Joe Jackson has a specific way of describing Public Sweetheart No. 1, his band’s debut album: a blunt, honest self-assessment of his own behaviour over an extended period of time, and the various ways he has affected the people closest to him. He adds, with the kind of self-awareness that characterises the whole record, that he’s at least tried to make it catchy in order to better live with himself. That combination of genuine remorse and a refusal to be precious about it is what makes the Melbourne trio’s first full-length worth sitting with. The Great Emu War Casualties are interested in making their failures honest, and then making that honesty infectious enough that you’ll come back to it.
The band has spent three EPs sharpening the tools that Public Sweetheart No. 1 deploys across eleven tracks. Guitarist Jackson, alongside his bandmates, has built a sound that sits comfortably in the tradition of Australian indie rock without being beholden to any single corner of it. Jangly guitars, stacked vocal harmonies, syncopated percussion, and a melodic directness that keeps the more emotionally complex material from caving in on itself. The Guardian, covering the single “Wanna See You,” noted a laconic propulsion that suggests a wander rather than a sprint, which is a useful description of the album’s overall gait. It moves with purpose but doesn’t rush.
“Ashes” opens the record without ceremony, layered harmonies and addictive melodies establishing the sonic territory quickly. “Old Dog” follows with funky synth adding a dimension that signals the band’s range early, the kind of move that pays off across a full album by preventing the sound from settling into predictability. “Overreacting” and “Get What You Want” dig into the self-examination at the record’s core, the lyricism doing the kind of precise, unglamorous work that Atwood Magazine identified when they described the band’s songs as intuitively marrying art rock and alt-pop. The guitars glitter without distracting, the harmonies stack without cluttering.
“Donut,” one of two pre-release singles, is the kind of track that earns the word anthemic without requiring bombast. Its upbeat commentary lands with the particular energy of someone who has figured out how to be funny about things that actually hurt, a skill the album returns to repeatedly. “Wanna See You” follows as what the band describes as the record’s token happy track, a designation that carries its own irony given its placement between the more emotionally charged material surrounding it. The Guardian’s description of joyous boy-girl harmonies and jangly guitars chronicling the ills of trickle-down economics captures something important about how the band operates: the politics are embedded in the pleasure rather than announced over it.
The sequencing in the album’s second half is where the self-awareness becomes structural. “Don’t Be Sad” arrives after the record’s most openly joyful moment, followed by “Sob Story,” which introduces distorted, menacing guitar riffs and a sense of existentialism that shifts the album’s emotional register noticeably. AU Review’s description of “I’m A Yes Man,” a track from the band’s earlier work, as having many chapters craftily assembled and woven together applies to the album as a whole. The light and the dark are not kept separate. They bleed into each other in the way they tend to in actual life.
“Turn My Lights Out” and closer “Old World” bring the album down from that tension, the sleepy ballad quality of the final stretch functioning as what the band calls a reassuring musical blanket. It’s a considered ending for a record that has spent most of its runtime being unsparing. The decision to close on something quieter and more generous reads less like resolution than like the particular exhaustion that follows real honesty. You’ve said everything. Now you rest.
Public Sweetheart No. 1 arrives at the end of a period of genuine artistic development. Three EPs of groundwork produced a band confident enough to make a debut album that doesn’t hedge. Jackson describes looking for clarity by going back to basics, removing the chaos and noise of the world in favour of honesty, and the record delivers on that intention without making it sound like a manifesto. Backseat Mafia’s description of the band as a glorious and diverse collection of stars emitting glitter and light while being made of something quite substantial and profound captures the dual register the album operates in throughout. The glitter is real. So is the substance underneath it.
Public Sweetheart No. 1 is available now.
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