Ahead of the release of the band’s debut album Won The Battle Lost The War (May 24th), we’re pleased to be premiere Sydney group Indian Pacific‘s new single ‘Seabird’, out across streaming services tomorrow.

Formed in 2018, Indian Pacific is the musical vehicle for the restless creative mind of songwriter, musician and producer Charlie Wells. Born and bred in Perth, Wells has spent most of his adult life living on the East Coast of Australia. From the Indian Ocean to the Pacific Ocean…. Indian Pacific.

Wells’s last band Hunting Party wound up in 2008 and though at the time he had no plans to continue playing in a band, his creative impulses had other ideas and over the ensuing decade Wells built up a prolific cache of songs and comprehensive demos.

Finally Wells realised “I was writing so many songs I just thought I may as well form a band” and he began to recruit players to bring his songs to life in the rehearsal room and eventually the recording studio.

The band’s first single from the new album was the Wilco-esque ‘Mallee Country‘ and now they create a different mood with the atmospheric ‘Seabird’.

Circling around an acoustic strum, the plaintiff strains of Wells’s voice echoes the sense of nostalgia the song explores and evokes, before it takes flight with its dreamy chorus and a winding electric guitar solo. There’s a cosmic alt-country and folk-rock sound running through the song, blending effortlessly with indie rock influences from across the past couple of decades. Like Grant Lee Buffalo and The Church on a WA coastal highway.

“The song was written about the innocence of childhood and memories of going to my uncle Jim’s beach shack at Seabird on the WA Coast,” says Wells. “I used to go there for holidays when I was a kid. It was very isolated, a typical self-built fibro beach shack. The kind of place that working class families could afford years ago.”