Crocodylus on their New Album Limbo, Please Be Good To Me

Bann Irbash
12 minutes ago
5 min read

Established in 2015 by high school friends Josh Williams (bass and vocals) and Stephen Sacco (guitar and vocals), Sydney-based alt-rock band Crocodylus soon expanded to include longtime friends Mikel Salvador (drums and vocals) and Nick Meadows (keys, saxophone, and percussion). Drawing inspiration from some of the defining rock bands of the ‘60s and ‘70s , Crocodylus’ self-proclaimed ‘shit garage rock’ was met with early praise from The AU Review, who hailed them as ‘rapidly becoming one of Sydney’s most in-demand bands’. Their rise on the local circuit in Sydney, defined by ‘adrenalised energy level’ live shows with (The PunkSite), soon earned them sold out headlines across Australia and stages stretching across the UK and Europe opening for Ocean Alley, Hockey Dad, The Chats, and more.

Following the release of their debut album Muscle Memory in 2022, Crocodylus’ sophomore album Limbo, Please Be Good To Me rose from a period of uncertainty and manifested into raw lyricism and dynamic riffs produced by Wade Keighran. The punchy singles ‘Limbo’, ‘Attention’ and ‘Leech’ received support from the likes of triple j Unearthed, who described ‘Limbo’ as ‘bursting with fuzzy riffs and wild, unhinged energy’ (Daniel Lane, triple j), and The Note, who praised ‘Leech’ as a ‘fast and frantic banger’. Excitingly, ‘Limbo’ also captured the interest of ORiGiN Music Group, who signed Crocodylus on global publishing and recording deals and aligned with the band’s aspiration to spread the word of Crocodylus far and wide.

You’ve known each other since high school with the band officially forming in 2015. How do you think growing up together has influenced your experience as a band?

Mikel: We’re all really great friends. It’s good and bad in a way, because they’re your best friends so you can try more stuff, but you’re also a little bit scared to offend them at the same time.

How did you land on the band’s name 'Crocodylus'?

Mikel: I remember Josh [Williams] told me that he was looking for band names on Wikipedia and he was looking up Latin prefixes to animal names and he landed on the crocodile one, which is Crocodylus. He thought it was kind of cool.

Your second album comes out this month. How do you find that your creative processes have changed since your first album, Muscle Memory, in 2022?

Nick: Writing more collaboratively is probably the biggest one. The last record we did in 2022 was mostly someone bringing a whole song in and we would all work on it, but at the end of the day it was still that person’s song so they would have final say. This one was mostly everyone coming up with parts and then we would mesh them together or just jam on a song and something would come out of it, which is really fun because we’ve never done it like that before.

Mikel: We wrote it over three different individual writing sessions at three different locations over the course of over a year. Every time we came to a new session, we all had new inspirations. We’d been listening to different music each time, and were in a different rural location around Australia, so there was different inspiration every time. That brought a bunch of really cool new ideas that probably wouldn’t have happened if we’d written it all in one session.

When I listened to the single ‘Attention’, I noticed that the lyrics felt very personal. How do you approach songwriting as a group when creating such introspective lyrics?

Mikel: Josh [Williams] writes most of the lyrics. We were all feeling the same way after COVID – we were a bit lost, figuring out where we wanted to go and what musical direction we wanted to take it in. That gave us a bunch of really new inspiration that we could bring to each song. Josh is able to really effectively put those feelings into words. He’s really good at writing lyrics, so he was able to match the lyrics really well to the tone of the song.

Your album is titled after a lyric from the song ‘Limbo’. How did that come about and how far into the album-making process did you know that this lyric represented the album?

Nick: I felt like I knew from the start of when I heard the lyric. I remember the album name was hanging in the air for a long time. We didn’t decide on anything until most of the album was already recorded, and then we were caught up with the name and I always like the idea of lifting a lyric from one of the songs to be the album title. That lyric always stood out to me and we all agreed it’s the various aspects of what the album’s about. It’s like a plea for any sort of thing to go easy and have patience.

I watched the music video for the most recent single from the album, ‘Leech’, and I thought that the last two minutes with the dancing were beautiful. How did the idea for that come about?

Mikel: That one’s a callback to a video we did in 2018 for a song called ‘My Baby’, where we went into a hall in the middle of the woods and we filmed this sort of dance routine. Nathan [Rathsam] who’s been doing all the videos for this record wanted to echo that in this video, because the song has strings that lend themselves well to a choreographed dance routine. We also just wanted to self reference.

What are your aspirations with the new album and what do you hope people take away from it?

Nick: We’d really like to tour internationally. That would be fantastic. I think people take away different things from music. I’m stealing an idea from Mac DeMarco now, but the beauty of music is how you can pick the lyrics and the content of an album and copy and paste it onto your own life and make it work for yourself. Even in the band, we all have different kinds of ideas about what this album means to each other. I’d like to see people be able to put it on their own life and help themselves through weird or good times.

Mikel: It’s really great seeing people’s interpretations already. We’ve had a journalist write a passage about the visuals of a video matching the music and the meaning of it, which was something that we hadn’t even considered. It sort of adds to the album as it trawls along.

Listen to Crocodylus’ new album on Spotify, SoundCloud, and Apple Music and keep up to date with them on Instagram.