CONCRETE SURFERS - TRACK BY TRACK
Words/Interview: Joseph Maranta
Images: Kelsey Doyle | @kjdoyle
The evolution of Concrete Surfers has been markedly linear. Their debut single Roma St, though a decade old in 2026, is still as relevant to the band as ever. Each subsequent release, sporadic as they may be, feels like another link on the way to this year’s debut album.
For a lot of acts that statement could easily be interpreted as a slight, a suggestion that there's a lack of ambition or inspiration which has caused their music to become stagnant. But for the four garage-rocking Brisbanites, it’s instead testament to their self-assuredness in, and their love for, the music they’ve been honing for the past ten years.
If Roma St were a sprout, their self-titled album is a matured, manicured bonsai tree. It’s an ode to empty goon sacs adorning a hills hoist. Steeped in the chaos of D.I.Y backyard gigs, yet so clearly moulded by a decade of growth in taste and musicianship.
Following the release of their debut album and first project since 2021, we sat down with Jovi (vox + guitar), and Jamie Brook (drums), Trent Courtenay (bass), and Sean Foster (guitar) to dissect each song track-by-track.
JOE: Cheers for catching up fellas. Firstly, congratulations on the release of your debut album! Is it a strange feeling knowing that this album has dropped in 2026, ten years on from your first ever single?
JOVI: Yeah it’s crazy! I guess we’re just not a super prolific band; some bands are and some bands aren’t. We love writing and releasing music, but I think we’re more focused on being as stoked as we possibly can be, with the music we do put out.
JOE: Was the process of releasing an album what you expected it to be?
TRENT: Well we organised most of it ourselves, we were really at the mercy of our spare time and our spare money. Doing it ourselves, we didn’t realise how much there was to it. Every little thing, like planning a single release for example, we’d allocate one month for it and it’d end up taking three months.
JAMIE: We got super caught up in the back end side of things.
SEAN: Creating the music was actually the easy part.
JOVI: We just wanted to ensure that absolutely everything was ready for the album’s release. We all work pretty long hours outside of the band, so that was one of the main reasons why the admin side of things took so long, but we ended up being able to plan everything from our photos, music videos and the tour, to be ready for the album’s rollout.
JOE: Were you the sole lyricist for the album, Jovi?
JOVI: I guess so, yeah.
SEAN: I’d say we have a little bit of input, but none of us are too lyrically inclined.
JOVI: Neither am I really!
JAMIE: We really write our songs a bit backwards most of the time. The instrumental is usually completely finished before any lyrics are made, and then we just slap the lyrics on top of it.
JOVI: It’s definitely been that way in the past, but for this album we did things slightly differently in that regard.
JOE: In what way has the band grown and evolved since your debut EP, Calamities?
JOVI: I’d say our songwriting has grown.
SEAN: Songwriting yeah, but also we’ve grown so much as people too. We’ve refined our taste and influences a lot, and I think we all bring something unique to the table now. We used to fuck around with our music so much to try and make it ‘perfect’, but this time we’ve been so much better at trusting the song itself.
JAMIE: I think we grew a lot with our communication as well.
JOVI: It’s a milestone in and of itself to have been in a band for ten years, but I’m really proud that we can look back on it all while still being the best of mates. We aren’t forced to hang out because we’re in a band, but because we genuinely enjoy being with one another.
JOE: Just finally before we get into the track-by-track breakdown, was there anything you aimed to do differently, be it in the sound or the methodology on this album, compared to your last EP?
JOVI: We’ve kept our ‘trademark’ sound on this record, where the drums follow the vocals and it’s all locked in together. But we wanted it to be heavier and faster this time around. Not that I’d ever say we were surf-rock, but we wanted to step away from that scene, instead pushing ourselves closer towards the punk side of the rock spectrum.
TRACK 1: Growing Pains
JOVI: I suppose to relate it to everyone without getting too personal, this one is about the curveballs you get thrown in life growing up. My brother Jamie and I were put into a position straight after high school where we had to grow up really quickly, so I guess it’s a reflection of how we felt and how we navigated through it at that time.
I think a lot of this album is about the human experience, more so than anything overtly political or regarding current affairs.
TRACK 2: Idiot
JOVI: This song carries on the sound from Growing Pains, but it’s really just about binge drinking [laughs].
