It’s long been said that the definition of madness is doing the same thing again and again, expecting different results each time. Across nearly a decade together, Zach Stephenson and Billy Fleming – better known to the world at large as Hockey Dad – had never gone completely mad. There was simply too many new things
for them to do, after all: Scoring two top-10 albums on the ARIA charts (with 2020’s Brain Candy getting all the way to number two), hanging up both Gold and Platinum sales plaques on the wall for songs like ‘Join The Club’ and ‘Seaweed’, touring with childhood heroes like Grinspoon and Taking Back Sunday, becoming a theatre-filling international headliner in their own right and dominating festival stages from Splendour In The Grass to Reading & Leeds and back again.
The madness, ultimately, wouldn’t come knocking until they tried to start writing their fourth studio album in mid-2020 – a time, if you’ll recall, that was more closed doors than open arms. Though the Windang duo did their best to weather the year’s prevalent shitstorm – including their famed COVID loophole gig Alive at the Drive-In, later immortalised in their debut live album – they found themselves at a loss, with everything up in the air. “That period was really difficult for me,” says Stephenson – Hockey Dad’s singing, guitar-playing yin to Fleming’s drumming yang. “I lost a lot of motivation to keep writing and making music. “It felt pointless if we couldn’t go out there and play it like we used to. Maybe these expectations of ‘The Great Writing Boom of 2020’ turned me off, too. The pressure was on to keep working and keep writing, but sitting in the same room every day for five months trying to write different things was never going to work. I need to be outside like a border collie, taking in the world.”
