The heat hung heavy over ArcTanGent 2025 as Friday afternoon settled in, the festival grounds buzzing with anticipation for the evening ahead. In the midst of it all, we found a (relatively) quiet corner to sit down with Mark Owen, founding member and lead guitarist of We Lost The Sea. Just a day earlier, the Australian post-rock collective had delivered one of the festival’s most talked-about performances, and in only a few hours they would return to the stage for something equally highly-anticipated: a complete playthrough of their landmark 2015 record Departure Songs. Despite the weight of the occasion, Mark arrived relaxed and smiling, his easygoing demeanour cutting through the intensity of the weekend.
Mark, thank you so much for making the time on a busy day here at ArcTanGent. Not only a busy day at the festival, but a day in which your band is playing your second set of the festival. How has the festival been up to this point? And how was the set yesterday for you?
“Oh, man. It’s been amazing. It’s hard to describe the feeling of walking out to a main stage and seeing it full. It might sound arrogant or whatever, but we just crushed it. We played really well as a band. We’re really happy as a unit, we love playing the new songs live. It felt really cool that we got an opportunity to show the band and our full current force, I guess. As opposed to playing Departure Songs, which we’re doing today, which is cool to play, but it’s a ten-year-old record. It’s not really who we are as people or musicians. And yeah, we played a 27-minute long song and no one really left. So that’s a good sign, I think!
But yeah, I mean apart from that, the festival’s really cool. I’ve never been before, so it’s been a bucket list thing to play it and because of touring and being in a band, you just don’t get a chance to just be like, “Oh, I’m just gonna go to the UK and hang out at a festival”, because I just wouldn’t have the leave from work or anything like that. So it’s been really cool to just hang out and it feels like a part of a really inclusive festival. Everyone’s really friendly. I haven’t really come across any dickheads. I think the biggest dickheads have been us that I’ve come across, which is cool!
Godspeed You! Black Emperor last night was just mind-blowing. I think that’s the fourth time I’ve seen them. But there was something about last night. They just felt more violent an I really loved the new record and they played my favourite music, I guess, my favourite record of all time in full. Yeah, I was like, “holy fuck! I can go home now”. What a way to round up the day, right?”
So you mentioned playing new stuff off A Single Flower. How do you feel about the record now that it’s out in the world?
“Yeah man, we feel really, really good about it. There’s been kind of a long time between records; it took almost six years to get out. And we started working on it, like some of the ideas that end up on the record, during like the Covid lockdowns. We took a while and it was dragging out and everyone was kind of feeling pretty flat about it. We also had some drummer issues and so then we parted ways with our drummer before we got Alasdair (Belling) in. He’s not 30 yet. He’s young, super positive, he’s got energy and he’s really creative as a musician, so that really injected a lot of energy for us, because for the first time in the history of the band we weren’t relying on being this wall of sound of guitars. You could actually sit back a bit more and let the rhythm section have their moments.
Everyone’s really pumped. I’m really, really proud of the record. I think that it’s objectively our best work and I know lots of people say that about a new record, but I think for me, it’s a really great snapshot of who we are as people and musicians and it’s been received really well, which is always affirming, you know, because you don’t want to put out a record and be like, “Oh I don’t give a fuck what people think.” You always do. So, when you hear positive things back, you’re like fuck yeah, it’s good that people are getting it.”
You’re a presence on the ArcTanGent forum and you must have picked up that people there were responding to the record as soon as it came out with glowing reviews. It felt like there was really strong sentiment behind the band with this release.
Yeah, I think so. I think one of the cool things is because I’m on the ArcTanGent forum,
the Two Promoters One Pod forum, the Post Festival forum, the Dunk! Festival forum and the Damnation forum, we’re really accessible. So when people want to reach out and tell us their story because we’ve got a back story that, you know, is a bit tragic or whatever, sometimes people feel like they want to direct their story towards someone. So they see us sometimes as a conduit for that and we respond as much as we can. We’re really active on social media and responding to people. I think that kind of comes across and so people actively want to support our band. So when you drop new music, it’s not like “oh, here’s just another band’s record”. It feels like they’re like, “oh, here’s this band that are investing time in us and so I’ll like take the time to sit and listen.””
