisfaction in that.

What makes a great show?

Ask a band what they want their audience to experience and the answer can easily become predictable: energy, excitement, a good time.

Pacific Avenue’s answer is slightly more personal.

They want people to forget about the rest of their week.

To let go.

To feel comfortable.

“To forget about their problems in the week and just to kind of let their hair down a little bit and feel welcome for who they are.”

It isn’t necessarily about giving the audience a perfect night.

It’s about giving them somewhere to disappear for a few hours.

Then comes another idea: connection.

“And feel connected as a group,” they add. “Become one big family, I reckon.”

That might sound sentimental — but then again, sentimentality is built into the title of their album.

The irony is that the bigger Pacific Avenue become, the harder that intimacy can be to maintain.

A small pub naturally feels communal. A stadium can feel anonymous.

Perhaps that is why they still value those smaller rooms so much.

They are spaces where the distance between band and audience almost disappears.

For a few hours, everybody is simply in the same room, singing the same songs.

The five-year question

Every artist eventually gets asked where they see themselves in five years.

It’s an easy question to answer badly.

Pacific Avenue don’t.

The first answer comes quickly.

“Madison Square Garden.”

Then comes another.

“Glastonbury”

There is no hesitation about the scale of the ambition.

“I’d like to be playing, I reckon, stadiums,” they say. “Wembley. I reckon that’d be pretty cool.”

A Wembley headline show would represent a dramatic change from the small Australian pubs that helped shape the band.

But perhaps that contrast is exactly the point.

The dream isn’t to abandon those early rooms.

It is to see how far the same energy can travel.

They also have more music in mind.

“Another album or two.”

And, because touring ambition eventually comes down to practical realities, there is one more goal.

“I reckon next time we’ll have a bus rather than a van.”

It is the kind of detail that makes the stadium dream feel strangely tangible.

Before Wembley comes the van.

Before Madison Square Garden comes another small room.

Before the next album comes tonight’s show.

The road matters

For all the talk of No. 1 singles, international tours and stadium ambitions, the most revealing answer comes when the band are asked what they actually want from the next five years.

The answer isn’t really about fame.

It is about continuing.

“Honestly, I think if we still get to live this dream in five years, it’s amazing.”

Then they reduce the whole thing to two things.

“Playing music and travelling the world, nothing better.”

It is a simple ambition, but perhaps that’s what makes it convincing.

Because the journey from Australia to London isn’t only about getting somewhere bigger.

It’s about getting to keep doing the thing that made the whole journey worthwhile in the first place.

For Pacific Avenue, that means writing songs about love and mistakes. It means watching those songs take on new meanings when an audience sings them back. It means walking into unfamiliar rooms and figuring out how to make them feel like home.

Tonight, that room is The Garage.

The audience may be smaller than the crowds waiting for them back in Australia. The distance from home may be enormous. Wembley is still somewhere ahead on the horizon.

But the principle remains the same.

Show up.

Plug in.

Hold the room.

Make everyone feel like they belong.

And then do it again tomorrow.

For now, Pacific Avenue are still on the road.

And judging by where they want that road to take them, they have no intention of slowing down.