Getting to know Silky Roads

November 23, 2020

Sydney-based indie-rock quartet Silky Roads have just revealed their new single. We asked them to tell us about themselves:

We are… Silky Roads, and I guess we’d describe ourselves as a bunch of good mates who like making music together. We have all been mutual friends for ages, and we’re all classic rock lovers. We just can’t get enough of the sounds from the 60s and 70s and we kind of want our upcoming music to have a ‘blast from the past’ feel to it.

Pomegranate is… a funny track in that when we first started jamming on it, it was a faster paced, busy blues jam, and wasn’t showing too much promise as a song – because it was really just a jam, and had no solid structure. It wasn’t until we slowed it down and stripped it back, and basically just simplified all the parts, with the help of our producer Yossif Kay, that its true shape emerged. However, once we shone that light on the song it only took one session to come out with the final arrangement.

Lyrically the song touches on our mutually shared feelings of fear and doubt in terms of where the power lies in our society as a whole. There is some frustration in there about making decisions based on the wrong kind of fear. The kind that’s all about just holding on to power for power’s sake.

Equally you could say the song is about the undervaluing of our generation and the squandering of our future. We come from the age group which our politicians have told to be ‘less activist’. In the words of the school strikers, ‘we’ll be less activist if you’ll be less shit’.

Home is… Sydney, and for all of us it’s a special place. We have all grown up here, and after going abroad you really start to realize how unique a city it is, cut through with multiple harbor’s, big chunks of bush, and wildlife everywhere. Some of us have travelled quite widely…to India, Nepal and North Africa. We’ve seen first-hand the difficult situations millions of people live in and we know how lucky we are to be here. We really don’t want to see it destroyed by fire and drought and pollution.

We spend too much time… anticipating what the future holds for us, where the Silky Road will take us, and what sort of music we will be coming up with further down the line. We are constantly throwing around the phrase ‘imagine in a year’s time’… After all, recent history is telling us that pretty much anything could happen, right?

We’ve never… formally learned to play any of our instruments. Beyond one or two kick off lessons we are all self-taught, but we all had a lot of music growing up at home and at school.

Music seeps into and becomes part of you without you realizing it… and then, if you get the chance and you meet the right people, it flows out again.

It might surprise you to learn that… we never set out to form a band and create music but it just kind of fell into place, and because we’re all good mates it’s pretty easy going. In all honesty we don’t really know what’s going on but we’re loving it and we are excited for the future and don’t see it stopping anytime soon. And as Tom Petty once said “Do something you really like, and hopefully it pays the rent. As far as [we’re] concerned, that’s success.”

Also, it might surprise you to learn that we recorded a bulk of the upcoming EP in a tiny country church in the middle of sheep fields and vineyards. A great place to chill and just focus on the music.