bly”, and mortality raises its head time and
again on the album. “My grandmother died
a pretty gross, horrifi c old lady death, I saw
people die in the shitty neighbourhood I
grew up in, surrounded by death,” he ex-
plains. “My obsession with it is lifelong:
mortality and the shortness of life.”
In a practical sense, this obsession has
become one of his primary motivations –
“We’re all gonna die, I want to make sure I
spend the time on this earth being the very
best I can” – but in an artistic sense, it fuels
some of the album’s most poignant mo-
ments. Case in point is “Persevere”, in which
Le’aupepe recounts in heartbreaking detail
the passing of his best friend’s baby, before
exploring notions of faith via a conversation
he had with the child’s father, a deeply com-
mitted Christian (who, incidentally, plays
keys on the song). “I visited her grave about
a year after she died, and I had a lot of ques-
tions,” says Le’aupepe. “I had all these philo-
sophical quandaries regarding baby death.
That’s the one thing that keeps me from be-
lieving in God, is why babies die, why ba-
bies get cancer. It’s sheer fucking absurdity.”
In “Do Not Let Your Spirit Wane”,
Le’aupepe recounts a recurring dream in
which his imaginary wife and child are
killed in a car accident while he’s at home,
drunk in the basement. It’s not, he believes,
a harbinger of heartbreak to come, but rath-
er his self-conscious “trying to tell me not
to take the beautiful, transient things in my
life for granted. Don’t fuckin’ waste my life.”
His failed marriage is addressed in “Keep
MeIntheOpen”,while“TheHeartIsaleasing the record... That fucking album,
dude, The Positions,” he sighs. “I thought I’d
never make anything again after that.”
As winter 2015 became spring, he was
fl irting with the idea of giving it all away,
concerned his identity was so closely tied
up with the band’s he didn’t know who he
was anymore. Worse, he had nothing left
to say; he didn’t “fucking mean anything”.
(In paying tribute to Soundgarden vocal-
ist Chris Cornell upon his passing in May,
Le’aupepe took to social media to reveal
that Cornell’s encouragement during their
solo tour together in 2015 went some way to
convincing him to stick with it.) In one year
Le’aupepe managed to write only two songs- “Fear and Trembling”, which opens the
band’s second album, Go Farther In Light-
ness (out August 18th), and “The Deepest
Sighs, the Frankest Shadows”, which bass-
ist Dunn refers to as “one of the spiritual
centres of the record”.
By mid-2016, with nothing to say and
no songs with which to say it, Le’aupepe
booked studio time for Gang of Youths to
start recording the follow-up to The Posi-
tions, hopeful that the deadline would kick-
start his creativity. It worked. “I just wrote
as we were going,” he says. “I like the pres-
sure.”
The majority of the album was written
in Los Angeles over a two-month period in
September and October last year, and re-
corded largely in Sony’s Sydney studios be-
tween October 2016 and January this year.
“I found a lot of shit to say,” says Le’aupepe.
“Probably too much.”
If The Positions is an album about “cling-
ing to love and trying to fi ght impossible
odds”, Go Farther In Lightness is unequiv-
ocally a record about life and living; about
overcoming fear and embracing everything
that comes with being a human with a fi nite
amount of time on this earth. It’s an album
of intense searching and questioning, par-
ticularly around the concepts of faith and
religion. It’s also one of the boldest state-
ments ever made by an Australian artist, a
case study of a man searching for healing
after the tumult that surrounded the cre-
ation of The Positions.
A concept album in which Le’aupepe is
“trying to document my period out of the
cancer album and into... newfound adult-
ness”, it’s broken up into four musical move-
ments. Each is separated by an orchestral
interlude named after the psychoanalytic
concepts of French psychoanalyst and psy-
chiatrist Jacques Lacan, with whose works
Le’aupepe is infatuated: “L’imaginaire”, “Le
Symbolique” and “La Réel”. Le’aupepe had
wanted to execute a similar idea on The Po-
sitions, but didn’t want the events of that
album to be represented chronologically so
decided against it.
The fi rst quarter of the record sets in play
the themes and recurring motifs of the LP,
with opener “Fear and Trembling” focus-
ing on “issues of mortality, issues of reject-
ing the faith of my childhood in order to try
and fi nd something more substantial and
life affi rming”.
Le’aupepe has been obsessed with death
“since the first moment of sentience proba-September, 2017 RollingStoneAus.com | Rolling Stone | 49GETTY
HANDS ALL OVER
Le’aupepe at one
with the people,
Falls Festival, 2016