THE GENEVIEVES

Writer: Em Tobin

Photographer: @snappedbykay

When I saw The Genevieves play live upstairs at Season Three last year, it was impossible not to get lost in the magnetic trance that is their music. Off their Dog Dreams tour, the four-piece graced the scene with their flourishing aura of pure passion. Twisting together mosh-ready vocals, distorted guitar riffs, and evident on-stage chemistry, The Genevieves met an excited Brisbane crowd. 

Gritty, raw, and real, Adelaide-based project The Genevieves is an ode to post-teenage angst, and the celebration of collaborative creativity that arises when crafting truly unique sound. For The Genevieves, the process of coming together as a band to formulate distinct sounds is equally as important as the product, thus giving rise to their evident creative intersection of live and studio-refined sound. Born out of Adelaide, The Genevieves are excited for what is to come down south, praising the small capital city as one to watch, eagerly discussing their love of the intimate nature of the music scene. 

In this interview, The Genevieves and I discuss the key moments that shaped their 2025 national tour, and how integral working together as a band is to their sound. On a more personal note, their Dog Dreams EP was one of my favourite Australian releases of 2025, and I’m looking forward to hearing more from the band in the new year.

EM: Hey Genevieves, it’s so good to catch up. I saw you all live at Season Three late last year, and thoroughly enjoyed your performance! Can you give me a recap of what it was like to play for a Brisbane audience?

FINN: It was incredible. We only played one night in Brisbane, but it was worth making the trip up. Everyone was lovely. We had an inkling about Brisbane’s overwhelming support before we met anyone, which was cool. Our expectations were met. It was a great gig. 

EM: Last year the band released their first EP, Dog Dreams. What was the process of writing, producing, and putting the EP together? 

FINN: It took a while for it to come together, and most of the songs we included, we wrote before we even had the idea to put an EP out. We originally wrote the tracks to play live shows, but eventually decided to put out a project that was bigger than a single.

JAMES:  We picked out the songs we thought would be cohesive and went away to record them at a farmhouse. It was the first time recording at the farmhouse, we previously recorded at a different Airbnb, a regular-sized house in the same isolated area. The farmhouse was huge. There were eight bedrooms; it was super big, old, and it was cold. We put the EP together over a couple of days, mixed it ourselves, and then put it out.

EM: How was the process of working together collaboratively as a band, and how did working on a larger project change how you perform? 

FINN: Our EP was extremely collaborative. All our songs stem from individual band members bringing in their own ideas, which are threaded through the whole band, with members working on verses or choruses. Sometimes we change up each other’s ideas, work out choruses, and decide who should do vocals and sing. I handballed lyrics for choruses to Lara, who chose which lyrics would work, and our outros came together from band jams. Dreaming, Speaking was kind of a James and Baily song. Keith was a song that Baily brought in that took on its own life and became more of a band than a solo song. 

JAMES: We’re still majorly figuring it out. In the past two weeks, we’ve been having more conversations about tinkering with our sound and finding the sweet spot between everyone contributing and coming up with things at home, fiddling with things other people have written. Our process is different for each song nowadays. 

FINN: We’ve recently written things that have come together spontaneously as we play together. Sometimes we feel good about it, and sometimes we feel disconnected from it. It’s weird when things are made naturally, because it doesn’t feel like what we’ve done before. That’s why our sound feels very true to us, but the newer stuff feels a bit strange. We’ve been chatting a lot about how we get our tracks off the ground and get them to sound like a Genevieve's song. 

EM: Touring last year off the EP through venues in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane, and Canberra, what did you take away from your experience?

JAMES: We learnt a lot, there were a lot of positives, but also things we struggled with. We’re starting to figure out a lot of things still, three or four years in. It was a solid tour, and we’re happy with it. We played some great shows. 

FINN: It was definitely a lot of fun. The entire aspect of touring is brutal and takes a lot of time, especially with driving. Sitting at our level of popularity, it’s hard to pack out a room on a Tuesday night. We’re limited to playing Friday and Saturday shows for a chance of selling out. We ended up having a few days off. We did hectic drives, two or three days of nine-hour drives each day. We learnt how to manage and what to do to stay functional. 

