Making a punk record is easy. Just ask anyone. Well, anyone who hasn’t actually ever made one, that is. Behind the three chords and drug-soaked lyrics is a whole lot of hard work, planning and in the case of Dune Rats second album, The Kids Will Know Its Bullshit, and a fair bit of self-reflection since their 2014 self-titled debut. With this method tried and tested, the boys decided the new album is a different beast. They would take their time, write and rewrite, build and pull apart, until the songs felt right … Singer and guitarist Danny Beusa explains:

“With the first album, we still didn’t really know what we were doing as a band musically. We just liked playing music together and smashed out the songs in a month ’cause we hadn’t put out an album yet. So, this time we focused on making an album that was Dunies sound, figuring out that was the funnest thing.

Helping Danny, BC Michaels and Brett Jansch out on Production is their long-time touring friend Zac Carper from LA band FIDLAR. Working with Zac had been thrown around the tour bus for a while and was cemented when Dune Rats joined Fidlar on their North American album tour late 2015. Zac’s progression as an artist and producer between FIDLAR’s first and second albums had definitely inspired Dunies to run at this record in a new way. Recorded at Head Gap in Melbourne, The Kids Will Know It’s Bullshit is the sound of a band working together with their best mate to make rad tunes with hundreds of beers and laughs along the way – a 30 minute anxiety trip of stoner pop.

“FIDLAR were a band that could have been easily typecast, but Zac really raised it; he didn’t alienate the previous audience but opened them up to think “fuck, they’re not just a bunch of dudes who drink beer, and skate and shake and bake” or whatever it is…”

Like their most recent single, the very drug innuendo-laden Scott Green, with the seriously-funny-and-great interactive video clip, which came about after a day in Joshua Tree asking everyone “Who’s Scott Green?”, and getting one of the best possible answers from a guy at a grocery store: “Dude, I survived cancer, I get it delivered to my house, do you wanna come to my house and smoke a bowl and we’ll get you delivered weed?!” Of course after they finally made it back to the studio, it was time to work.

The first taste of this album, Bullshit, had Dunies having to convince Zac was a positive term.

He got insulted for a while coz he was still learning our sense of humour, after their set we’d come and say “That was bullshit”, and it took a few shows before they said ‘Well what was wrong with it’, and we were like “Nah, bullshit good!”.

Other songs aren’t quite as complimentary, but show a deeper thought process than before, as Danny recalls:

Lyrics to us were always second to playing the music. So sitting down and thinking “what’s the song actually saying?” was a big step up. For instance Buzz-Kill is based around Brett’s angry neighbour.. and how he represents a whole bunch of fuckwits who are 45 year old white privileged males, who have their boat (still angry), and they’re cunts to everyone. Coincidentally the timing worked with Trump getting in…. “

BC also recalls the band making one of his songs a bit more fluid:

We’d come up with ideas, stupid songs about nothing and then turning it so it was open to interpretation. Like 6-Pack is about underage drinking but also about broken homes and finding a second family in your friends.

Add to that the mission statement Don’t Talk, the jangly riffs and almost philosophical nihilism of Demolition Derby and Braindead, Never Gonna Get High and Counting Sheep’s sagely advice to their less sensible selves, the reminiscing and Johnny Marr chord shapes of Like Before, and Mary’s hypnotic chord pattern, Im pretty sure Dune Rats have worked out who they are.

Danny sums it all up.
“I think with Dunies the best thing is its all three of us always, there’s no sick song writer, there’s no “I am the lyricist and singer”; we all sing, we all write lyrics, we all do it. The one thing we’ve wanted to be is not be the greatest musicians, we not trying to recreate the wheel, but when there’s a lot of people that are pretty fake or doing it for different reasons, were just doing it so we can keep doing it; playing live shows and being us three doing it genuinely. It’s kind of a weird thing where we finally made the album that we wanted to make, and we just wanna keep touring and being best buds”

The Kids Will Know Its Bullshit was written wherever Dune Rats hung their smoking devices: in various beach shacks along the east coast of Australia, in the middle of Joshua Tree and in a speeding RV along a US highway, and recorded at Head Gap in Melbourne.

And what do the Dune Rats think about their second album?

According to Brett it’s “Fucken sick. Everyone is so stoked that we did it all together.. this big process of us doing all this shit together. It feels like we really accomplished something as a group.”