Melbourne’s RVG return with their highly-anticipated second album, Feral. Following their beloved 2017 debut A Quality of Mercy, RVG perform the tricky alchemy of combining rock’s urgency, punk’s anarchy, and pop’s empathy to create a record that feels vital: Feral is a catharsis, a call to arms, and a forthright indictment of contemporary complacency. To Romy Vager, RVG’s lead singer and lyricist, to feel feral is to feel outside of everything. Throughout this album that feeling of isolation is incited, but it never feels hopeless: these songs channel the raw energy of despair and frustration into melodies that often feel victorious, perhaps only because they so aptly supply a soundtrack to the end of days.

Feral was recorded at Head Gap studios with producer Victor Van Vugt (PJ Harvey, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Beth Orton). Internationally renowned, Van Vugt currently resides in Berlin, Germany and travelled to Melbourne to work with RVG. One of the producer’s key tenets is a sense of spontaneity, of capturing the essence of a song’s live performance, a concern that RVG prize above all else when recording. The band recorded the album’s instrumentals live to track, allowing their playing to be infused with the kind of electricity that has seen the band’s live show lauded across Australia and internationally. Guitarist Reuben Bloxham plays with an emphatic precision, but his guitars often feel as alive as Vager’s voice, while drummer Marc Nolte steers the album, at turns restrained and freewheeling.