We all do way too much of it, and it’s fun until it’s not and it eventually becomes a problem.
TRACK 3: Fallout
JOVI: As the title suggests this one is about falling out of friendships and relationships.
JAMIE: The instrumental for this one was just so hard, when we first did the recording for this song we did it clean. It was only afterwards when we threw distortion onto the vocals to match the song, and then whacked on a lot of guitar distortion.
JOVI: I think adding some hair to our vocals works well for us. I wouldn’t say we’re fuzzy necessarily, but we often try to go for the lo-fi / hi-fi thing, especially when we’re playing live.
SEAN: The distorted vocals I think help mimic our live sound too.
JOVI: I really hate recording vocals in the studio. I feel like a fish in a bowl with everyone watching me. Since we’re such a loud band live, I often have to push my voice more, because sometimes I can’t hear myself unless I’m singing really loudly. I think that comes as well from growing up and playing a lot of D.I.Y shows throughout our time as a band, shows where I’d have to yell-sing to make sure the rest of the band could hear me.
TRACK 4: Pedigree
JAMIE: When we were recording this I was pumping a lot of the classic Good Charlotte, Blink-182, kind of that Jackass soundtrack - 90s and 2000s rock.
JOVI: Jamie’s our resident stadium rock connoisseur.
SEAN: We’re all into different music, but I think our common ground would be that 90s / 2000s rock.
TRACK 5: Remember Me
JOVI: The writing for Remember Me is rooted in nostalgia.
Like I said earlier, this album revolves around relationships, and I feel like we can often get stuck on remembering the idea of who someone was, and what they were like - while grappling with the idea that everyone changes eventually.
So I guess that lyric of ‘remember me’ became a very core part of the song.
TRACK 6: Go Ahead
JAMIE: We started writing it originally as a song that we’d all play in. We had a drum track written in for it and everything, but we eventually decided the song didn’t actually need it.
SEAN: It’s the first stripped-back song we’ve ever done. I think it does well to break up the album intensity. We’re keen to put it into our live set. We’ll make Jovi go on stage and handle it by himself so the rest of us can get a break.
TRACK 7: Want It All
JOVI: When we were writing this, we really wanted a 90s sounding track on the album, and that’s where we landed.
TRENT: It has that really slacker-rock kind of chorus.
TRACK 8: You Said
JOVI: This track was in the same key and tempo as Want It All, so that allowed us to do a pretty seamless transition into it. We like to put surprises like this in when we can, things that aren’t necessarily related to one particular song, but more the arrangement of the record.
JAMIE: We do the same transition live, so it’s nice we can record it that way and keep it consistent. It makes this feel like even more of a live album.
JOVI: I was smashing out Dogrel by Fontaines D.C. so much when I was writing this song. I think even though it’s an upbeat sounding track with Sean’s guitar, you can still hear some moodiness in the song, because a lot of that Fontaines’ album is very moody I’d say.
TRACK 9: Personal Hell
JOVI: A lot of the lyrics on this track relate to panic. There are a couple of allusions to drugs in the lyrics, but they were just more of a funny way to convey those feelings.
TRACK 10: Scraped Slow
SEAN: With this one, we had a chord which was so heavy that we just needed to find a place for it on the album. We were jamming before recording, and we’d fallen into this three-chord loop which ended up turning itself into a song. It ended up being really heavy, exactly what we wanted.
JOVI: This and Fallout were written in the same first block of songs we did for the album, the first run of five. It’s why it has some similarities with the lead-guitar mainly, but the other three tracks we wrote in that block didn’t end up making the cut for the album.
TRENT: It's got a bit of a western jangle to it as well, especially that opening riff.
JOVI: We did something different for the vocal recordings on this song as well. For the verses, it’s an octave vocal. I’m singing the high and low at the same notes to make it sound a bit Smashing Pumpkins-esque. We also have an acoustic guitar playing through the heavy bits, which helped make the snare a bit more beefy.
TRACK 11: Again and Again
SEAN: This song is actually pretty annoying to play live because it’s our only Drop D song, so we have to tune our guitars down before playing.
JOVI: This song didn’t come together very quickly, but it was really rewarding once it was all put together.
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