The Temper Trap Announce 'Conditions' 10th Anniversary Tour & Take Us Track-by-track Through The Album

To celebrate the tenth anniversary of their critically acclaimed debut album, Conditions, Aussie favourites The Temper Trap will embark on a headline tour of the country's east coast this year. 

Starting in December, the four-piece will perform the LP in full at intimate shows in Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney.

Conditions features some of The Temper Trap's biggest hits, including Sweet Disposition (which has racked up over 225 million streams on Spotify alone), Love Lost and Fader.

Frontman Dougy Mandagi sat down with us to go track by track through the entire LP; check it out below. 

Tickets for the Australian dates go on sale from midday local time on Friday 28 June. Click on theGuide or scroll down for more details.

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Reflecting back on his headspace around the time that The Temper Trap's smash debut record Conditions - released on 19 June 2009 - was created, bandleader Dougy Mandagi enthuses, "Everything was exciting. It was all very new and I think we just kind of wrote what felt natural to us; we didn't really overthink anything. We had just learnt how to write pop songs, I guess... Anything that sounded new to us inspired a sense of excitement and we would go straight to the studio to try something out, to try a new pedal out or a new guitar out and, yeah! We were all really eager to write and just go out into the world, share our music, play as many live gigs as we can." The Temper Trap are now three albums deep and, when asked whether he can believe the band's debut album dropped a decade ago, Mandagi marvels, "It's crazy!" 

Love Lost 

"I think we came up with the idea of that song - the sort of clapping, keyboard intro - in Mt Macedon. We kind of set up shop up there, and we brought a whole bunch of instruments, and we were all just staying there and writing. We had been up there for about a week, I think, at Michael Gudinski's beautiful home up in the forest... I don't think any of us had ever stepped foot in a house that nice before, you know, and there's all this historical Aussie rock memorabilia everywhere, you know what I mean? Photos of Gudinski with Madonna and 50 Cent and Billy Joel, and things like that - haha, you know what I mean? There would have been some legendary stories that took place in there."

Rest

"Actually, come to think of it, that song may have been one of the older songs in the repertoire, for sure. Something anecdotal that I remember is that was the song that kind of perked the ears of the A&R in the label that we're signed to - we're actually still with Liberation - and we played a little show in Melbourne. It may have been at Ding Dong [Lounge]? I can't remember. But that was the first time that the A&R from Liberation came to see us and we may have either opened or closed with that track, I can't remember, but there's one part in the song where I just sing a note for a long time, basically, and I think that was the one that sort of made the A&R from the record label go, 'Oh!' you know, 'There's something here,' and, yeah! I guess the rest is history."

Sweet Disposition 

"It was a hot summer's day in a really crampy, tiny rehearsal room in Melbourne and Toby [Dundas, drums/BVs] and I were just mucking around waiting for Lorenzo [Sillitto], the guitarist, to show up. And I think Jonny [Aherne], our bass player, he was in Mexico at the time or something and so it was just the three of us, and we were pretty much just waiting around for Lorenzo to show up. He finally shows up at the studio and he's got his guitar slung around and he's just practising scales... And that was the famous, you know, guitar line - that's the riff; was just kind of, I guess, a little variation of the scale. But as soon as he played that, I was just instantly drawn to it and I went, 'Woah! What's that?' He kind of just shrugged his shoulders and went, 'I dunno, it's just scales; it's something I'm mucking around with,' and I just said, 'There's something there. That's really good, keep playing that.' So, you know, he just kept on playing that and I got on the bass and we just figured out, the chord progression, based off that riff.

"Toby played that drum part instantly... Everything just flowed really naturally with that song. We basically wrote the whole chord progression, arrangement and all the music that night. I went home, penned down the lyrics. The next day we tried to play the song with vocals and lyrics, and it just came together in two days, really. We all really liked the song. We didn't know that it was gonna be a huge hit, but we all really liked the track straight away. Yeah, something in the air that night."