As an instrumental band, it’s not that you’re going on the forums or talking directly about the creative work that you’re doing, but at the same time it kind of gives it a voice and like you say, it makes your band relatable to people in a way that maybe adds a layer.
“Yeah, I think so. I think we’re all a bunch of dudes who grew up in the southwestern suburbs of Sydney, like the rough part of Sydney and we’re a bit… what’s the word I’m looking for? Not sombre, but we’re introspective and a bit cynical and angry about stuff all the time, but it’s all from a place of love. We really care about people and people having freedom of expression and freedom to basically do whatever they want because it’s their business, and so I feel like that contributes to people feeling like they can connect to an instrumental record.”
I think it’s true as well that there’s something in what you said about people superimposing their own stories on the music that you make and having some sense of the background of your band. We said in the review for this record that there’s a high bar on an emotional level when you listen to the first few notes of ‘A Gallant Gentleman’ at the beginning of Departure Songs and it’s like an emotional release valve for a lot of people. You touched on it earlier, but ten years removed from that album, how does it feel playing that material that was a moment in your life?
“It’s actually really interesting because I was having this conversation with Matt Cook who’s our front of house guy and he was good friends with [Chris] Torpy as well. We were sitting at a pub in London on the day we arrived trying to outdrink the jet lag. He was like, “Oh man, do you ever, like, talk to Torpy? I mean do you ever reach out to him?” And I said I think we do when we play the record in full. Because I think playing the songs, there’s been not many shows where we haven’t played ‘A Gallant Gentleman’ and at times it feels a bit like, you know… I think Gav from Damnation and Two Promoters was giving me shit about it because, he’s like, “It’s not fucking ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, mate! Play the song!” Because I sometimes feel like, do we have to play it again? And part of that, just for reference, is because I feel like sometimes a little bit of what’s so special about it gets lost in translation live, especially because there’s no choir. So you’ll see today where we have written this outro in lieu of a choir which gives people a chance to sit in the moment a bit more. I feel like when we were playing it before sometimes we’d hit a sample of the choir and it kind of cheapened it a bit and robbed it of a little bit. So, when we play these songs individually like ‘Bogatyri’, which I think we’ve played pretty much every show ever because it’s a banger, it’s like “oh this is cool this is fun, or whatever”, you know. But right now if you said write a set it would be the whole new album, you know.
But we played it at Post Festival a couple of weeks ago and I had this moment when we’re about halfway through and I was like, “wow, this is actually a pretty special record”, because I don’t listen to it. I never go back. I will occasionally maybe once a year or something, but it’s not something that I’ll put on and listen to and then when I was going through it “I was like, oh shit. This is actually pretty special”. There’s something about it that is great. And then we played ‘Challenger’ and we got halfway through it and we started ‘Swansong’ and I was like, oh great now I’m really sad again. I guess it’s still really emotional and it cuts to the core. It takes me back to a time and place when we wrote it and when you do it in full, you get that whole picture.
For example, in 2017 when we did our first European tour, we played just that album in full because we had no other instrumental songs. We just had that record and it was really emotionally draining to play. I think we played like 22 shows. Every night we played that show and every night we had people coming up to us afterwards, which is great but everyone was telling us their story and saying “this means so much to me”. For us, it was still pretty raw. And it feels like every night to really give it gravitas and to be honest and to not be disingenuous with the record, you always have to put yourself back in a place of really raw grief if that makes sense. So, when we play it in full it’s still heart-wrenching to us at times, you know, and we never finish playing that record without, at different points, when we’re at the moment in the record for us personally that is like the most harrowing, you know.
