Sometimes it’s worth going back instead of chasing the next New Music Friday blur. When we last caught up with The Finch Cycle in June 2024, Bradley Murray was introducing “Mt. Pilot” through “Diesel Hands” and “Neuro Backpack”, tying neurodiversity, regional Victoria, and his long-running pull toward post-rock into a project that still carried the shape of emo, indie rock, and the slower, sadder stuff he’d been living with since the mid-2000s.
Quite a bit has happened since then, and now there’s a new point of entry: “We Must Be Cautious”, a collaboration with Champion Motorist that came out on November 14, 2025 and still feels worth dragging back into the light.
The setup was simple and slightly reckless in the best way. Three days in a rehearsal space. No demos. No polished pre-production. No one walking in with a finished riff pile and asking the others to color inside the lines. Paul Shea, the drummer in Champion Motorist, says the idea was always to make “a tune that was a true collaboration, rather than a brought in idea in a signature style for others to work around,” comparing the approach to Bowie and Queen building “Under Pressure.”
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While Andrew McLaughlin was getting the recording rig together, Shea and Murray started jamming, feeling each other out, and the whole heavy ending of the song arrived within the first twenty minutes.
That part matters, because “We Must Be Cautious” is built around the decision not to fix the life out of it later. Murray is blunt about that: “100% This was our aim – we wanted to create and capture a moment in time,” tying it back to the very first song he made with Andrew, where the point was a group of people coming together and making something in a single day.
He talks about the fun of it, but also the pressure that comes with having to solve structure in real time, on the spot, before instinct cools off and turns into second-guessing.
You can hear the two projects meeting in different sections rather than fighting over the same one.
The Finch Cycle has usually leaned inward, reflective, tied to atmosphere and place. Champion Motorist, the Naarm/Melbourne instrumental rock duo of McLaughlin and Shea, bring a stronger physical push. Shea says there was no clash to overcome because the collaboration did what that word is supposed to mean: ideas got talked through, then tested by how they sat together in the room.
He hears the split clearly. “The first section of mood building is very Brad, the middle ambient section is very Andrew, and the heavy footed ending is very me.”
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The title sounds heavier than the story behind it, which is probably why it works. Shea says every version of caution was in the room while they were shaping the track — when to push a section, an instrument, an idea — but the actual phrase came from somewhere much less grand. It was one of those lines he’d used before in situations that needed some thought, and also, more simply, something Obi-Wan Kenobi says to a young Skywalker as they approach Mos Eisley Spaceport. That was enough.
The name stuck once the song’s outline had settled and they were taking a break before the final take, talking Star Wars and drifting into the scene that gave the track its title.
For Murray, part of the appeal here is still the room itself, even when the room isn’t especially flattering.
Back in our previous feature, he spoke about wanting to capture spaces, not just performances, whether that meant a converted barn near Hanging Rock or, one day, a full live recording where the room becomes part of the piece.
This time the space was Three Phase Rehearsal Studios, where “We Must Be Cautious” was made over a weekend in July 2025. Not some perfect live room either. A carpeted rehearsal space, loud enough that in the quiet moments they could hear other bands practicing nearby. Murray laughs about the solution: turn everything up and record it loud. In this case, he says, it was less about acoustics than “the time and space of three people coming together to create something unique, in a time-constrained setting.”
That time pressure is not an aesthetic pose. It is adult life doing what it does. Murray is still making instrumental music around work, family, distance, and the limited windows left over after marriages, kids, mortgages, and careers have taken their piece.
He said much the same when “Mt. Pilot” was coming together across Ballarat, Bendigo, and Wangaratta, with drums, trombone, and guitars recorded in stages because getting everyone in one place for long enough was the hard part. That record pulled in Brendan Bartlett on trombone and Michael Evans-Barker on drums, gave “Diesel Hands” its swooning brass and “Neuro Backpack” its dedication to neurodivergent kids, especially those not getting enough support in schools, and turned Murray’s attachment to North-East Victoria into the title and visual identity of “Mt. Pilot”, with its trees, forests, mountains, wineries, and that turn-off sign on the highway he could never stop thinking about.
The difference now is how directly that restricted time shapes the writing. Murray admits that finding time to sit down and construct music is difficult, and when it does arrive, it is often short and frustrating. The job becomes documenting ideas and hoping some of them survive long enough to be shaped into a full song. That kind of restraint changes how you work. There isn’t endless revision, and there doesn’t need to be. “We Must Be Cautious” comes from that headspace: not unfinished, not careless, just uninterested in sanding every mark off the wall.
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There is also the local backdrop, even if neither project sounds especially interested in scene mythology. Murray points out that Melbourne’s post-rock world had its bigger burst in the mid-2000s, around the same period when he was coming out of Sunny Disposition, watching bands like Laura, Because of Ghosts, International Karate, This Is Your Captain Speaking, and Radiant City, and running Wireless Records while managing Radiant City as well. He still sees post-rock as a niche, and is fine with that.
There is, as he puts it, definitely a “vintage” of people who show up for this stuff, the diehards who never really left. But seeing younger people at a recent Caspian show felt encouraging too.
The listening that stuck with them through 2025 says plenty about where both projects are sitting now. Shea singles out Solkyri after catching them at the Birds Robe birthday gigs, drawn in by the range and by a drummer he felt was playing the exact grooves and fills he’d reach for himself. Murray points to Sydney’s Mowgli, who he saw supporting This Will Destroy You in Melbourne, and describes them as a stunning collision of post-hardcore and post-rock. That makes sense in light of what he said back in 2024, when he was already leaning away from tidy genre comfort, talking about syncopation, odd time, chugging guitar parts, and a desire for the music to get darker, more angular, more intense. He was naming Coastlands then; now he is even more explicit that recent obsessions with post-hardcore have him thinking about where that footing can lead next.
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Success, at this stage, sounds refreshingly unheroic. Murray says having people listen at all is rewarding, no matter how many there are. He adds that all three of them love the whole process — jamming, songwriting, recording, production — and that simple pleasure cuts through a lot of the tired language around growth and momentum. These are people who have been around long enough to know the difference between making something because the numbers demand it and making it because spending a weekend in a room with the right people still feels good.
That also makes “We Must Be Cautious” an interesting marker between where The Finch Cycle started and where it might go next.
Murray has said he can hear both bands clearly in it and hopes there is more to come from the partnership. He is already writing toward a second Finch Cycle album and has talked elsewhere about wanting to mess with synth textures and electronic noise, borrowing a friend’s OP-1 and seeing what might happen. At the same time, he sounds less interested in expansion for its own sake than in getting more specific: maybe stripping back, maybe changing course, maybe letting that post-hardcore fixation push deeper into the writing.
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For a track made without “prepped riffs,” it carries a pretty clear division of labor. Murray handles guitar and bass. McLaughlin plays guitar and took care of recording and mixing under the A.M. initials. Shea is on drums.
Champion Motorist remain based in Melbourne, Australia, with McLaughlin and Shea at the core. Murray is still out in Wangaratta, still carrying that mix of regional distance, old emo wiring, post-rock ambition, and the stubborn need to document whatever can still be built in the hours available.
And that is probably why this one holds up months after release. Not because it arrived with huge fanfare, and not because anyone involved seems interested in pretending it changed their lives.
Three people got in a room at Three Phase, kept the tape close to the moment, and let each section belong to the person who had the strongest claim on it. Sometimes that is enough. Sometimes it is better than enough.
“We Must Be Cautious” is out now on Bandcamp and streaming platforms.
