After three EPs, countless shows and a much-needed reset, Naarm indie favourites The Velvet Club have arrived at a huge milestone with the release of their debut album, Are You Falling In Love?
Across its ten tracks, the record captures a band leaning back into the raw, immediate joy of 2000s indie-rock — think The Strokes, The Vaccines, The Libertines, The Kooks, The Drums and The Smiths; while turning that nostalgia into something deeply personal. Written through the aftermath of a long-term relationship, alongside frontman AJ Tilyard’s experiences with anxiety, depression, OCD, therapy and medication, *Are You Falling In Love?* moves between heartbreak, friendship, solitude and self-reckoning, all wrapped in jangly guitars, punchy hooks and the live-wire energy The Velvet Club have built their name on.
The album also marks the band’s return to creative joy after a burnout-induced hiatus, with AJ joined by Tom Otten, Sam McRae, Lachlan McDowell and Andrew Dooris. Co-produced and engineered by Luke Thomas at Taste Police in Brunswick, mixed by Scott Hoorscroft and mastered by George Georgiadis, the record feels like a band reconnecting with itself — and with the community around it.
The Velvet Club are heading out on tour in August, and will be hitting Sydney, Brisbane, Perth and Melbourne. All the dates are below – so get along if you can and support live music.
To celebrate the release, The Velvet Club have given the AU review a track-by-track breakdown of Are You Falling In Love?, taking us inside the demos, studio moments, breakup reflections and sonic touchstones that shaped the album.
Listen to Are You Falling In Love? below, and read the full track-by-track from The Velvet Club.
The Velvet Club – Are You Falling in Love? – Track by Track
“Are You Falling In Love?”
“Are You Falling In Love?” is heavily inspired by early-to-mid 2000s UK indie bands like The Vaccines, The Libertines and The Kooks. I really wanted to write a track to start the album that was short, fast and punchy. I really feel like this song sets the scene for the rest of the album with its catchy, repetitive melodies.
I found myself rediscovering my love for these prominent indie bands of the past during the album writing process, and I think I really allowed myself to write and express myself more closely to the bands that inspired me so much when I first started making music.
When we were recording this song, we only tracked each instrument and the vocals three or four times max, as we wanted to keep the live feeling the song demanded and not take away from the energy it had when we played it together live in a room.
“Blue”
“Blue” is about the comforting feeling of your friends being there for you in a time when you aren’t feeling the best. I guess the overarching theme of the song is pondering if the love from your friends is enough to shift your overall mood, and trying to enjoy the moments of happiness with your friends even when you’re feeling down.
“Blue” was written at a time when I was going through a big breakup, but at the same time feeling so much love from my closest friends. The song came together so quickly, just playing guitar in my room and singing how I was feeling at the time. It’s a super simple song, but I think that’s what makes it.
“We Don’t Talk”
“We Don’t Talk” was one of the last songs written to make the cut for our debut album. Reflecting on a big breakup I was going through at the time, the song came together really quickly, almost fully formed as it is on the record, with the lyrics barely being changed since the initial demo I made.
I wrote this in Andrew’s house when he was away touring Europe with his other band. He had given me a key to use his home studio for a week to try and finish off some songs before we started album tracking when he got back. I don’t think I even finished any of the songs I was supposed to be working on, but this song came out instead. He had one of those vintage department store guitars in there, and as soon as I started playing around on it for this song, it immediately took it to The Smiths influence with that chorus-drowned Johnny Marr-style lead guitar line.
Although it was just before tracking for the album started, and we had to decide on 12-ish songs from about 50 to be in the running for the album, I think this one really shaped a lot of the decisions. It really set the tone for the rest of the album to me. I think it takes us in a slightly new direction or space in the indie-rock world, while still holding down the familiar driving rhythm and ferocity that we have made a main focus in our band over the years.
