13/06/2025
For those who have been paying attention Dirty Three guitarist Mick Turner has been on a roll recently. First with the release mid-2024 of the first Dirty Three album in 12 years and subsequent Australian tour followed by the 3rd album release of the magnificent Mess Esque, an Australian tour with the same and then a European tour for Mess esque appearing both as the support and in the band for Bonnie "Prince" Billy
And now we have Bleak Squad the ‘supper group’ featuring our Mick alongside the other Mick (Harvey) of The Bad Seeds / The Birthday Party fame, drummer / producer Marty Brown of Art of Fighting and singer / guitarist Adalita, best known as the front person for Oz indie-legends Magic Dirt.
“I had some bits of songs sitting around; I always have – ideas that didn’t fit anywhere else,” says Adalita. “It was like, finally, I had somewhere to put them. And it was so natural, right from the start. Like we’d been playing together for years.”
“It was very casual. No egos, no expectations,” Harvey says. “It wasn’t burdened with any of that. It was completely open. Marty just said, ‘Come in, bring three or four ideas, we’ll see what happens’. So that’s what we did.”
Over four days at Head Gap studios in Preston, the four distinct musical personalities became a band with unexpected ease.
“A song would become so much a [result] of what everyone had contributed that I started forgetting whose music it was in the first place,” Harvey says, still surprised at how readily a whole album began to present itself. Strange Love is due in August.
"Everything Must Change, the first song unveiled last week, is a portentous illustration. It began with a nebulous handful of chords presented by Turner – overseas as we speak, with his duo Mess Esque (“the Micks are always overseas”, Adalita says). Harvey threw in a string of apocalyptic lyrics, then encouraged Adalita to intrude.
“You tapped into something,” Harvey tells her, “and made it an even more surreal kind of excursion, which was fantastic. It messes with your head. The construction is kind of unfathomable to me. It was like a mystery, in a way.” - The Sydney Morning Herald
And with that first taste last week we can now unveil the first single and full length video for Bleak Squad and the track Lost My Head, (link in the comments) an Adalita original but very much a collaboration.
Strange Love, the debut album for Bleak Squad will be released August 22nd via Poison City Records and is available for pre-order here: https://orcd.co/bleaksquad The band have also announced 4 live dates to celebrate the release. As much as can be mustered with such a prolific personnel.
August 1st: Queenscliff Town Hall (on-sale now)
August 2nd: Meeniyan Town Hall (on-sale now)
October 11th: Sydney, City Recital Hall (on-sale July 23)
October 16th: Melbourne Recital Centre (on-sale June 16)
All ticketing info via feelpresents.com
