Somewhere over a pitch-black ocean, Adam Boo Rad Lee pressed his face to the window of an overnight flight and watched the stars until he stopped shaking.
He was flying home from a trip that had gone wrong, a motorbike accident had left him rattled, and the panic attack arrived without warning. The line that came out of that night, “watching the stars from a red-eye budget plane,” ended up on the closing song of Racoonhead’s third album. The following week he was booking another flight.
“That’s the tension the song lives in,” Adam says. “A love letter and a complaint, addressed to the same addiction.”
“Same Old Haunts” closes “Long Live Our Apartment Complex,” the Melbourne band’s third record, out July 1 and on preorder now via Bandcamp. Racoonhead premiered the video for the single earlier this month, shot on a runway at Melbourne Airport. The companion piece to that song is the album itself, and Adam wrote “Same Old Haunts” last, by his own account the one he’d been building toward the whole time without knowing it.
“It came out fast,” he says. “By that point, I knew what I was trying to say.”
The song circles restlessness as a condition rather than a phase. “Restless heart, please stay still,” the chorus goes, a request the song can’t quite get the singer to honour. Adam moved to Australia three years ago, a long-held dream that delivered exactly what dreams promise and then some of what they don’t. “To live somewhere so beautiful and completely different from where I grew up was really a blessing,” he says. “But you find that being in a new place with rose-tinted glasses and actually living there are two separate things. You get used to things that were once novel and beautiful. Over time, I found myself yearning to be somewhere new again.”
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The question that runs under the whole song, he says, is whether he’ll ever find home anywhere. The answer is “less a resolution than a reminder: appreciate what’s in front of you.”
The second verse turns inward. “Plastic wrap my heart, save it in a wooden box” is Adam’s way of acknowledging that wherever he moves to, “a part of me will always have roots tied to where I’ve grown up, and where my friends and family are.” “Will the waves erase sandcastles we made” is the next worry in sequence, whether home will still be there if he tries to go back, or whether he’s “closed doors for too long to reopen.” And “all the years surrender, but I can’t seem to remember” is, in his own words, “what it feels like to watch time move at a completely different pace than the people you grew up with and to realise you’ve been slowly forgetting versions of yourself you didn’t mean to leave behind.”
The chorus keeps coming back to the same line, like a place the song can’t stop landing in: “Same old haunts, to die in.” Repetition runs the whole architecture. “Now we’re starting over and over again,” another line goes. The closing image puts it plain: “I still see you, you strike that same pose. I can almost picture it, but that door has closed.”
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For all the weight in the lyrics, the song carries it light, in the lineage of early Title Fight, Sunny Day Real Estate, and Alkaline Trio. Adam sings nasally on parts of the album, what he describes as “my best M. Shadows from A7X impression,” a style Racoonhead have tagged Pest-core. It’s a self-coined inside joke that nods to their other single “Pest,” and it shows up on a few other songs across the record. “I hope the term catches on,” Adam says, dry as ever.
“As cliché as it might sound,” he adds, “Same Old Haunts really felt like a full circle moment for the album.” Despite being written last, it felt like closure, though he is careful about how he phrases it. “It’s actually ironic because while I was writing this song, it felt like I had found some sort of stride in the songwriting and had more to write about for the album. But it also definitely felt like closure.” He hopes listeners can feel both, “that closure but also have a sense of open-endedness as to where this story might go and leave room for their imagination.”
“I think the other songs on the album feel like me figuring stuff out,” he says, “i.e. my experience as an ‘outsider’ in a new country and those experiences. Whereas this song felt like hey, it’s me, I’m here and I’ve finally arrived. And it’s the acceptance and ambiguity that maybe we’ll never figure it out and it’s ok. That’s how life goes.”
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“Long Live Our Apartment Complex” pulls at those same threads across the whole record, what it feels like to move and start over in a new place, and the inane situations that come with it. Adam hopes it gives people back home a window into that life, and gives anyone going through the same thing something they recognise.
“I hope everyone who listens gets something out of it, whether they’ve found home or are still looking. Maybe my next album will come out of Europe or Japan. Who knows.”
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