Overnight Oats puts music on the menu
For a band called Overnight Oats, it might seem strange that not a single member of the group considers it their favourite food.
But the alliteration of this healthy breakfast option, a regular meal for bassist Lachlan Darch, stood out to the group.
“Lachlan eats overnight oats every day, so it’s something that we chose and it kind of stuck,” explains lead vocalist Lorren Cianci.
“It’s also nice when you say our band is called Overnight Oats and people are like ‘oh, I love overnight oats’ – meaning the food – but it’s nice that we build that rapport,” adds guitarist Tom Kong.
Overnight Oats consists of Lorren on vocals, Lachlan on his Fender Precision Bass, Tom on his Fender Telecaster and Kyle Coleman on drums.
The band blends the sounds of 2000s indie rock, pop punk and emo music, in what Tom describes as a “melting pot of all our influences”.
That includes bands like Teenage Joans, Ball Park Music, Green Day and The Jungle Giants, and especially Blink-182.
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“We have a baseline of like, we love Australian indie music, we love pop punk, and then from that base we have our little extra things we can sneak in,” says Tom.
“Lorren might put in bits from theatre into her vocal lines, I would sneak in an emo riff and Lachlan would put in his Blink-182.”
Officially formed in late 2022, the band grew out of a jam between Lachlan and Lorren, who are engaged, and their friend Tom.
“We all just had a big jam together and then we were like, ‘oh yeah, this is cool’,” says Lorren.
But a drummer was needed to complete the sound, so Tom brought in his mate Kyle, who he knew from high school.
As a fairly new band, Overnight Oats have only put out two releases so far: their debut single ‘Kansas’, which can be streamed on Spotify, Apple Music and other services, and a demo of their song ‘Girl Next Door’.
Yet with a number of other originals in the works, the band hopes to put out another single soon, with an EP as a longer-term project.
Overnight Oats already has around half a dozen shows under their belt at venues like the UniBar, the Exeter Hotel and Hotel Metro, where they play gig staples such as ‘D for Disappointing’, ‘Happy ur Happy’, ‘Staring Contest’ and ‘Retrograde Amnesia’.
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Explaining their songwriting process, Lachlan tells CityMag that the music tends to evolve organically.
“There are two ways that we’ve written most of our songs,” he says.
“The first one would be during band prac, Tom and myself would just start riffing over some random chord progression and Kyle will join in on the drums and then a couple of minutes later, Lorren’s like ‘I’ve got the whole song vocals ready’; verse, chorus, bridge.
“The other songs that we’ve got, it would just start from Tom or myself having this riff structure and then we’d send that around to the band and slowly try to develop it.”
Illustration by Angus Smith.
In their short time together, Overnight Oats have already had some great moments as a band, but it was their first gig at the UniBar that stands out as a highlight.
“In our first show – I reckon it was ‘Kansas’ or one of the other ones – I remember everyone got down on the ground when we had a little breakdown section – it completely caught, I reckon, all four of us off guard,” says Kyle.
“It was like everyone, all of our mates had come to support us; it was this great big stage. For me, it was like ‘oh my God’, this is so much fun, I love performing and I get to do it with my mates’,” Lorren adds.
This article first appeared in The Food Edition of CityMag, which is on streets now.
