The video for “Same Old Haunts” was shot on a runway at Melbourne Airport, the kind of location you only get away with once. “Shooting on the runway felt really apropos, it’s the perfect backdrop for a song about relocation, escapism, and our search for meaning,” says Adam Boo Rad Lee, who fronts the Melbourne band Racoonhead. “It would have been ironic if they’d deported me for trespassing.” Nobody deported him. He did, by his own account, come away worse for it: “I never realised how dusty runways are and I had an asthma attack.”
The single is out now, the second pulled from “Long Live Our Apartment Complex“, the band’s third album, due 1 July. James Paul filmed the video. Oliver Wright mixed the track, which is worth noting given Racoonhead’s standing joke about their lo-fi years, that the songs “sound a lot better when you hire a mix engineer.”
Racoonhead started in Singapore around 2017, assembled by Adam out of a rotating cast pulled from local cult bands like Forests, Two Seas and Long Live The Empire. Their self-titled EP landed that year on Chillwavve Records, and the band describe it with more honesty than most acts allow themselves, as “a bit like each of those aforementioned bands but more annoying, because there’s more Adam.”
In 2020 the project found new life in a shoebox Melbourne apartment, where a transplanted and jaded Adam recorded “Songs I Managed To Salvage From My Macbook That Caught Fire” on whatever equipment he had to hand. The follow-up, “Racoon For A Dream”, arrived in 2021 on the Japanese label Nothing Feels Real, carrying songs called “I Can’t F*ing Skate” and “You Drive Like An Ahole”, and the band ran a stretch of sold-out shows in Singapore and Japan behind it before going quiet.
Now they are back as a two-piece, Adam on vocals and guitar and Sam on drums, and “Same Old Haunts” sits at the centre of that return. The band tag their own sound emo-pestcore. The reference points Adam offers are earlier: early Title Fight, Sunny Day Real Estate, Alkaline Trio.
The song works as the counterweight to a life spent in transit. “I’m a restless person by nature. Since I was little, something about the nomadic lifestyle has always beckoned me, hopping from place to place, living in new cities, then packing up and doing it all over again,” Adam says. “On some level I’ve been searching for something missing. I don’t even know what it is. I always figured I’d know it when I see it.” Against all that motion, the track pulls the other way: “This song is me reminding myself to slow down. To take time to just be with what’s right in front of me. That tension between running and staying still, sentimentality and motion, fight or flight.” He also calls it, “low-key a love letter to travelling,” and the contradiction between the two readings is the point.
That tension has a home address. “Melbourne has one of the highest rates of immigration in the world. It’s a city full of people who’ve uprooted everything in search of something more. I’m one of them,” Adam says, which is what makes the runway a fitting place to film a song threaded through with relocation, escapism and the Asian diaspora. The words circle travel imagery, red-eye budget flights and sandcastles the tide will take back, with a refrain about the same old haunts that keeps coming round like a place you can’t stop landing in.
“Long Live Our Apartment Complex” was written and recorded over the winter of 2025. The band pitch it, again straight-faced, as “an equally disappointing collection of songs, challenging what modern emo-punk can sound like.”
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