The Nation Blue Aren't Planning On Getting Bruised Touring 'Black & Blue'

For a band that hasn't released material for almost a decade, Melbourne via Tasmania punk rock stalwarts The Nation Blue seem keen to make up for lost time. Why else would the three-piece bust out not one, but two, standalone albums, virtually in one go? To an outsider it's a brash move with a hint of desperation from a group looking to restate their worth.

With the three members busy with their own projects, including High Tension, Harmony, Adalita's band and King Cannons, since their unofficial hiatus in 2009, proving a point definitely wasn't the case. If anything, singer Tom Lyngcoln insists Nation Blue's drift back to the studio had the boys on the same odd footing they left off on.

"It was kind of like 'well I don't really want to see you two' and then it was like a midlife crisis where you buy a motorbike and you don't stay in your lane," Lyngcoln laughs. "I guess it was just something that we were doing continuously for so many years and then when you stop and take a break away from it, it actually seems a little bit insane in retrospect."

"We found that both sessions kind of slid together reasonably well and then from there we found the lyrical content had a divide."

That insanity included recording Black and Blue in the Mechanics Institute in Kyneton and Lyngcoln initially deciding to helm production duties. Realising that his engineering skills weren't quite up to the task, the boys brought in friend and producer Mike Deslandes. Despite tackling the "eternal" reverb the stoic space offered during recording, the process was productive, yielding 29 songs across two sessions with about a year apart for Lyngcoln to start his family. Such happy events created some of the more personal moments on Blue, but Black remained political.

"We found that both sessions kind of slid together reasonably well and then from there we found the lyrical content had a divide," he explains. "There was the political kind of darker social commentary for Black and the more personal stuff for Blue - things like fatherhood and mates that we've lost."

With expectations of a new wave of punters at shows for their impending national tour, along with a scattering of familiar old faces, Lyngcoln says the pressure is off the band to relive those, literally, painful glory days of their youth. Lucky too, as according to him "there's nothing sadder than seeing a 40-year-old man trying to climb a PA stack". But when talk turns to the future, the singer is less certain.

"I would say that just due to how much life we're packing in these days, it won't be how we used to do it," Lyngcoln reasons. "Dan's playing in a thousand bands, so's Matt, so am I. It just comes down to literally a calendar on a computer. It will definitely say something about CTE and concussion and how focused a person with substantial brain trauma can be and function."