And yeah, so today, I’m excited to play it, but also you approach it with trepidation. You see the comments online people like “oh, you know, I can’t wait to cry to this record”. Oh, yeah It’s like we want to have fun, but we also want to be respectful. We also want to be honest with it. It’s got to be an honest performance, because I think, especially with post-rock, you see so many post-rock bands and they come across as disingenuous almost, you know, because they ham it up or whatever, because they feel like because they don’t have a singer they’ve got to do this thing a certain way. And sometimes, when we play that record, there are times when you get caught and you think, “oh god, that hurts a bit.”
And I think that’s that’s cool because that’s one of the things I loved about you Godspeed last night, because the new record is all about Gaza, right? And so for it to feel violent and feel angry is what I want. I don’t want it to be like, oh this is lovely with Godspeed, you know we’ve been doing this for 20 years or whatever. We can kind of do what we want. But it feels like that they’re just like fucking “all right, these are what the songs are about and we wrote them because we’re fucking angry about these things”, and so instead of just going through the motions, I’m fucking angry. And so here’s an angry version of the song.
I guess that’s the cool thing about Departure Songs. I’ve often said that it doesn’t feel like that record belongs to us anymore. It feels like we’ve kind of given it out and given it away, so now when we play it, because we know how special it is to people, it’s like this moment of shared grief or shared catharsis. It’s like we’re just the conduits for people’s own story. So, it’s almost like it’s an offering to everyone who’s come with us on this journey. We’re really honoured to be able to present this piece of work, this piece of art, that has connected with so many people and means so much to people, and everyone’s got such a strong connection to the record. And we do too, but we get to tell our story, and everyone else gets to experience their story and we’re not trying to take that from anyone. We’re not being like “Our singer killed himself. So we’re sad and so you should be sad”. What we’re saying is… You know, like Nick Cave, even though he’s a zionist piece of shit, he says that when we love we grieve and that the ultimate trade-off for love is grief. And he says it’s non-negotiable the same way love is.
We know everyone’s got loss and grief and everyone deals with it. It’s a real thing. So, it’s really cool that we have a record that people love so much, despite how it makes them feel, and it’s an honour to offer that to people in a live setting. We want them to stand there and go through that with us if that makes sense.”
Related: We Lost The Sea – A Single Flower | Album Review
You mentioned a bandmate of yours saying, “Do you talk to Chris [Torpy] sometimes?” Do you ever reflect and think what he would make of what you’ve done as a band over the years?
“Yeah, I do man. It’s a real weird thing, because I would do anything to have him back, but also it’s a real hard situation because if it hadn’t happened the way it happened, then we wouldn’t have written a record like that. And so all this cool shit that I get to do is, in a way, because of him, whether it’s because we wrote a record in his honour, or simply the fact that we became without a singer. I honestly think that I know that he would be like fucking really pumped and really psyched. And seeing Grady (Avenell) sing with The Grey… He was a massive Will Haven fan. He stood like Grady. He watched the way Grady performed, you know the hand behind the back, the leaning forward. Yeah, if you mix him and the singer from Poison the Well together, you had Torpy live.
You know, we’re doing all this crazy shit that he would have lost his mind about and I’d like to think that he would be really psyched and supportive and happy with what’s going on. I mean, I remember when we first played our very first show as an instrumental band we had been booked to open for This Will Destroy You in Sydney and it’s our first ever international support slot. It was, like, three weeks after he killed himself. And we’re like, “We’ve got to play this show. Like, we’ve got nothing else to do except like play the show”. So we got up and just played the songs that we were gonna play just without him, as an instrumental. We just put this microphone in the middle and just had this one empty microphone in the middle and I think that’s a sentiment we still feel. We don’t put a microphone there anymore, but it still feels like he’s still in the band, he’s still part of the band. He’s still part of that ethos; he is still part of the things we do. We talk about him all the time. Yeah, I think that he would very much be very psyched.”
We were talking about that way in which people bring their own stories and connect them up with We Lost The Sea. I suppose that part of that legacy, if you want to call it that, is that today it’ll be a full tent again of people who on the one hand bring their own stories. But also, if they have some idea about the background of your band, they feel for you guys and the position that you were in. That’s a very powerful thing.