JAMES: It was so much fun, we spent a lot of time hanging around Sydney, which was great, and we explored the city. There are a lot of great parts to Sydney. We’re keen to do more touring. 

EM: On that note, where was your favourite spot to play on tour and why?

FINN: We played at The Tote in Melbourne. The bands we played with were sick, and The Totes was such a pub rock venue. There was a great community at the show.

JAMES: We were also quite nervous about that show because the night before we played on a great, curated line-up at the Old Bar with Good Music. The next night was our headline show at The Tote, and we were nervous about ticket sales, but it ended up being amazing. It was a great start to the tour. 

EM: Off the Dog Dreams EP, my favourite song is Dreaming, Speaking. How did you go about writing and producing the track?

JAMES: I had Bailey around at my house, and we’d set out to write a fast song. It gave us direction from the get-go. Our set felt like it needed something quick in the middle, so we wrote an up-tempo track by throwing riffs back and forth. It was our first time doing that together. We brought it to Finn and Lara, and they brought in other aspects to the song. 

FINN: The bridge needed a break from the fastness of it, so it truly materialised from the collaboration of the four of us. 

EM: What has come out of putting out Standing in Your Way, and how is it to play live to an audience?

FINN: The track’s evolved quite a bit since we wrote it. That was another one James wrote, and it sounded close to when we recorded it. We didn’t book recording time off for it. Bailey had a riff, and then James wrote the song around it. 

JAMES: We gave ourselves three days to write a handful of songs, and it was one of the ones we wrote. One of those songs will be out this year at some point. They were all written together, which was cool. It was a new moment for us to record and produce a trilogy of tracks together. We were originally planning on recording an EP with them, but they sounded quite sonically different, so we will put them in to encompass a larger feature. 

EM: Off such a big year of touring and putting out the EP, what is your vision looking like, and what do you aim to do in 2026?

FINN: We’ll definitely put the songs we recorded out. We’re thinking of getting back out on the road afterwards. We’ve recently booked time to go away and do more recording of something longer in length. We’ve booked the next month to write. The plan is to just write the album over the next month and take a few months to test out the songs live. Since we wrote the songs for Dog Dreams before playing live, they’ve evolved, but it’s nice to have snapshots of when we first wrote them in an EP. It’ll be good to have time to write and test out live the album, and head back to the farmhouse, which will be sick. 

JAMES: We’re going in July, and it’s going to be freezing. 

EM: That’s so exciting. As an Adelaide-based band, what is your favourite thing about being part of your city’s music scene?

JAMES: We’re feeling pretty excited about it all right now. I don’t know whether we live in a bubble, but it feels like Adelaide is gaining traction on the national stage. It’s awesome to see our mates do cool things around us. The bands here are starting to take off and get more attention. We want to bring more eyes to Adelaide. It doesn't feel like the whole, everyone moving to Melbourne thing is as on people’s minds as it was a couple of years ago. 

FINN: When we were in Brisbane, everyone described it the same way people described Adelaide. Everyone knows everyone, and everyone is in each other’s bands. The scene is pretty condensed. So many of the things we’d talked about how Adelaide felt similar to how people chat about Brisbane. People from Brisbane are also coming more into our radar, which is cool. It’s great that Melbourne is Australia’s music capital, but it’s nice to see other cities gain more attention on a national stage. It feels like there’s a lot of cool stuff happening, and people from Adelaide are really starting to tour. 

EM: And finally, who would be your dream Australian act to open for?

FINN: I’d love to open for King Gizzard one day. I’d reckon it’d be sick. I’d like to think it would be an insane hand beforehand, too.

JAMES: Definitely Tropical Fuck Storm. I feel like previously, someone like the Birthday Party. We actually are opening for a band in a couple of months, and Mick Harvey is playing guitar, one of the old Birthday Party members. I’m feeling pretty giddy. 

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