Kaurna/Adelaide noise-rock outfit Placement have today released their long-awaited debut album, Insect.
It’s a beautiful guitar-led album. Sometimes a little grimy, othertimes upbeat and bright, but never dull. With a nod to the 90s, it’s thoughtful and refreshing. The irresistable eerie and magnetic vocals of lead singer Malia Wearn are captivating. It might be dark at times, but it’s never beige. There is beauty in the shadows.
Placement are currently touring Insect. They are playing in their home-town tonight at the Grace Darling, before heading off Canberra, Wollongong and Sydney. They are also supporting Press Club in Adelaide and Melbourne, and The Preatures in Adelaide. All the dates are below. Get along and support live music.
Placement has penned a track-by-track breakdown of the album for the AU. It’s a fascinating read, so do crank up the volume, press <play>, and read on. The author of the song is in (brackets) against each song title!
Placement – Insect – Track by Track
Inertia / Heavy Lids (Malia)
Do we really want what we say we want?
This song speaks of desire, motivation, ambition, slipping away into the sleeping reality of inertia, and habit. We may begin full of emotion, full of passion and vigour, but somewhere along the way are we just doing what we’re doing because it’s what we have been doing. Does it still fill us, fulfil us? The power of habit and ritual is strong, the inertia of daily life can propel us through a lot, past a lot. If we keep running towards the same things again and again, we should know what’s coming.
The song came into our set really quickly after writing it, as we were about to play a tour of shows where we needed a longer set than we’d been playing. We wanted to bring something new in instead of bringing back an older song. The chorus didn’t become what it is until a few weeks before we recorded it. I sang it a different way for about 4 or 5 months. But still when you find the right part it feels like it’s always been there. I can’t even remember how I sang it before.
New Disease (Malia)
Placement played our first show at the start of 2020 and soon found ourselves struggling to exist in a world where live music in its usual form was not possible. The ghost of the threat of sickness seeped into every part of life, and of course our music. Unsurprisingly, ‘New Disease’ is a pandemic song. It’s about the things we believe in, and how they change and distort us, forcing us away from or towards reality. Confirmation bias, isolation, coping mechanisms whatever they are, we who are here made it through, but of course we are changed. Sometimes all we need is to be fed a line we can hold on to, an excuse to keep doing whatever we want to do. All of us caught the new disease, whatever that was and we were never the same again.
We released this originally back in 2023 but re-recorded it for the album because we loved it so much we wanted to press it to vinyl but also felt like it fit really well with the rest of the songs on the album.
Sought out the Night (Malia)
This song is pretty autobiographical, with direct reference to incidents in my life. Generally I write songs about topics that are weighing on my mind rather than my life events, so this is a bit of an anomaly. It’s a song about being with someone for a long time and being there for the ride. It’s a song about living. I have always made art, making is an obsession for me, but there was a time when I felt I didn’t have the right as I had no stories to tell. So I set out to change that. We always sought out the night. We always drank too much red wine. We always tripped and fell, and as a result, we had stories to tell. I did break both my pinky fingers, luckily they do seem to be the most expendable, they never healed properly. Still you always just told me you loved me and knew the right words.
This Weak (Malia)
I wrote the words to this song a few years ago when the US started rolling back Roe V Wade. I was heart broken. I’m half American, and growing up this was something I took pride in, but as the years passed I began to have more complicated feelings about it. It was a decision that made me feel like I and my opinions about my own body were not welcome. Can I just have my own body? The words came out automatically on a grey day in a grey week when I couldn’t stop reading stories of all the horrible and immediate consequences of the repealing of body autonomy. I’m childless by choice, what would my life look like if that choice was taken away from me.
Midnight New (Alex)
The intent of this track lyrically is to evoke a sense of loneliness and yearning, particularly in the early hours of the morning, commuting or quietly navigating the house in the dark. I feel that often in these situations, I’ll have an epiphany of sorts and make plans to completely reinvent myself in some capacity. As the sun comes up, plans dissolve into the monotony of life.