Down River 

"Jonny wrote that song, actually; our bass player. I think he'd just written it on guitar and each of us contributed whatever we contributed to the song. But that was one of the songs where, haha, he liked this thing called slap dancing - I dunno, it's this funny thing. He was just really into this slap dancing thing where you kind of do this stupid dance and make percussive noises by slapping your hand onto your chest and onto your legs and whatnot. And when we were recording the song, he insisted on trying out this slap-dance thing, you know; he just thought that the song needed another percussive element. And of course everybody's just rolling their eyes back going, 'Oh, dude, what're you doing?' Haha. And that's a funny moment that I remember from recording the song. I think we gave him a chance, you know? We let him carry out his vision. I dunno if it actually made the recording, if it did we probably just turned it right down. If you listen to the track just imagine Jonny with no shirt on and no pants on in the studio, slapping away."

Soldier On 

"I could be wrong, it was a very long time ago, but I think that was another one that came out of Mt Macedon. We liked that song because it's totally different to the other ones, you know, the other songs are kind of dense... And it's just nice to have a song that was quite bare and really relied on the fragility of the vocals and whatnot. 

"Oh, one thing I remember is that I really fought with everyone else when we decided to record that song, 'cause we did a demo - just the band, without a producer, before we decided to record properly - and I always thought that it was just a crappy demo and that one day I'm gonna go into a proper studio and rerecord it and do it the way I like it, you know? I already had an idea in my head of all these things that I wanted to fix. So once we got to a proper studio in London with Jim Abbiss, the producer, I was ready to rerecord that song. But everybody else had a different idea. I basically got into this huge argument about rerecording and they basically let me rerecord the track and we sort of [compared] the [rerecorded] track versus the crappy demo, just to see [which one was better]. And they were right! The crappy demo - there's just something about it, you know? It was a lot more intuitive, I guess I didn't think about it too much and because of that it just had a certain something that the rerecording didn't have." 

Fader 

"Fader is a song that Toby and I did... We thought, 'Let's just try to write a really catchy pop tune,' and Toby and I went into the studio with a little Casiotone keyboard. I think Fader came about pretty naturally, pretty quickly, but then I feel like it was one of the last songs that we wrote for the album. And I think we just wanted to have one more song that was kind of more of a punchy pop tune, you know?" 

Fools

"Fools may have been a Mt Macedon number as well. I think we got about three or four songs out of that trip, which was nice. I mean, we'd just wake up in the morning and head straight for the instruments; there was really nothing else to do out there."

Resurrection 

"I can't think of anything about Resurrection."

Science Of Fear

"I think the best thing about that song, to me - I mean, I really like the track, but the one thing that I remember the most is Jim Abbiss just calling up DJ Shadow and asking him for a little electronic beat to put in - there's, like, a little breakdown in the song that lasts for probably, I dunno, all of ten seconds; it's a DJ Shadow beat. And towards the end, as well, I think there's some kind of electronic glitches and bleeps and whatnot - that's a DJ Shadow contribution as well [laughs]. So I thought that was pretty cool. We're all really into that kinda stuff so it was cool to be able to incorporate that.

"We had never worked with a producer of that calibre before, so it was just cool to see him be able to, you know, pull those kind of favours and have access to other amazing producers and whatnot. I think he'd worked with DJ Shadow in the past - I think maybe Jim Abbiss did a couple of tracks with Unkle or something, I can't remember what the connection was, but, yeah! He just got on the phone and next thing you know..."

Drum Song 

"I remember Drum Song being a bit of a contentious song amongst us in the band, because half of us - I dunno, we obviously all liked it, but half of us were unsure [about putting it on the album]. I mean, it was a bit of a bold move, I guess you could say, to chuck in a full instrumental that's kind of - I don't even know what kind of music you would call that; it's almost a percussive, psychedelic jam-out, you know, next to songs like Soldier On and Sweet Disposition and whatnot. So half of us weren't sure and then half of us were really into the track. I think the people that really wanted the song on the record - I was in that camp, I was all for it - eventually persuaded the others. I'm so glad that we did put that song on the album and it really breaks up the album nicely. And I love playing it live as well, because it means I get a chance to take a breather from singing."