Sydney’s The Low Priorities have arrived with Dice, a debut album bursting with jangling guitars, infectious melodies and classic Power Pop energy. Drawing on decades of friendship and a shared love of guitar-driven pop, the band have turned what began as a modest EP project into a full-length record that’s already attracting attention well beyond Australia. We caught up with Dan Keary to talk about the making of Dice, the band’s musical influences, Sydney’s thriving guitar-pop scene and what might come next.

Dice is your debut album. How did The Low Priorities come together, and how did these songs develop into the record we’re hearing now?

We’re all old friends who have played with one another in different bands on and off over the years.

About a year and a half ago, we had the idea to start a band specifically to play songs with a power pop feel. We thought that if we recorded a few songs as a self-released EP, it might be a good calling card to get some live gigs here in Sydney. While we were making those recordings, Dave wrote another batch of songs so we’d have enough for a live set. We got excited enough about them that we thought we may as well record all the songs and release an album rather than an EP.

So the album was done before we’d actually played any live shows.

There’s a real sense on Dice that you’re drawing on a long tradition of melodic guitar pop while still making it sound like your own. What were the musical touchstones for the band when you were making the record, and how consciously were you thinking about finding your own sound?

You’re absolutely spot on in referring to a long tradition of melodic guitar pop.

We’ve been playing together in bands since the 1990s and have spent many years sharing our love of music and enthusing about hundreds of different artists and records. The common thread of what we love is guitar-based bands with memorable, melodic songs. While making the Dice album we really enjoyed drawing on these inspirations, sometimes several within the same song. We’d often find ourselves talking excitedly all at once about bands like The Who, Blondie, Elvis Costello, The Nerves, Guided By Voice, Badfinger…to name only a few!

We wanted to make a high energy, catchy record that was clearly inspired by these and other great bands, but which still had a sound that was a unique blend of our own voices and playing styles. We weren’t looking to reinvent the wheel, but hopefully to create something with its own identity within the guitar power pop tradition.

There’s clearly a strong guitar-pop and power-pop tradition in Australia, and Dice has already been mentioned alongside that history and the current Sydney scene. Do you feel part of a wider Australian guitar-pop community, and are there bands from that scene — past or present — that you feel particularly connected to?

Yes, we’re certainly fans of a lot of the bands that people would associate with classic Australian power pop, such as The Hoodoo Gurus, Sunnyboys, The Stems, The Someloves etc.

In terms of the current Sydney scene, there’s still plenty of great guitar pop artists and bands like Bryan Estepa, Hoolahan, The Pyramidiacs, and The On and Ons playing regularly and everyone knows each other either directly or indirectly.

We did an album launch gig in Sydney in August and have another Sydney gig in mid December. Next year we’ll be looking at playing some more shows with other like-minded bands both here in Sydney and hopefully down in Melbourne.

The album has been getting some really strong reactions since its release, including the description of Dice as an “exemplary” power-pop record. Has the response surprised you, and have you noticed it bringing new listeners, contacts or opportunities your way?

We’ve been really happy with the response so far. We were confident we’d made a really good record so were always hopeful it would be well received but, yes, we’ve been pleasantly surprised at the airplay and positive reviews its been getting both here in Australia and in the US and Europe.

We’ve made quite a few new connections in different countries and there’s also some opportunities for some overseas shows next year and hopefully we’ll be in a position to confirm these shortly.

Dice is out now, and the songs are no longer really yours — they belong to the listeners. What does it feel like to let your first album go into the world, and is there a particular song you’re especially curious to hear people make their own?

That’s a nice way to put it – that the songs now belong to the listeners. We’d like to think that’s the case because that’s how real music fans perceive the songs they love – as their songs – and hopefully there’s enough people out there who have formed or will form that attachment to our songs.

We wanted to make an album on which every song could stand up on its own and hopefully we achieved that, so that every song could potentially be someone’s favourite.

We’ve been promoting the title track “Dice” as the main track, as we think it best captures some of those classic power pop elements we love – jangle, melody, power etc – but equally, there may be sonic or lyrical elements of other songs that people can relate to.

As long as we know there’s people out there enjoying the album, we’ve achieved what we set out to do.