A Quick Chat with Big Reef

Big Reef has quickly become a standout act, especially after your well-received east coast tour in 2023. As brothers and a creative duo, how does your dynamic influence the music and performances you create?

Being brothers means we have a shared pool of influence to pull from, growing up together and being exposed to, influenced by and bonding over similar art, music and comedy has provided us with a firm baseline to work from. But of course we are individuals and we both thrive when exploring ourselves and our individuality through art, so we have the best of both worlds - a huge shared pool of references and our own individual personal influences which we can bring to each other from our own worlds. 

Your new single ‘The M.V.P.’ is a character piece about a man with more confidence than is warranted. Can you dive into the inspiration behind this track and how you approached its production?

A lot of our lyric writing tends to lean heavily on characters rather than personal experiences, or at least a character that we can project a few small personal experiences on to. On the surface, The MVP song is about a person who in a fleeting moment is captured by lust and feels it reciprocated, he feels like a damn stud - I think most people have had that experience, it feels good! We’ve taken that very real potent snapshot and exaggerated it into a character who feels that level of confidence all the time. We are big proponents of being humble and self-aware (perhaps this is not so clear in the way we market and perform, but it’s true all the same). I think the lyrics on The MVP are a bit of a stab at people we’ve met over the years who could stand to look inward a little more often, we feel strongly about that. 

You both take a DIY approach to Big Reef, creating all visual art, music videos, and graphic design yourselves. How does this self-sufficient ethos contribute to your overall vision as a band?

To begin with, it’s fun to make stuff, music, music videos, graphic design, podcasts, video art, websites and on and on and on… We’ve both been making creative stuff as long as we had access to the requisite tools so this holistic approach is an innate part of the Big Reef project.  We’re driven to build a world around Big Reef  because that world is often more exciting and interesting than the one we actually occupy. Coincidentally, this ethos, along with our predilection toward stoicism and strong work ethic, align well with the current “creator” and DIY economy. As the music industry continues to churn and change with technological advances and emergencies, just being a band is rarely enough, you need to be a “creator”, a “personality”, a self-made brand. Our ethos appears to be in vogue right now…

The live visual show you’ve developed is a key part of the Big Reef experience. How do these synchronised visualisations enhance your performances, and what do they add to the narrative of your music?

We’ve always been huge fans of music videos, and the way that visual art and music can be coalesced into something even more potent than their individual parts. Creating video art that captures the mood, aesthetic, message and momentum of our music is another meditative practice that has become an essential part of our performances that strengthens our ability to communicate to our audience. Something as simple as a flash of washed out green timed with a crescendo in one of our songs can do miles of legwork in communicating a more emotional and resonating message than your typical band on stage format. Live performance needs to be differentiated from home listening, and we’ve created an entire synchronised visual art show to help bridge the communication gap between us and our audience, and to give our fans a reason to come and experience our music in a live environment.

Your sound draws influence from iconic bands like The Strokes, LCD Soundsystem, and Prince. How do you blend these inspirations with your unique style to create something distinctly Big Reef?

I think first and foremost our music seems to get pumped through a filter of our own very personal interpretation of 80s new wave and prog pop music, perhaps this is hard-wired into us. Bands like Tears for Fears, Peter Gabriel, Talking Heads etc. have all contributed to a sort of calcified lens that I think is in a big way responsible for our distinctive sound. In the past couple of years Post-Punk and Shoegaze have seen a resurgence in popularity, but it’s their more over-the-top and pop-forward cousin New Wave that we feel an affinity with. With The MVP, we’d been listening to a lot of The Strokes, Ariel Pink and LCD, and so the sounds of these bands found themselves embedded in the work, but as always those influences have been imbued with our unique voice.

With sold-out shows in Sydney and Canberra and a steadily growing Patreon community, what’s next for Big Reef? How do you plan to continue building on this momentum?

We just want to keep meeting and talking to the people who relate to what we’re doing, we’ve met so many cool and nice people in our short history as a band and it’s nice to have these parasocial and IRL relationships blossoming on our patreon, instagram DMs, and at our shows. We will continue to release singles (there are many more on the harddrive ready to go), continue to podcast, play shows and perhaps most important of all - shitpost on our social media. It’s nice to have a project that doesn’t feel beholden to any industry norms - we want our community to come directly to us and we will continue to grow that community day in and day out.