Intercooler: Air Forced One.

Intercooler play the B Lounge on Thursday.

For those not obsessive about the goings on under the bonnet of their car, an intercooler is part of a turbocharger. It reduces the temperature of the air being forced into an engine to make it run more efficiently, and hence produce more power. If you’ve been fortunate enough to catch the local quartet of the same name live on stage, you’ll have noted they seem to have no problems producing vast quantities of sonic horsepower themselves.

Since their inception back in 1993, the band have been developing a sound to aspire too. In 1996 the band released their debut EP, and in coming months we’re set to see it’s follow up, as guitarist Michael explains.

“At the moment our plans have slightly changed at the moment because we’ve got the album almost ready to go, but I think we’re going to do a single first now. Probably in about two months, we’re going to have it out I hope, we’re just doing things like finishing off the artwork at the moment. The album release will be done some time after that.”

The recordings have been in the bag for a while now, and the band have been continuing to put more material together in the interim.

“We’ve been finished for two months or three months now. It’s all done, it’s been mastered. We’re really happy with the finished result. Almost all of it was done with Jeff Lovejoy (who also worked on the band’s first release). There’s one track on the album that we did somewhere else, but it was mixed by Jeff. It was done all over the place, Rockinghorse, Red Zedz and at Black Box, which is like Magoo’s portable studio. We did the vocals in his bathroom. One of the tracks even goes back to some sessions that we did just after the first EP.”

Considering the amount of time that’s passed since the recording of their debut and the current release, it’s not surprising that they’re different musical beasts.

“It’s a lot rockier, and there’s a bit more diversity,” he explains. “We’ve got a few more mellower songs now, there’s a bit of variety on it now. It’s a pretty broad spectrum of where we’ve been and it has been over a fairly long period of time.”

“There’s nothing set in stone just yet, but we’re heading to Sydney and Melbourne to hook up with people we’ve played with before, just letting people know that we’re around. We’ve been down there two or three times before, but because it’s been such a long time it’s kind of like starting from scratch.”

There was a period where Intercooler were very quiet.

“We did almost disappear for a while. We were always writing and practicing. Joel, our bass player went over to Europe for a year, so while the band was kind of on hold we were still practicing, and we changed drummers. I wouldn’t say we stopped, just more scaled down for a bit. But we’re back. We’re powering.”