For Melbourne’s four-piece, Kandalini, their debut self-titled EP is less about perfecting a sound and more about embodying the raw, ever-changing realities that have shaped their lives over the years. The result is an EP that feels alive—torn between the past and future, the personal and political.
Through the five tracks, they rip through genres with reckless abandon, pulling in everything from punk and grunge to stoner rock and desert blues.
“We are so proud of where the songs have ended up and feel that they are a perfect picture of where we started, and strong indications of what else we have coming,” guitarist and vocalist Dale Mamo admits.
His words are telling. These tracks have lived through tumultuous years of personal and global upheaval, carrying the weight of relationships, ideological shifts, and the bittersweet realities of growing older in a world that often feels indifferent.
For those eager to dive deeper into Kandalini’s world, the band has provided an exclusive track-by-track commentary, detailing the stories and ideas behind each song.
Scroll down to read their insights and find out more about what makes this EP a true reflection of who they are, where they’ve been, and what’s next on the horizon.
Nectarine
It was our first ever song! I think. It’s this or what we call ‘Cunt Cunt’, which we’ll be putting out pretty soon too. ‘Nectarine’ is just a fun guitar song, the lyrics are pointless, I hate saying baby so much in it, it’s not a word I use often, and I definitely don’t have the kind of sexy machismo needed to pull it off in song. It was absolutely impossible for me to change that and so there it is in all of its glory.
I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of playing this song so I hope it’s as fun to listen to as it is to play, I think I would have been 16 or 17 when I wrote it and it’s barely changed since then. If that’s entirely true then this is an old, old song. I think I was just playing around with that kind of bass cliché riff in my head once and thought well that could easily be a punk lick, I’ve played it so much now I associate it more with our song than the cliché, so I don’t even know if it’s hacky anymore.
Wire Mother
The riff came out of habit after listening to too much Nirvana, it was never meant to be a song, I still don’t really like playing that riff. I play all of our songs just instrumentally at home all the time, just on an acoustic guitar, but I pretty much never play ‘Wire Mother’. I do absolutely love playing it with the band though and it’s an absolute highlight of our live shows usually.
The name was inspired by the Vsauce video “Why Do We Kiss?”, where along it’s classic meandering formula, Michael Stevens talks about the infamous Harry Harlow ‘Wire Mother’ experiment. I drew upon some of the ideas discussed to inform some of the lyrics but I really just pulled whatever words I could hear from the mumblings of vocal melody from one of our early phone recordings of the song. We recorded this and ‘IOTCYM’ at our first session at Hothouse, with the others in a following session, a long, long time after.
It’s OK to Change Your Mind
This is the only song on the EP that wasn’t just written by me in my bedroom as a guitar/riff based song. Scott pulled the bass riff out of his behind one day at practice and we jammed on it really organically and basically jammed out the entire structure of the song including mumbled vocal melodies in one go. Most of the vocal melodies come about that way with lyrics kind’ve pulled from the mumblings after the fact, usually based on a horrible phone recording.
It was written during the lockdown era of the pandemic and so it was thematically inspired by the media circus and vicious polarisation surrounding that period. That kind of thing is obviously ever present, ongoing, and worsening as time presses on. I also drew on my own experiences with bias and prejudice to push the lyrical direction to a more reflective side. I’m extremely proud of the use of the word ‘nevertheless’ in the third verse.
We changed up the guitars we were using on these tracks, Hothouse have a great collection of guitars and basses. I used a Gibson Trini Lopez ES-335, famously used by Dave Grohl in the studio. Since we considered ‘IOKTCYM’ as our ‘Big Me’ it seemed most fitting. Scott used an old Maton Master Sound bass, for a classic but local flavour.
We have a goofy video for this song that we put out with the single, it follows fictional versions of ourselves acting out various scenarios making various decisions, tolerating obnoxious behaviour, and consuming online rhetoric. We had a lot of fun making it and it features our favourite ever Drumtek on High St in Thornbury.
Winter
Our softest cut to date, well, mostly. It has been in the pipeline for a while, I always have been and am still a bit self-conscious about it. If it wasn’t for how keen the rest of the band became of the song then it probably would have been buried, never to see the light of day. Even this version was deemed not worthy by me immediately after tracking, only to be fought for tooth and nail by the rest of the band.
It’s a reflective song about fighting for positivity and optimism in an increasingly bleak world, not only in the obvious big picture stuff but more so in the day to day, frivolous life stuff. It’s a bit cheesy, a bit sappy, but we leaned right into it by experimenting with vocal harmonies and gang vocals. The big rock finish was a sticking point and it was really hard to decide whether or not to include it. I feel like it could do with a radio edit so people can enjoy it without the raucous ending, but we’ll see how it goes I guess.
Alright, Alright
Our magnum opus. We’ve been closing our sets with this song for the last few years and it’s always received the highest praise. We really honed it during the live shows, slimmed it down, and distilled it to what we would consider its purest form. Albeit at just under 7- minutes. We often sandwich a cover section in where the freakout section is after the crescendo, with my favourites being the solo from Epic by Faith No More, and more recently, Don’t Fear the Reaper by Blue Oyster Cult. Who knows where we’ll take it next.
It came about in a really weird way, I felt I didn’t have any more songs in me, I never had really consciously written songs, they normally just pour out of me at the right time. So I decided to try writing a song intentionally as an exercise, with no pressure on myself that it had to be any good, just something to see if I could. The opening riff came out of that, and then I slowly worked on it, adding parts and forming the structure.
The quiet bouncy riff section after the solo originally sounded like a blatant rip-off of No One Knows by QOTSA, a big faux pas in my eyes since the rest of the song is already a bit on the nose, and though it’s a brilliant song, done to death and I always skip it on that album. The bounce came to after working out how to differentiate it and now it’s a very iconic Kandalini moment, and always a highlight for me when we nail it live.
I think lyrically it’s quite abstract and I’m really excited to see how it’s interpreted by listeners, but it evokes feelings of helplessness, apathy, frustration, and retribution. Adam’s solo is one take, and it was the first take.
