“WE BUY EACH OTHER PEDALS FOR BIRTHDAY PRESENTS!”

The Lazy Eyes are Australia’s next great psych-rock band. Guitarists Harvey Geraghty and Itay Shachar reveal the secrets of their mind-bending sound...

- Amit Sharma

Young Sydney four-piece The Lazy Eyes could very easily end up becoming your favourite new psychedelic rock band. There’s a striking maturity to their self-produced and self-recorded debut album Songbook, which bears the mark of musicians with wisdom far beyond their years. Drawing influence from the Australian indie/psych movement around them, with Tame Impala and King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard leading the charge, there’s also a jam band mentality to The Lazy Eyes’ songs that harks back to The Beatles and the avant-garde ‘krautrock’ movement. The music they make is hypnotic, with singer/guitarist Harvey Geraghty and fellow guitarists Itay Shachar kicking in some truly phenomenal modulations to spice up their hallucinatory tones...

There’s a song on your new album called Tangerine – could that be a reference to late 60s art-rockers Tangerine Dream, or perhaps loosely inspired by Beatles lyrics?

Harvey: Our bass player Leon [Karagic] is a big fan of krautrock. And yeah, he’s into loads of stuff like Tangerine Dream. These days we all tend to listen to a mix of older and newer artists, though you get to a point where you realise all modern acts are somehow influenced by The Beatles. All of Tame Impala’s guitars and drums are Rickenbackers and Hofners. That’s pretty much the Beatles set-up! Maybe that helped them resonate with people, because those sounds were already somewhere in their own subconscious.