After a breakthrough year in 2012, Sydney rock band Strangers are keen to keep the momentum going, starting the year with a headline national tour in support of their debut album, Persona Non Grata.
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The five-piece from Cronulla has been getting good airplay on Triple J and picked up some gongs at the Alternative Music Hub End of Year Awards including Australian Album of the Year and Australian Newcomer of 2012, while their single Persona Non Grata came second in Best Song of 2012.
"We did the album last year and that took quite a long time," frontman Ben Britton says.
"We worked really hard at it, so when everything started to fall into place we were pretty stoked.
"To actually be on the road and be able to play music - it's a pretty rare thing these days to be able to do so we consider ourselves to be quite lucky."
The band has always been ambitious, he says, but even the success they have had so far has taken a little bit of getting used to.
"We did some residencies in Melbourne and Sydney, so we'd drive down to Melbourne every Tuesday and then drive back through the night after the show and play Sydney the next night," Britton says.
"We did that for eight weeks straight and by the end the shows were being sold out and everybody was singing along.
"We're quite a modest band and quite grounded, and when those things happen you go, 'Oh this is awesome. The songs and music we put out works'."
Modest and grounded they may be, but that doesn't stop them from wanting to conquer the world.
"The international thing hasn't happened as yet but we're going over to do South by South West in Texas, we're jumping over to do Canadian Music Week as well and doing some showcases in New York," Britton says.
"We started out in this crappy little rehearsal room in Kogarah where we lived as kids and we always dreamed, 'Imagine if we went overseas to do this', and now it's happening and it's quite surreal. We've actually worked really, really hard and we feel like the next dream now, in a non-egotistical sense, is to take over the world. So we've got our eyes on the prize."
Britton describes the band's guitar driven, riff-laden sound as "heavy, melodic rock".
"We kind of compare ourselves to bands like Queens of the Stone Age and Foo Fighters, those melodic rock acts," he says.
Their live performances, he adds, "are very loud".
"It's almost like going to a house party and having a house band there. We try and make it a party vibe. We want people to leave the show thinking 'I just watched my best friends play', so we really try and establish that connection with the audience, get them to sing along and have a great time."
