Teskey Brothers Spread Australian Soul-Americana Around The World

Australian roots music is making headway in the UK, with the news that Run Home Slow, the new album by the Teskey Brothers, has debuted at No. 2 on the official UK Americana chart, published 9 August by the Official Charts Company.

The group, from the Yarra Valley just outside Melbourne, won acclaim, and a top 20 Australian chart placing, for their self-produced, self-released 2017 debut album Half Mile Harvest. Co-founded in 2008 by singer Josh Teskey and his brother Sam, they also feature bassist Brendon Love and drummer Liam Gough. Their combination of soul and blues influences, with strong echoes of Otis Redding, is evident again on the new project.

Now released in the UK by Decca Records in partnership with Vertigo in Germany, their sophomore set Run Home Slow entered the Americana listings behind only Bruce Springsteen’s Western Stars album. It also debuted at No. 77 on the OCC’s main, all-genre survey, and rises 42-33 on the AMA chart in the US, where it’s on the Glassnote label.

This follows the album’s arrival, also at No. 2, on Australia’s ARIA album chart, runner-up only to Ed Sheeran’s No. 6 Collaborations Project. Here’s the video for the new album’s track ‘So Caught Up’:

“We were really aware that we didn’t want to alienate fans,” says Gough of the band’s approach to Run Home Slow. “We feel really proud of the first album, but the second album needed to be a step up.” They enlisted producer Paul Butler [Michael Kiwanuka, St Paul & The Broken Bones, Andrew Bird] to work on the new record, for which he flew to their home studio in Warrandyte, Victoria in Australia.

The Teskey Brothers start a run of European shows later this month, with shows in Holland, Germany and the UK, where they’re at London’s Jazz Cafe on 3 September. Then follows an American tour from 10-29 September, with dates back home in Australia throughout November. Another European tour is already booked for January and early February 2020.

Format: UK English