“You know, he passed in 2013. What is that, 12 years ago? But when we get interviews, or meet people, or we talk to people online I still get to talk about it. I still get to bring him up. I still get to say his name. I can still tell you the craziest fucking stories, because he was an absolute maniac. So I guess, in a way, we’re keeping his memory alive. What’s that old saying that people are never really gone until you stop talking about them? We get to talk about him all the time and we’ve become really good at talking about it. We’re really open about it and we’re big supporters of mental health, not just because of him, but also because of all our own struggles with mental health in the wake of that and in the years that followed. I guess mental health struggles are rife in our band. It’s not an uncomfortable topic of conversation for us to have. That leads into why people find it so comfortable to talk to us. We never pretend we’re therapists or anything like that. We’ve had some pretty wild scenarios where people reach out in like real crisis moments and we’re like, you know, we’re really glad they did, but we had a dude once who was just like, “oh, man I just drove to this bridge and I was gonna like jump off and then I put your record on because I wanted to listen one more time and I decided not to jump and I’m just messaging you from the car near the bridge”. And we were like, man, I’m so glad you didn’t do that and I’m so glad that you have reached out to us and you can reach out anytime you want but please talk to someone professional! We’re just dudes from a band in Western Sydney.
And if you need to talk to someone we’re so glad that this didn’t happen, but please reach out, you know.”
Is there a point where you’re asked to play Departure Songs in full and you say no?
“Yes, I mean the reason we’re doing this is because it came out ten years ago this year, last month, so we’re playing it in China again this year, at CAN Festival. Then we’re gonna do maybe one, maybe two shows in Australia. And then we’ve got one more European show. I think we’ve kind of done all the continents. And then that’s it. We won’t do it again in full for a long time, I mean unless you offer us an obscene amount of money, because you know, we’re broke. So yeah, I think one of the things that this record has cemented for us is that A Single Flower stands by itself. We’re touring in Australia this year, but only a couple of shows are booked, but we’re playing the new record in full. We’re not going to play anything else.
I think the plan is we come back to Europe next year and we’ll do Europe and UK and do a bunch of shows and I would be surprised if we played much or any at all of Departure Songs or even Triumph and Disaster. This is it.”
So, the focus now is touring the new material, and at what point do you start writing again? Are you always writing, or is there a gap now?
“In terms of writing as a group, I think we’re all really excited to start again because, like I said before, we had a whole bunch of ideas that had been around for a long time, so we had heaps of leftovers from that, and we were talking about it. We’re like, you know, what? Let’s just wipe that. We’ll just start again. So, the record came out on July 4th and I’m always playing guitar, always noodling with ideas and I’ll be downstairs in my house and I’ll be playing my acoustic and I go, “Oh, that’s really cool.” So I’ll go upstairs and plug my rig in and record it real quick and like oh, there we go. So I’ve got this folder that’s got hundreds of ideas. But I remember the day after I was just sitting on my couch and I think no one else was home. I was just sitting there chilling out just relaxing on a Saturday morning, and I just picked up my acoustic and this idea kind of came out and I was like, “That’s the first one. That’s album six. I’ve started now”. So I even recorded it and I put the date down and album six, number one. Cool, so I’ve started.
When we start rehearsing again for coming back to Europe next year, we’ll probably start jamming some new material. Obviously, we’re gonna do this album cycle, but I think by the time we get to like having this album out for like three years, we’ll be ready to go on the next one.”
That’s really exciting to hear that there’s stuff in the works now when I’m still on play 15 or so of the new album.
“You know, that’s the thing: the album came out on July 4th, but we had the masters back on December 25th, and we finished the record before that. We recorded in July or August 2024, so it was like a year from when we finished recording it to when it came out. So, by the time we start writing early next year, it’ll be almost a year and a half since we wrote, so we’re ready. We can start now. We’re excited to try new things and do some different things. We did three big, really heavy slabs of music that are lots of big builds and lots of catharsis, so it’ll be interesting to see what we do sonically next. It might be another huge slab again or it might be like a trip-hop album, who knows?”