Insect (Malia)
I had a cat called Cash. He was hard to live with, stinky and spiky and murderous. He was tiny and wild and uncontainable. We called him Cashew for short. He would disappear sometimes for days and we would wonder if he would one day disappear forever. But I found him straight away that morning, draped across the pavement. I had to wait for a car to pass between us before I could reach him. Did they see him as they sped past, one of the many insects crushed on the road, drawn to the light, to the furnace. How long did he lie there in a halo of streetlight, just outside the cemetery gates? He had jaws that bit and teeth that caught – an insect, like me.
Like so many songs on this album I am exploring our mortality, the fragility of humanity and the fear but growing acceptance of a looming apocalypse. A certain type may end and a new world emerge, that may or may not include us, but still includes beauty and growth. This is a song of hope, not despair, and it’s my favourite song on the album.
More a Curse (Malia)
We used to be wild and frail, dying all the time, everyday, easily. Mortality was apparent, everywhere. Despite the immense dangers of childbirth, families were flocklike, compensating for the high chances of death, disaster. We rolled the dice regardless, back when our odds were such that a life for a life was still a fair exchange.
There is this denial in our thinking which lets us feel to the most part that we have mortality at bay. We do not expect the randomness of death of some generations and societies. It is almost an arrogance against death. But still, for every way we reduce the odds, for each medical innovation, technological invention, scientific breakthrough, there is a new demon waiting to bare its fangs. The huge randomness of the odds are incalculable. We think our needs are relevant inside this tornado, this spectre of destruction. How slow is the adjustment, to where we accept it’s not just a cold?
Deserter (Malia)
I learned to like leaving things. It started when I had to break up with a friend and afterwards I felt surprisingly good. It was exhilarating and cathartic, I felt powerful and in control of my destiny, I didn’t need to spend time with someone anymore just because I always had. It felt like I was finally taking destiny into my own hands, taking control of my time, learning to say no. I was also thinking about feelings of control in intimate relationships and how much I was seeing people regardless of gender, not able to successfully leave damaging relationships because the one being left would not relinquish their control, would use all the tools in their arsenal to force the other back. She’s allowed to leave, he, they are allowed to leave.
The Wardrobe (Malia)
This was a dream I had. It was so vivid that I had to write it all down the moment I woke. Elements seemed based on things I’d lived, but twisted somehow as dreams do. When Alex showed me his ideas for the song and said he could see me kind of speaking a story over it, I knew this was the story. Later I realised that while this spoke to my life events it also spoke to stories I’d read of escaping through portals to other worlds. The way our dreams are portals to other words. It is called The Wardrobe in homage to two things, The Gift by Velvet Underground, and The Lion the Witch and The Wardrobe. In that book the wardrobe is a portal to another strange land, as dreams are. The structure of the song and the way it’s a story unfolding felt reminiscent of The Gift and that is the song I had in mind when choosing the narrative and flow of the lyrics for this song.
Collapse (Alex)
This track is about the struggle of letting someone go, knowing that a lifetime of moments you share will eventually fade to nothing, as everything does. It also touches on how heartbreaking it can be to understand significant loss on a personal level for the first time in your life.
Insect National Tour
Tickets from linktr.ee/placementnoisemusic
Thu June 26 – Grace Darling, Naarm / Melbourne VIC
Fri June 27 – Crown & Anchor, Tarntanya / Adelaide SA
Fri July 11 – Fun Time Pony, Kanbarra / Canberra ACT
Sat July 12 – Dicey’s, Wollyunga / Wollongong NSW
Sun July 13 – King St Crawl, Gadigal / Sydney NSW
Friday July 18 – Crown & Anchor, Tarntanya / Adelaide SA (supporting Press Club)
Saturday August 2 – The Gov, Tarntanya / Adelaide SA (supporting The Preatures)
Friday August 8 – Corner Hotel, Naarm / Melbourne VIC (supporting Press Club)
Insect from Placement is out now – grab a copy HERE. Keep up to date with Placement via Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and Spotify
Header image credit: Kathryn Harvy
