Q&A with Australian band Ojay

We got to chat with pop-rock band Ojay following the release of their latest release titled “December Snow”.

How did you all meet and decide to startOjay?

Sully and I (Condo) had been playing in separate bands all around Perth since we were like 10, and we always shared the stage with each other. At one point he was in a band with one of my band members, and I was in a band with one of his band members, so we just naturally started jamming together. By the time we were about 15 or 16 we had a band together called Peppermoth, and we just started writing a bunch of songs. A couple of lineup changes and a name change later, we had a band calledOjayand an album called Peppermoth – which we recorded, mixed and mastered in about 2 weeks total. We played a bunch of gigs and had a lot of fun for the next year or so before our bassist Fitzy and our drummer Birko decided to pursue other interests.

We spent the next 2-3 years on hiatus writing The Ride, and we didn’t really know what we were going to do about getting two more band members, so Sully swapped over to bass. Skills, a life-long friend of mine and Sully’s ended up jumping on the kit, and we had a lot of fun just jamming and running our new songs. I met Marshy through a mutual friend over a Beef Wellington dinner, turned out he played guitar. Before we knew it we had a full band again and a brand new album, and the rest is history.

How would you describe the music that you typically create?

It’s always super hard to pin it down when we get asked this question. We’re massive fans of the 80s & 90s rock and punk scenes, but we’re also huge fans of the massive variety of talented artists releasing new music today. We had a ukelele song, a piano ballad, and an acoustic driven pop song on our debut album, mixed in with a 200bpm trashy garage punk song. Our latest song was a waltz ballad.

We once put out a headline that said “Imagine Fall Out Boy meets Ed Sheeran meets Matchbox Twenty”, which p***ed a lot of people off, so we might have to say that one again 😉

What would you be doing right now, if it wasn’t for your music career?

We’d probably be homeless buskers.

What’s the story behind your latest track “December Snow”?

December Snow is kind of a wild curveball to what our fans thought our music could be. A four minute romantic ballad, that puts a waltz spin on our signature sound, and touches on a long distance love separated by the world. Lyrically the song touches on a long distance love, shared on opposite ends of the world. One person is experiencing Christmas and the holiday season in snow, and the other in the blistering heat.

If you could go open a show for any artist who would it be?

Probably someone unexpected like Kanye West or Luke Combs.

What is the best advice you’ve been given?

Never give up. I’m a huge sucker for cliches but they’re cliches for a reason. Sully and I have been playing in bands for well over a decade, and had every chance to just give up and pursue something else, but if we did then we wouldn’t be where we are today 🙂

If you could change anything about the industry, what would it be?

Merch cuts at venues and/or artist’s streaming revenue. Artists, and particularly local artists, simply cannot make a living off of album sales alone today. And with the way streaming revenue is, we have to rely on merch sales to be able to sustain ourselves. So to see some venues taking a cut of that is just pathetic in my opinion.

What’s next for you?

We had a pretty active year last year, and we just want to keep that going. We already have some super exciting shows for 2024, and you can definitely expect a tour in the back end of the year. Other than that we’ll just have to wait and see 😉