Sydney punk rockers Born Lion are not afraid of anything. They burst onto the scene with their ARIA-nominated debut album Final Words, and have since supported major rock bands like Royal Blood, Mamozets and Karnivool. With in-your-face guitar riffs and no bullshit lyrics, the four-piece recently conquered their second full length Celebrate The Lie and continue to triumph the Australian music scene.

Now, with their co-headlining tour with Captives quickly arriving, I was fortunate to talk to John Bowker about all things Celebrate The Lie, the immensely interesting music video for single “Drag”, and what it’s like to go on tour with long time friends Captives.

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Your new album is called Celebrate The Lie. Tell me a little bit about fans can expect from this new album.

It’s a deviation of our last record, so it’s still fun. And we definitely tried some different things, there’s some different sounding Born Lion songs but it still sounds like us. On our first record, nothing went longer than 3 minutes and was a straight guitar sound. This time around, we recorded in Adelaide with Jimmy [Balderstone, producer] and he had a shitload of stuff so we spent 2 weeks there and just played with a whole bunch of different stuff. it’s just us mucking around and trying new pedal effects and new equipment that we hadn’t used before.

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Speaking of Jimmy, he’s worked with other great Australian artists like Luca Brasi and Grenadiers. What was it like to work with someone of that calibre?

He’s a bit of a mad genius. He’s gifted at what he does and there was a lot of time where he would take control and say “Okay, you use this guitar with this amplifier and through this pedal and see what happens”. He also likes to do his own thing and work his own hours. He would just turn up and just go until 3 or 4 in the morning. He was just a really cool guy to work with.

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Nice! Did you or any of the other guys have any favourites of the new album or is every song quite special?

The first single “Evil K” is definitely one of my favourites. When I wrote that riff, I was fairly pleased with myself and thought it was pretty good. Our new single “Slowly Sinking”, that’s another one of my favourites as well. It’s more of the old Born Lion elements in it. It’s super heavy and it’s fun and I think that’s why I like that one a lot too.

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So, let’s talk about the first single “Evil K”. It’s such an awesome track, what was so special about this track that made you want to release this as the lead single?

It’s the first song we wrote with our new drummer. Early last year, our original drummer departed so we got in Andres [Hyde, drummer] at the start of writing and that was the first song that we wrote together. “Evil K” has this real special energy about it in the sense that everything was really new and fresh within the band. And that excitement of having someone new to work with is really what we wanted to represent in the first single.

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So, the second single “Drag” is also a great track as well with a very interesting music video. Who came up with the idea for the music video and how hot was it for the other guys to be in those chicken suits?

The idea was a dream our guitarist Red had, whose actually a psychologist believe it or not. We were at the airport when he said “You gotta hear this idea out” and laid it on us and we all thought it was really cool. It’s always hard when you have to come up with something and we nearly were going to just do a performance clip until Red came up with that.

As for the heat factor, our drummer could only stay part of the day so my brother had to be a stand-in chicken. So he wasn’t too stoked about having to get in that suit after Andres had just bashed out a few takes in it. I didn’t have to wear the suit so I was really lucky [laughs].

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You mentioned a new single “Slowly Sinking”, Do you guys plan on making the music video for that one just as insane?

Nah, probably not! It’s just the lack of resources and money so I think we’ll just put together a bit of a tour montage for that one.

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Speaking of tour, you guys kick off your upcoming tour with Captives on Friday. How excited are you play alongside those guys?

We’ve been mate with those guys for a long time and it’s something we’ve talked about doing for a couple years now. We played with them three or four years ago when they all came from Tasmania to Melbourne to play a show and we just hit it off there. We’ve got a really cool bond where we motivate each other to play as good as possible, so to do a proper tour with them is gonna be awesome.

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With you guys being good mates, are there sure to be some old-fashioned pranks whilst you guys are on the road?

Yeah, most likely. You’ve reminded me that I need to come up with some [laughs].

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You guys are playing Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane and Sydney. Do you guys happen to favour a particular city?

Hometown is always good. We always get the best response in Sydney, but we’re really keen to go to Adelaide on this tour. We’ve only played there a couple of times, one being our own which had a great turnout. So we’re pretty keen to get back there as well.

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Last but not least, can fans expect to hear some more songs off Celebrate The Lie at the upcoming shows?

Yeah, it’s pretty much going to be all new stuff on the setlist. We might play two older songs but 75% of it will be the new album.

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