DMA’s: “There are a lot of similarities between country and Britpop”

Following the release of their self-titled fifth album, DMA’s guitarist Matt Mason has spoken to NME about returning to their roots and channeling the spirit of 2016 debut ‘Hill’s End’. ‘DMA’s’ was released on August 21 and marks the third UK Top 10 album in a row for the Sydney trio, completed by vocalist Tommy O’Dell and guitarist Johnny Took.

It comes in the wake of a 10th anniversary tour of ‘ Hill’s End ’ that saw the group celebrate the record across the UK, including two nights at London’s O2 Academy Brixton and two nights at Manchester’s O2 Victoria Warehouse.

Making ‘DMA’s’, Mason told NME , was an exercise in stripping things back to the “imperfect” and DIY-minded energy that filled their first record.

“You start to pick things apart more as you mature as an artist and I don’t think that’s always a good thing,” he said.

“So [it was about] putting ourselves back in the headspace where we weren’t doing that and we weren’t trying to perfect things.” He continued: “There are a lot of vocal takes on the album that are just the demos.

We would go back to re-record them and it would just completely kill the vibe.

So we just tried not to overanalyse everything, even though I am a bit too neurotic to allow myself to properly do that.

There’s a beauty in being young and not even noticing things that could be technically incorrect and just going with the feeling of it, so we tried our best to do that.” Mason – speaking to us at Manchester venue The Yard during the band’s UK out-store tour – also explained how one of the record’s lead singles, ‘Heatin Park’, was named as a joking hybrid between the city’s Heaton Park and Linkin Park , after the track’s co-writers Jimmy Somewhere and Milo Orchis noted a similarity to the nu-metal group.

“They live in the first house that Dr Dre lived in LA and they make beats for Norwegian rappers and they love nu-metal.

They were like, ‘Yeah man, it sounds like Linkin Park’ which is never something I thought we’d get told, so I gave it a weird working title of ‘Heatin Park’ as a mix between Linkin Park and Heaton Park,” he told NME .

“We supported Liam Gallagher at Heaton Park, and we played with Courteeners .

We sat down and said ‘We need to rename that because it’s ridiculous’.

But then things grow on you…” Check out the rest of our interview with Mason below, where the guitarist reflects on his relationship to the band’s British comparisons, the lessons learned from self-producing ‘DMA’s’ for the first time, and his unlikely avian tour hobbies.