“The internet started all of this.” Backstage after Chase Atlantic’s debut UK appearance at Reading Festival, frontman Mitchel Cave hones in on why there was a fever-pitch crowd awaiting them, and what brought them here in the first place. “If the internet did not exist, then we would not be where we are.”
Chase Atlantic are a part of a burgeoning scene of young acts that refuse to bow to any formal idea of genre boundaries. There are calls to all manners of culture and music, but most importantly they’re doing everything themselves, including venturing away from the Australian confines on the other side of the world to stir some serious buzz.
Consisting of brothers Mitchel and Clinton Cave, along with Christian Anthony, before Chase Atlantic they had a few YouTube channels between them, one of which was soon repurposed for Chase Atlantic. Mitchel and Christian even auditioned for the Australian X Factor in their former band What About Tonight and made it to the dizzy height of eleventh place.
The three-piece amalgamate influences of hip-hop, R’n’B and rock, with extra tinges of glittering indie and shoegaze. Oh, and saxophone courtesy of Clinton, of course. With this melding of sounds, thankfully there’s no fear they’ll lose any actual identity according to Mitchel, but it also means that people will jump to the nearest easy picking to shoe-horn them.
“At the beginning, we were copping a lot of flack for sounding similar to The 1975,” he admits. “But we’re so far away from that now. It wasn’t even a conscious decision to move away from that sound. We just grew out of it.”
“I feel like we’re similar in the sense though that they do their own thing – and they still have a big following,” Clinton continues.
“In a way, they pioneered their sound,” Christian muses, “and now a lot of people are trying to be like them. It’d be cool to have a similar thing for us, to pioneer our way.”
