Ceres - We Are A Team

Don't be shocked, but Ceres have made an album about love.

Gone is the dark night of the soul that propelled 2016's Drag It Down On You, replaced with a desire to spread positivity in the world via their third full-length, We Are a Team.

"That was the whole reason for this album to be," says frontman Tom Lanyon.

You can hear it from the first line of the record "I'm gonna get happy" to the swooning, string-laden closing track "Something Good" with its refrain, "I think something good's gonna happen".

"We Are A Team is not this dark, at the bottom of everything kind of record. It's a more uplifting thing."

With the exception of two songs Stay Awake and Collarbone, 2011 Lanyon wrote the album between February and September 2018, when Ceres gathered in a house in Apollo Bay with producer Tom Bromley (guitarist for UK outfit Los Campesinos!) and Grammy-nominated engineer Andrei Eremin (Chet Faker, Tash Sultana) to record We Are a Team.

Setting up in a seven-bedroom house on an idyllic rural property without phone reception or internet, for 16 days they "all completely lost [their] minds".

"Everyone fought," chuckles Lanyon. "But everyone was firing on such creativity and trying to do the right thing, and everyone has strong opinions. It was a struggle to get it done. But I think that means we care and we tried our hardest. I've never worked on anything as hard."

Turn the volume up hear the wind howling through the house's rafters; at the end of Something Good you can detect the sound of it creaking. The fact that the house became a part of the recording tied in nicely with the album's themes, as the property belongs to the family of Lanyon's partner and was a favourite location of her late father Viv, the namesake of the album's lead single.

"For us to make a record about that family's niece or daughter in that house is pretty incredible," says Lanyon.

While the album might mark a shift thematically for Ceres which formed in 2012 and is completed by guitarist Sean Callanan, bassist Grant Young and drummer Frank Morda musically We Are a Team continues the band's ability to create stirring, life-affirming indie-rock anthems, albeit with a more nuanced, mature songwriting flare that reflects the roadwork and emotional growth of the past three years.