Sheppard are back! With their global hit, “Good Time” still gracing airwaves around the world and their uplifting, indie-pop smash ‘Daylight’ still proving itself to be a fan favourite, it’s undeniable we’re truly in a new era for one of Australia’s most successful musical exports.
The sibling trio who currently spend their time between Brisbane & Nashville are set to release their next single ‘Edge Of The Earth’ in early March as they gear up to their upcoming fourth studio album. Fans are already affectionately referring tom the song as “the catchiest Sheppard song since ‘Geronimo’”.
The band have now clocked up 1.2 billion combined streams across their catalogue, including 2014’s global hit “Geronimo” plus classics like “Coming Home”, “Let Me Down Easy”, “Learning to Fly", Eurovision entry “On My Way”, and “Die Young".
The streaming figures demonstrate Sheppard as a truly international band, with their biggest audiences in the USA and dedicated fan bases in Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, and most of Europe and Asia as well as their home territory of Australia.
With 4 million monthly listeners on Spotify alone, and their videos about to crack 250 million combined views on YouTube, George Sheppard states “we’ve been very fortunate”. “It’s hard to put those figures into quantifiable numbers, but we feel it through our fans. Both online and at our live shows, it’s so cool to see such a diverse and multi-generational crowd. Honestly, we just feel so grateful. So many incredible things have had to go just right, and wrong, for us to have been lucky enough to call this our job, but it does also show the hard work we put into this early on has paid off.”
“In the early days, back in 2014 and 2015, we’d be on tour for four or five months at a time, living away from our family and partners, missing important life moments and events, living out of a suitcase. International touring sounds glamorous, but it can be a real struggle. Especially when you’re just starting out and you suddenly have a worldwide hit and have to try and be everywhere at once. It was intense, but looking back now, we’re so grateful we had those opportunities and made the most of them because they’re paying off now, today. People all over the world are still hearing our music and discovering our band.”
Kaleidoscope Eyes (their third consecutive Top 2 album on the ARIA charts) eventually became home to all the tracks from their one-single-a-month experiment to keep themselves busy during the pandemic.
“Thank goodness we did that, because otherwise I think we would have gone crazy in 2020.” Emma Sheppard says. “We just set ourselves the challenge, bunkered down and got it done.” Sheppard also did regular live gigs online, even managing to shoehorn in that Christmas song amid those monthly song drops to cater to eager fans and omnipresent algorithms. “We did struggle at times to make the deadlines, submitting a song for release is quite the process, but we always got there. We made sure we always had something coming out.” Amy Sheppard admits of the prolific streak of music. ”Maybe it was ambitious but it definitely kept us on people’s minds and on their playlists”
“It was pretty cool that it was an episodically released album.” George adds. Our fans knew they’d be getting a new Sheppard song every month. It gave people something to look forward to in a time when there wasn’t a lot to look forward to.”
Amy Sheppard even managed to launch a side solo career as a country artist with a string of acclaimed singles and live shows. “It’s been interesting switching hats.” Amy says. “Honestly, it’s been nice figuring out who I am as an artist outside of the band. Country came naturally to me. If you take the production away, I don’t think the songs we write for Sheppard are much of a stone’s throw away from country songs. George and I actually started as a more folky, acoustic duo. It definitely feels natural putting the hat and boots on.”
The plan is to keep her solo country career while still being a member of Sheppard. “The juggle has been intense so far, but this is my dream. There’s nothing else I’d rather be doing. I think it’ll go hand in hand with Sheppard, one seems to complement the other.”
Sheppard are pacing themselves for a slightly less hectic run into album number four, planning to drip-feed fans with a handful of diverse tracks from the record in advance. All the videos will have a cohesive theme, with the band keeping to their trademark of running the themes through stunning visuals. “The art and aesthetic of an album is there to add to the world of the music. Once the songs are done we love bringing everything together into one piece of art,” Emma says.
While “Good Time” captures them at their most loved-up and vibed-up, the forthcoming album will expand their musical and lyrical horizons. Fans will hear the band processing their “considerably rough” time through the Pandemic; this is most evident on the most recent release. “Obviously everyone was dealing with it at the same time, but the music industry and live events were hit particularly hard” George says. “We definitely felt that pressure too, but we also had some unique personal struggles happening underneath too, so a lot of the writing on this album has been about making it through a really dark patch in our lives, when the world was being particularly unkind, and finally making it out into the warm sunshine on the other side. A lot of the themes on the album are based around that idea of dawn. A new beginning, a metamorphosis. A rebirth.”
Amy adds “We’ve had a lot of time to reinvent ourselves – so this album definitely feels like a rebirth of Sheppard.”