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Over the past few years, the Fremantle four-piece have followed a familiar path to success. They built word-of-mouth buzz with two EPs while playing gigs, gigs, and more gigs before being added to Falls Festival in Fremantle by triple j Unearthed in 2018. 
The following year they graduated from Feature Artist to the Splendour In The Grass stage, then landed a Hottest 100 debut with ‘Good For You’ (#80 in 2019). 
Now - four years after forming - Spacey Jane have arrived at their debut and this week’s Feature Album, Sunlight.
It’s the kind of first record you’d hope your fave new band would deliver. Building on the immediate charms of previously released singles - like 'Good For You', 'Good Grief', and 'Head Cold' - it’s an album brimming with glistening hooks and choruses you can imagine belting out in big venues and festival fields. 
Fronted by singer/guitarist Caleb Harper’s distinctive voice and introspective lyrics, Sunlight balances breezy-sounding songs with emotional weight and heft. It might not reinvent the wheel, but it’s easily one of the smoothest indie rock rides you’ll enjoy from an Aussie guitar band this year. 
While it sounds effortless, the recording was anything but. The band juggled upwards of 10 studio sessions, over the course of a year, between a hectic touring schedule and their individual full-time commitments to work and studies.
“It was like pushing water uphill to get it complete,” Caleb told triple j’s Richard Kingsmill (listen below or in the 2020 podcast). Sadly, even after putting so much work into Sunlight, its rays were dampened - like everything else in music - by coronavirus. 
“For us.. this year is about as drastically different as it could have been,” laments Caleb. In alternate timeline, he and the band would be returning from a UK tour, but despite releasing an album into a world where live music is on indefinite hiatus, the album has been “getting us through,” he says. 
“Something to look forward to; reminding me and us that the band is a thing and we’re working really hard on it still.” 
As you’d expect of an album titled Sunlight, there’s a summery sheen to everything. Affable melodies and jangling guitars are lounged in with warm back-up vocals and the occasional sparkling synth part. Even when they up the tempo, leaning into their wiry energy on ‘Good For You’ or the bouncing ‘Weightless’, Spacey Jane never sound too hot-blooded.
While the sun-baked music is all dapples of light, it doesn’t disguise the not-so-feel-good sentiments to the lyrics from Caleb, who has described it as an album “full of apologies.” 
‘Wasted On Me’ is a perfect example, contrasting its easy-going strum with a lament. ‘You must feel that you wasted your life for me/Well I know I feel the same’, Caleb sings. ‘I’m not the man I wish I was/Not even half of him’.
‘Skin’ pairs admissions of guilt and regret with a blissful refrain, while ‘Straightfaced’ is a sprite-footed burst of vitamin G (that’s guitar) about falling out of love, using bright melodies to express the lump-in-your-throat anxiety of admitting to somebody that it’s over. 
'The sun comes up and I'm stuck, and the brightness overwhelms me/Out in that light I am so dark/I pour out love but you can't see'. 
These kind of ‘Oooft’ moments show Harper’s knack for capturing early-20’s uncertainty from a personal perspective, picking apart breakdowns in relationships, romance, and his own mental health. 
Spiralling around the rise-and-fall of trilling riffs, ‘Booster Seat’ is an album highlight that deals with “feeling like anxiety and depression are taking control away from you,” the frontman explained, relying on others the way a kid in a car implicitly trusts their parents to keep them safe by restraining them. A complex metaphor that’s easy to grasp.
“I drew on feelings of my childhood and those vulnerabilities you have and how they’re still very relevant today.”
The same feelings course through ‘Love Me Like I Haven’t Changed’, a song borrowing some sad country twang in its search for self-forgiveness. 
‘I’m folding like a house of cards … or a sad song on your mind again. Love me like I haven’t changed/Like I’m still the same kid, born and raised/Before I ate up all this fear and rage,’ Caleb sings in a raspy voice that sits somewhere between San Cisco’s Jordi Davieson and Kings of Leon frontman Caleb Followill. 
Turns out the other Caleb and his band were a big touchstone.
“I was at a Christian school and in Year 10, we did a documentary review and I chose Talihina Sky: The Story of Kings of Leon,” Harper said. “I fell in love with the whole thing.” 
The band’s 2003 debut Youth And Young Manhood and its 2005 follow-up Aha Shake Heartbreak were “hugely influential for us,” he continued. “We were l istening to them a lot when we first formed [spacey Jane] and did that first EP.” 
Caleb could also relate to Kings of Leon’s religious upbringing, having been raised similarly. 
“I don’t think it was quite as extreme as bible belt Oklahoma like [kings of Leon’s Followills] but it was definitely quite strict. The denomination we were in was almost cult like – the way they try to control people and the flow-on effect through the family into childhood was pretty intense.”
The frontman has cut all ties to his religious background (“I try to run as far as I can from it. I just shut it out completely, I don’t address it…”) but not to his family. They placed pressure on Caleb to study, but he “flunked hard” out of an engineering/finance degree to work in bars while focusing on the band. 
Despite their concerns, “they’re pretty stoked now,” he said. “It’s always a concerning thing when your 17 year old is like ‘I wanna be a muso, screw everything else!’ but now I think for them it’s more tangible.” The quick version of the Spacey Jane origin story begins with Caleb and Kieran Lama, the band’s drummer and co-manager, first meeting as teenagers in Geraldton. They moved to Perth and met guitarist Ashton Le Cornu and later, through a mutual friend, bassist Peppa Lane.
Caleb fondly remembers those early days, jamming ‘til 3am in the shed, as “the happiest moments for me - the most I’d ever enjoyed something. Creating music. I think subconsciously I was preparing myself for wanting to do that forever.”
It’s that same giddy feeling that leagues of fans felt upon discovering Spacey Jane, an indie rock band that’s easy to love, rapidly elevating them to ‘Next Big Thing’ status… which brings us back to the central irony, making summery songs out of sad situations.The frontman admits to carrying baggage from his past and harbouring trust issues, “needing to give people more of my trust and not shutting out and not being afraid of that.” But Sunlight marks not just a milestone in Spacey Jane’s career, but the dawn of new emotional growth.
“A lot has changed over the last six months. I’ve also said a few times, the album is closing of a chapter for us sonically as a band but also for me personally. A lot of things I’m writing about retrospectively and have moved past them in a lot of ways.”
Fittingly, one of the album’s strongest moments is also its most cathartic. ‘Skin’ channels self-advice - that positive change begins with the individual - into a fade-out that cycles around a bright, infectious sing-along to words of hope.
‘If you’re looking for redemption then it’s breathing underneath your skin/And if you wanna start the healing then you’ll have to let someone in.’