Royal Headache comes up as another band lauded by punk and pop lover alike for their straight-to-the-point rock’n’roll sunk in the mire of low fidelity. Praised for being some kind of reaction to the apparent snobbery of the NOTVs and Circle Pits of Sydney’s uber-cool, super-small underground music scene, the four-piece of punk and hardcore misfits span the likes of Straight Arrows, Nintendo Police and Bedwettin’ Bad Boys.
As the legend goes, they set up camp “wherever” and performed their shambolic sets, along with blown-out amps and exploding energy. It wasn’t long before indie-hip conveyor-belt Pitchfork sniffed them out to add to their loaded roster of same-sounding coolsies and featured reel-to-reel recording, ‘Eloise’, in 2009. The rest of us bought into the hype and called them the Next Big Thing, just behind Jet and Eddy Current Suppression Ring. You might argue that putting the early millennial one-album wonders in the same sentence as ECSR is a bad call but, in characterising Royal Headache’s long-awaited self-titled debut LP (boasting the aesthetic of the latter with the longevity of the former) it makes a bit of sense.
