COCO ELISE
- Apr 16
- 6 min read
Words & Interview: Joseph Maranta
All Images: @stevmedia | Stevie Morley-Wong
A lagging day of work culminates in a cathartic slamming-shut of a work-issued Lenovo ThinkPad.
Numerous emails remain outstanding and projects with fast-approaching deadlines have yet to be truly planned out. The lingering feeling of dread evokes familiar memories of high-school due date crunches, though the threat of corporate ostracisation and performance reviews strike a deeper fear than parent-teacher interview scoldings ever could.
Pessimism isn’t his style but the crushing mundanity of white collar work got one over him today. Staring out of the bus window he feels an internal tug-of-war taking place between his usual half-glass-full self and the stressors inherent to working an adult job.
Arriving home he makes a beeline for bed. Crumpling into an unkept mess of linen he questions why he entertains his vocational melancholy. Staring at the ceiling, his focus drifts towards his once white walls now painted with a pastel pink and red from this afternoon’s sunset. The whimsical colour palette turning the perception of his brooding from a romantic stoicism to a fruitless self-sabotage.
In that moment of self-questioning, the familiar, comforting sound of panting and thudding paws draws closer towards his room. A labrador enters his room and leaps into his bed, leash in mouth and unbridled joy in its eyes. The cloud which had been swirling over him all day dissipates as an involuntary yet needed smile forms across his face.
This is Coco Elise
Led by Josh Ellis, Coco Elise have possessed a penchant for ear worm bedroom-pop tracks from inception, but have recently displayed impressive growth in their songwriting, maturing from nonsensical lyrics into resonant and introspective narratives.
Above everything though, the music of Coco Elise is distilled with optimism. No matter the poignancy of their writing, the soft instrumentals and high-pitched vocals provide hopefulness in spades, their music a sonic silver bullet for any bouts of melancholy or glumness.
Here’s our chat with Josh of Coco Elise.
JOE: Thanks for hopping on a call Josh! How has 2026 treated you so far?
JOSH: It’s been good!
We have a lot of stuff happening in the near future, 2026 is shaping to be a good year. We were prepping for this one all throughout 2025.
JOE: Quickly taking it back to last year, how special was 2025’s final show? Launching your second EP which had been three years in the making, in some respects.
JOSH: It was a lot of fun!
We were lucky enough to sell out Mojo’s Bar in Fremantle. Usually at our shows we have a lot of our mates there, and they definitely turned up to that show, but we had a whole lot of other people there to see our music. It definitely gave me a pep in my step to get back in the studio and make as much music as I can.
JOE: Why do you think the wait between projects was so long?
JOSH: I don’t know to be honest.
Our first EP Brian’s Views was just me on GarageBand. I put it out not taking it that seriously, and then we put out some more singles since we were playing live. One of the songs we made during that period, Do You Believe in Love? did really well for us at that stage. After the success of that track, Isaiah and I decided to take the project a bit more seriously for a year and release all the songs we’d written. So that’s what we did last year with Lilly’s Gallery.
So it wasn’t really an EP, it was more a clusterfuck of songs I’d made over the last two years or so. But it was still good to get it out, I was on a bit of a roll after that and managed to write this next batch of songs, and now I have them produced and ready to go.
JOE: A bit of a strange question, but when I was doing research for this interview I could only find interviews conducted by Filipino news outlets. Why is that?
JOSH: We did some PR for the first time last year with the EP’s rollout. Eventually a company reached out from the Philippines, and we’d already had a few listeners from over there so we wanted to capitalise on that. So we did those interviews last year and had a wins.
Last year was a big learning one for us.
JOE: Did it work?
JOSH: Yeah we’ve got some Filipino fans. Not enough to tour or anything, but we’ve got some sort of respect in Manila now.
JOE: You’ve mentioned that your sound is becoming more refined, no longer just ‘playing around’ for lack of a better term. With a more focused vision, are you still able to keep that same whimsiness and playfulness during writing and recording sessions?
JOSH: I record out of a spare room in my sharehouse, so it’s not a very playful environment here. So sometimes it can be whimsical and sometimes not so much. But I think the playfulness is still there for me, although this next batch of songs has taken more of a serious turn.
They’re more vulnerable, especially the lyrics. I’m genuinely proud of these songs, whereas before I was more playful because that was the easy way out, to be silly and vague about what’s really going on.
So the playfulness is gone in that sense, but the sound still remains with the layered vocals and percussion.
JOE: What can you tell us about your next single, Porcelain Tiles?
JOSH: This is the first song I’ve written off the upcoming project, and it’s definitely the first time I’ve felt really proud of a song.
It’s about the feeling of ending a relationship when you haven’t necessarily fallen out of love with them, but instead because life has gotten in the way. So you enter an intermediary period where you’re going through trials, so to speak, just to get back to that person.
JOE: Do you think this forthcoming project will be more of a compilation or a coherent body of work?
JOSH: This one is a coherent body of work for sure. It’s been made over the last six months and all the tracks make sense together, they all form the story of what I’ve been going through at the moment.
Compared to Lilly’s Gallery, which did fit together sound-wise to be fair, this one has its own structure and tells a story.
JOE: You’ve mentioned that Feel Like Rubber is your ‘happiest’ or ‘warmest’ song, but what would be your saddest song?
JOSH: Our saddest song is definitely coming up, but the saddest song we’ve released so far would probably be Colour the Stencil or Suddenly Your Mind’s a Fortress.
JOE: Speaking about Perth music more broadly, how do you think the city’s isolation impacts the scene?
JOSH: I think the main hurdle about being a band from Perth is the difficulty of touring outside of Western Australia. Because of the difficulty of leaving the city, the community here is very tight-knit, everyone is aware of the projects one another is working on, which is a silver lining in some ways.
But at the end of the day you’re in a smaller city so you miss out on a lot of touring acts who go to other parts of Australia, and you can feel quite far away. You’ve caught me at a time where I feel quite far away from everything going on.
But Perth is an amazing place to play music in and the community we have here is awesome.
JOE: Has there been any temptation to head over east?
JOSH: 100%.
We’re going to be there later in the year if everything goes to plan, whether that’s Sydney or Melbourne, it’s time to leave regardless. The Perth scene has an amazing sound, very much that indie-rock sound with awesome bands like DICE for example, who have helped carve the city’s sound.
But I feel like Coco Elise’s music doesn’t have as much pull in Perth as it might over east. There are so many things you can do here in Perth, but I think it comes down to us not having as much success as we’d like here, not that success is the final goal or anything. But we think it would be nice to have a fresh start, to have something different going on.
JOE: Who’s your favourite Perth act who has left home, and who’s your favourite Perth act who has stayed in Perth?
JOSH: One of my favourite ever Perth acts is Hector Morlet, he hasn’t released music in a few years but he’s stuck around Perth. I guess Kevin Parker has technically stayed as well. Also Little Guilt, Airline Food, Mayple, Persia, Butter and Glimmer have been on my rotation over the years. I play in another project called Edie which is great also.
As far as someone who’s left, I know that Ullah has moved away, she’s in Melbourne at the moment and she’s obviously awesome.
JOE: Can any non-Perth residents hope to catch Coco Elise in a city near them anytime soon?
JOSH: Yes they can! We have plans, but we can’t reveal them yet...
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