Australian Inde-Folk musician Angus Stone has been enjoying the fruits of his labour with Dope Lemon, his solo project. His most recent offerings of Rose Pink Cadillac (2022) and Kimosabe (2023) have made him and his band two time ARIA (Australian Recording Industry Association) nominees and earned them up to 13 million streams in the last 30 days alone. Their notoriety also saw Angus play alongside Post Malone on the Australian leg of his 2023 tour where they both performed ‘Big Jet Plane’, a song of Angus’ former project Angus & Julia Stone.
With all the incredible engagement Dope Lemon has garnered, their fifth offering Golden Wolf teases a more open and introspective Angus. Lyrically, the album deals with mortality and what we as people leave behind and take with us into the next life, whilst offering up the usual laid back and summery tones of Dope Lemon. Only this time around, the summery sheen seems to have been dialled up even more, with lavish instrumentation and extended musical sections that push the pysch influence of Dope’s music to the max. The mix adaptively layers each moment with a tasteful coating of reverb and brightness, whether it’s these louder jamming sections or the quiet and thinner moments where Angus’ voice is paired up with a single instrument.
We sat down with Angus whilst he was in the UK, to talk with him about the more introspective themes of Golden Wolf and what influenced the more improvised and long-form approach for parts of this album.
The sound of ‘Golden Wolf‘ has been partly described as ‘Moving effortlessly between sun-soaked rock and shimmering nocturnal grooves’, how was this atmosphere created?
When we were making that song (Golden Wolf), it was the most magical afternoon. There was this beautiful stream of gold light hitting the living room, it was almost like time slows down in those transcendental and ethereal moments, and everything was just unfolding in the most magical way. It was the perfect combination of all the right things, it rolled off the tongue lyrically, poetically, and the room felt like it held the story and the sounds that became that song.
This album has also been described as ‘Dope Lemon at their most honest and vulnerable yet’, is there a particular song that most exemplifies this?
For me, I start to understand the music more so on the back-end when it has been out and people have had experiences with it, and they’ll come up to you and tell you a story about when they first heard it or they had this experience, and for me it’s like ‘oh shit’!
It’s like you’re learning about the substance of the song through the peoples’ experiences if that makes sense. It starts off as this treasure that you found and you end up telling yourself things that you wouldn’t be able to say without the song.
I feel like it’s one of those things that once it’s out of your hands, it kind of takes on a life of its own. That’s when you really start to experience what it’s all about. Music is a cool art-form like that.
There’s a real emphasis on jamming this time around, some songs such as the final track ‘Dust Of A Thousand Stars’ have real room to breathe, how did this come to be?
Y’know, I think it starts as this seed that you plant and it flourishes into this beautiful piece as a whole. Notably, there’s a song called ‘Sugarcat’, I don’t know, something about it, it has got this vibrant and beautiful energy. For me, that song feels like the next level for us.
You’ve said in the past that you sometimes go into the studio with a certain intention or expectation in mind, but often what ends up coming out is different. How did the final album marry up with your initial intentions?
I think personally, I’ll have this overwhelming need to share what I see each day and what I’m feeling, and I sort of bottle neck up to a certain point, and I put aside a month and ill just sit in the studio and create. I think you can plan up to a certain point and then it becomes out of your hands. As long as you show up and your heart is there, and you believe in the labour of love that it is, you’ll get a good result. You just have to see it through.
What inspired the title of this album? Is Golden Wolf perhaps a character similar to Smooth Big Cat (2019), or is it the name of the plane on the front cover?
Golden Wolf symbolically, is based on what it is to pass over into the next life, what it is that will take us there, who will take us there, and what it is you want to take with you, whether it’s this life or if you want to create a new one. It’s sort of what you leave behind and what you pass on through with, and the lessons that you’ve learned and what you can do better. I guess it’s touching on all those subjects that make us a soul and who we are in our entirety as a human being.
The lyrics of the title track Golden Wolf definitely hold true to that. They seem to deal with introspection, what the future holds, has there been anything that has triggered this introspection?
I guess life itself, you think you’ve got it all figured out but it will show you otherwise, depending on what day it is! I think thats the beauty of music, your fans and followers get to come on this journey alongside you. It’s like reading a book, you get to follow the person thats in the story and see their next chapter. I feel like thats what making records is, when you have people following you along and sharing your stories.
I have to ask, how did the front cover come to be?
Back when we released our first record Honey Bones (2016), my friend was a photographer in the town we recorded it and she had these beautiful photos of this girl that she’d been shooting, and my other friend was an artist and he painted a lot. We were sort of playing around with the band name and what we could do with it and the lemon ended up being painted on top of her head. There’s something really cool about it, I don’t know what it was but it triggered this cool art-form and I guess looking at it in a sort of introspective way, you can be anyone you wanna be when you dive into the Dope Lemon universe and come along for the ride.
Were there any particular musical influences that inspired ‘Yamasuki – Yama Yama’?
So ‘Yamasuki’ is the band and ‘Yama Yama’ is the track. I saw it on the Guy Ritchie film, ‘The Gentlemen’. That song popped up and it was cool! I was just sort of sitting there and I had smoked a joint; it has happened a couple of times where I’ve heard an instrumental of a track and I’ll be sitting there watching a film or playing GTA, which is where I found ‘Home Soon’ this other track.
For the GTA one (Home Soon), I got on a call with the head of SONY in Australia and I said ‘I’ve got this track, can you track down who wrote it?’ That was a band called the Chakachas from Belgium, and they allowed me to sing on it and that became the ‘Home Soon’ track.
It’s the same thing with this new ‘Yama Yama’ by Yamsuki. I made a call, and we get talking with the artist and they allow me to sing on top of it. It’s cool like that, because it’s someone else’s baby, they’ve put so much effort into its creation and it’s really beautiful for artists to allow that to happen. Thats how the track came to be.
The album starts off bold with the ‘Burning behind me quote’, embarrassingly I actually had to google what this was because I suspected it might have been a reference to something. What exactly brought this to mind when writing the opening track ‘John Belushi’?
That’s cool, haha. I don’t know if you’ve seen the video, but it’s a BBC reporter, he’s somewhere where they’re burning half a tonne of heroin, hashes, and other narcotics. He’s trying to get through the report, but obviously the smoke is hitting him and he starts to giggle. That track ‘John Belushi’, it’s obviously based on that ‘heavy gear’ sort of life style, I just thought it was fitting for the title and it’s a fun way to start the album.
You’ve recently been on tour with Post Malone, and have been seeing massive fan engagement and award nominations with your previous works, what would you now want fans and newcomers to your music to take from Golden Wolf?
I’d hope that younger artists out there draw inspiration and constantly keep growing, and to not be afraid of diving into the unknown and to be explorative with concepts. It’s cool, Dope Lemon has created this magnetic orbit of other artists in all sorts of creative forms when it comes to painting or film. It’s really nice to see the community grow with Dope Lemon, it’s one of those things that we as a group and a project really want to keep flowing, I’d love for that to live on with the music.
Golden Wolf will be releasing 2nd May. Pre-order and pre-save link can be found here.