Lyrically, “We Don’t Talk” is probably one of the more self-reflective songs on the record. Focusing on the moments during and shortly after a big breakup, where you can find yourself quite lost and reflecting on life before and after the moment of separation. I was in the middle of writing for this record when I went through a big breakup, so that feeling of being lost was overwhelming and definitely leaked into every part of my life, including writing this record.
Although most of this record is about that time of my life, this song in particular really captures the crux of it all to me. It’s a little bit angry in its tone, but still self-reflective and sincere. Co-produced and engineered by Luke Thomas, I feel like he was really able to get the emotion out of me during the recording of the vocals on this track in the studio.
“Turn My Way”
“Turn My Way” is one of the more lyric-heavy songs on the record. Luke really challenged me to put as much emotion into the vocal take as I could, as the song really relies on the lyrics and the feeling in the vocal take to get it to the big instrumental jam in the outro.
We really played with the structure and parts of this song a lot in the studio compared to some of the other tracks on the album. Sam decided to come in with the drums after the first vocal line, which added heaps to the intro and feeling of the song from the start. We added the false ending before the big chaotic outro to really accentuate the layers of guitars and delay swirling around. I feel like we really allowed ourselves to play around with this song as much as we could.
“I Need Something Too”
This song was kind of a turning point in writing the album for me. It came together maybe halfway through the process, and I feel like it opened up some avenues for other songs and styles of writing I haven’t experimented with much in the past.
I was listening to a lot of Clairo and sort of realised that a lot of her structures and songwriting are pretty consistent with a lot of the bands I admire from the early 2000s. The repetitive melody singing “I need something too”, moving with the chord progression, really captures this influence I think — especially in the outro section with the guitar riff.
I love how angular and jagged this song feels, with the guitar through the verses sounding like something from an Interpol or Bloc Party record. I really love the use of that angular sound in the verses before it opens up in the choruses with the synths.
I knew I wanted a bunch of really wobbly, chorus synths underneath this song. I did a day with Andrew in The Jungle Giants’ studio where he basically filtered through all of their synths showing me options. I feel so lucky to have been able to play with the multiple amazing synths they have in their studio, and to have that session with Andrew, because it really brought my vision for this song to life. I don’t own a single synth, so it definitely wouldn’t have been possible without him.
This song also really levelled up in the studio with Luke. He nailed the drum machine sample as the intro for the song and really added so many great textures throughout. He showed us a bunch of ’60s soul tracks that had some really simple but effective drum fills, particularly a bunch of Aretha Franklin songs that use these super subtle fills in instrumental parts, which we threw in throughout the song.
Lyrically, the song sort of encapsulates my headspace during writing this record in my personal life. I had kind of reached breaking point with pushing through or ignoring my mental health, particularly my struggles with OCD. I just felt like I needed something outside of myself to ease the struggles I was having.
“Alone”
“Alone” was one of the first songs I wrote for the album in early 2025, along with “Anything” and “Blue”. I’d been going through the beginnings of a breakup and at the same time coming to terms with my mental health, and started seeing a therapist and taking medication. It was an extremely transitional period in my life, and at the same time I was trying to write for this album.
Lyrically, “Alone” is kind of like a diary entry for me from that period of my life. At the time, I really just felt like I needed to be alone for a minute to assess all of the chaos going on in my life and gain some sort of control over my feelings or the experiences I was facing. I guess it’s like the breaking point of overwhelm, and feeling like you’re not capable of pushing through when there are so many avenues of life that seem to be falling apart at the one time.
Musically, I was listening back through a lot of The Smiths and The Drums at the time. The intro was very inspired by The Drums, with the downstroke guitar and single-note synth melody. That’s something I consciously really wanted to bring into The Velvet Club’s sound for this record that we haven’t really used before.
I absolutely love the bridge in this song. We have been playing it live for a while now, and even without anyone knowing the song, it seems to really lift a crowd. I love those moments at shows when the song sort of naturally falls apart and then builds back up piece by piece through its energy.
