Indie-rockers Winterbourne are releasing their new album Act Of Disappearing today on Island Records Australia.

The band's own words about the new release: "Second albums are notoriously difficult things, and I think the reason goes far beyond weight of expectation. In our case the second album has been a difficult thing to wrap our heads around because of the crazy amount of freedom it has offered us. For Echo Of Youth we tried to sum ourselves up as a band as much as we could in 12 songs. Our entire music making career until then had been geared towards the creation of our debut album, and once that was accomplished we found ourselves with all the time in the world and an opportunity to do just about anything we wanted to - an exciting and daunting prospect."

"This album ended up coming together extremely naturally. Many of the songs have been floating around for years, and what songs we still needed we were able to create by our tried and true method of getting in a room together and making sounds. Perhaps the thing that aided our process the most was our commitment to the setting of Angelo - a fictional place that embodies the nonsense of the real world. Placing the songs within this world allowed us to explore them from an objective point of view, and also gave them all some common ground so they could connect musically. Angelo became the home of Ally and Daniel, the star-cross’d lovers around which the narrative of the album could develop. We were able to put our thoughts, feelings and questions into those characters and see what they could do with them, which freed us up to write the music while they dealt with the heavy stuff."

Overall, Act Of Disappearing is a journey towards understanding, oscillating between reality and fantasy, balancing on the edge of chaos through the masquerade of life and towards the truth within it."

Winterbourne, the Australian duo of long-time friends and collaborators James Draper and Jordan Brady, are releasing Echo Of Youth, their debut full-length album today, August 23.

The duo worked with their self-appointed musical dream team consisting of producer Andy Mak (Vera Blue), engineer Jackson Barclay (Timberwolf) and multi-instrumentalist Thom Mak, delivering a 12-song opus of exhilarating indie rock, rich in swirling guitars, lush synths and soaring, catchy choruses. Even with its richly textured and distinctive, genre-defying sound, Winterbourne still manage to preserve the simplicity of their reputable essence, with James and Jordan's singing and guitar-playing at the album's core.

"It might sound overly dramatic, but this really does feel like the culmination of everything we've done in the last 12 years, including even the most vague and unnecessary nonsense. We approached the record with the very deliberate goal of creating something that could sum us up completely, and serve as an answer to the question ‘so, what do you guys do?' or, ‘what kind of music do you play?'" said J&J about the release Echo Of Youth, adding "This has been by no means a duo effort, and we're forever indebted to the wonderful people around us who have taken our nice romantic album fantasy out of our heads and brought it into reality."

So, go check this much awaited, awesome record now, streaming or downloading it from your favorite music service... I think it will rank very high in my personal end-of-the-year chart!

Winterbourne, the Australian duo formed by James Draper and Jordan Brady, have just released their second EP Pendulum on the Island Australia label.
The 6-track mini-album was produced by Andy Mak (Vera Blue, Lucy Mason, Tina Arena), whom they previously worked with on their debut EP All But The Sun in 2014.

While ABTS was mainly an alternative folk rock record a la Mumford & Sons and similar bands, this new one is a more diverse -and interesting- affair stylewise: we can find sixties-oriented rock songs, like the brilliant opener Shape and But I Do; the more classic (for them) My Perfect Sunday; Floating Around, with its The Pretenders/Chrissie Hynde vibes; When I'm Under, a psichedelic slow number where the '60s influence is, again, undeniable; and To Get To Know You, the amazing single which, as the bio says, takes the heart and soul of the duo's earlier work and transforms it into something else altogether. "We weren't trying to do something outrageous and different, the song just wanted to go there, so we went with it," explained Brady. "It started very differently to how it ended up. James just started playing this electric guitar part that had this great feel, and so when he chucked that in the song, it became this groovy, cool thing that was so much different than what we set out to write. We loved it." Me too.

So, watch the Pendulum EP & (upcoming!) Tour Trailer clicking on the image and stream the mini-album on Spotify now.