This song was also in contention for opening track, but after writing “Are You Falling In Love?” I felt that “Alone” was the perfect start to side B of the record.
“Anything”
The first song we released from the album in late 2025. The opening guitar riff is actually the stem from my original demo that I recorded in my room in early 2025. We tried to re-record it in the studio, but nothing seemed to hold the same feeling as the original demo did. Actually, a lot of the guitars on this song are exported straight from the original demo.
This song was one of the first I had finished in the initial batch of writing sessions for the album, and it is probably the song that got the band most excited to dive into the album-making process. At this stage, there were only three or four songs, and we felt this one had all of the elements of what we were trying to achieve in the tone of nostalgia and making the music that we wanted to hear.
“Overdue”
“Overdue” actually started as a little loop of the intro guitars that Tom sent me to try to write a song around. Instantly, I loved it and it felt a lot rockier and angsty than the more slacker-indie songs I was writing at the time. I started with the chorus melody and words after adding a few chord progressions to Tom’s loop, and it kind of demanded the reverb/delay-drowned vocals, which I hadn’t really committed to on a song before this.
The song to me feels the most like a live jam of our band on the record. It was probably the song that was the most open in collaborating in the studio, and really evolved a lot from the original demo.
Lyrically, it touches on the breakdown of a relationship and the realisation that it’s too late to fix any of the issues that have caused the “overdue” breakup.
“Wasted Space”
“Wasted Space” is another song that started out as a loop of the intro guitars that Tom sent me during the writing period to try to spark a song. I loved this one as soon as Tom sent it to me. It sounded so different to anything we’ve released before, and I love the way it sits on the record, with songs like “We Don’t Talk” being a more indie-dance side to the band rather than rock’n’roll driven. To me, it blends influences of dark ’80s rock like The Cure and The Smiths with current indie bands like Highschool and bdrmm.
This song was the last to get tracked for the album, and we literally finished it with a second to spare. It was one of those songs that I feel like we were so focused on finishing that we didn’t really appreciate it until it was done. Now it’s one of our favourites, and I’m so glad we persisted with it.
“Easy To Love”
This was actually also one of the first demos I made for the album. A lot of the other demos I made with this sort of vibe didn’t last very long when it came to choosing which demos to track for the record, but for some reason this one held on. The song almost completely consists of those demo files from the day I recorded it. We re-did the drums with Sam playing and added a better main vocal take, but everything else is from the demo I made in early 2025.
The demo was a little more lo-fi, although we tried to keep that aspect of the song alive in the real recording. I think each guitar part holds so much emotion, as it was literally only a few takes of each guitar, and I just kept them even if there are minor mistakes throughout.
I added the Mellotron on top of the demo during a session at The Jungle Giants’ studio. It was pretty hard to not include it in the song once I had heard it in there. I’ve always wanted to use one on a song and this felt like the perfect time.
Recording the vocals with Luke was a really special moment in the album recording process. It was just myself and Luke at his studio in Brunswick, and I had been sick for a couple of weeks and pushed back a bunch of recording dates. I had been working two jobs constantly to make up for the time off sick leading up to the session, and on the day I had to push it back later at night after work to get it done.
I was so exhausted when we started, and I kind of think I can hear that in the recording. I think being in that state was almost super reflective of the song, and almost a perfect storm to get a really emotive take. We were so stoked listening back to it at like midnight.
As soon as we finished this song, I felt like it had to be the closing track to the album. Especially with the final lines of the song being, “I don’t want to sing anymore.”
The Velvet Club – Are You Falling In Love? Album Tour
With special guests Pureé & Ghost Care *
7th August – Marrickville Bowlo, Sydney
8th August – Black Bear Lodge, Brisbane
14th August – Rosemount Hotel, Perth *
21st August – Howler, Melbourne
Tickets HERE for all shows
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Header image credit: Nikola Jokanovic
