DMA’S, Self-Titled, is a record about rediscovering what made the band special in the first place.

DMA'S

DMA'S

(Wonderlick Recording Company / Sony Music Entertainment Australia)

DMA’S have spent the last decade becoming DMA’S. They started out with Hills End, all scrappy guitars and borrowed Britpop ghosts, wandered through For Now, blew the doors open with the glossy, neon-lit THE GLOW, then stretched further into the widescreen melancholy of How Many Dreams? And now, ten years in, they have simply put their own name on the front of their record, self-titled. These days DMA’S feel and sound like a band taking a long look at themselves in the mirror and deciding they actually quite like what they see. It is a homecoming record, but not a nostalgia exercise. There is a difference.

The band have talked openly about wanting to get back to the feeling of their earliest work. They self-produced much of the album, recorded in their Glebe studio and Los Angeles, left demo vocals intact, kept mistakes, and deliberately resisted the instinct to polish every rough edge until it disappeared. Tommy O’Dell has even described hearing a cold in his vocals on some of the recordings. The point was not to sound young again. It was to sound alive. It the age of AI generated music - it’s even more important to not seek perfection and polish.

And that looseness is all over the record. There are still enormous choruses. Still guitars that seem permanently pointed towards a festival field at sunset. Still O’Dell singing like he has just discovered that heartbreak is an Olympic sport. But there is less structure around it. After the gleaming machinery of THE GLOW, DMA’S feels like the windows have been opened. And perhaps appropriately, one of the album’s best songs is called “Windows.”

Inside DMA’S, Self-Titled

1. El Alamein

The opening track is a strange little doorway into the album. “El Alamein” takes its name from the El Alamein Fountain in Sydney’s Kings Cross, while also drawing on the history of the Battle of El Alamein. Matt Mason has explained the song as moving between a soldier’s experience of battle and someone walking past the fountain generations later, dealing with their own private battles. That is a very DMA’S way of opening an album: enormous history filtered through a very ordinary place.

Musically, it immediately announces that this isn’t going to be THE GLOW 2.0. The guitars are rougher, O’Dell’s vocal feels slightly removed from the listener, and the track eventually dissolves into distortion. It has the feeling of walking into a pub after midnight and finding the band already halfway through the song.

There is no grand introduction. They just start. And it works.

2. My Baby’s Place

This was the first single and the first track the band fully self-produced, and it is probably the clearest example of what they mean when they talk about returning to their roots.

But what I like about it is that it doesn’t feel like a calculated attempt to recreate Hills End. It feels older. Not older in sound. Older emotionally, - mature.

The song is about wanting what everyone else seems to have. Watching your friends disappear into relationships and wondering when it will be your turn. Then, suddenly, finding your person and deciding the rest of the world can piss off. It’s ridiculously simple. Which is probably why it works.

There is a warmth here that THE GLOW sometimes buried beneath synths and stadium-sized production. This is DMA’S remembering that sometimes all you need is a melody, a guitar and Tommy O’Dell sounding like he has something he desperately needs you to believe.

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3. Hurracane

Yes, “Hurracane” is spelled wrong. Apparently deliberately. The band have admitted there are several misspellings on the album, originating from demo titles that simply stuck. “Hurracane” is one of them. “Emailz” is another. And honestly, I’m glad they didn’t fix them. There is something charmingly anti-perfectionist about leaving the typo on the final record.

The song itself is anything but uncertain.

It starts relatively restrained before building into one of those enormous DMA’S choruses that O’Dell seems to be genetically engineered to sing. This is the band doing what they do best. The difference is that here it doesn’t feel like they are trying to make the biggest song possible. They’re just letting the song get big.

One of the album’s immediate earworms and an obvious live monster. I’m clearly obsessed with this one. It’s my favourite tune on this album.

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4. Killing Time

Then everything speeds up “Killing Time” is twitchier, more restless and slightly stranger than the songs surrounding it. It has a clipped rhythmic quality and a repetitive melodic structure that gives it this almost hypnotic momentum.

This is where the record starts reminding you that “returning to your roots” doesn’t mean putting Hills End back on and pressing copy. DMA’S have ten years of experience they didn’t have then. You can hear it.

There is confidence in the restraint. They know when to let something loop. They know when not to add another guitar and when the chorus is coming and, thankfully, they don’t put three more choruses on top of it wearing a hat.

It gives me such a serotonin boost but I also can’t seem to shake off thinking about Jamie T when I hear this one.

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5. Heatin Park

And then they go weird. “Heatin Park” is possibly the most ridiculous song title on the record, which makes the story behind it even better. The chorus began as a collaboration with Norwegian producers who loved nu-metal and thought the idea sounded a little like Linkin Park. The band combined that with an older song and riff, eventually arriving at the gloriously misspelled “Heatin Park”.

This should not work. It absolutely does.

The guitars are heavier. The drums hit harder. There is a slightly dirty, almost grungy quality to the whole thing. For a band whose name has become almost synonymous with a certain kind of Australian interpretation of British indie, it is refreshing to hear them throw a little concrete through the window.

And according to Mason, it has already become particularly wild in the live set. I believe him and I can’t wait to see the band play it live!

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6. Emailz

“Emailz” is one of those songs that feels smaller than it actually is. It came together unusually quickly during a writing session, with O’Dell saying the song and lyrics essentially arrived all at once. Again, the spelling stayed as a relic of the original demo.

Musically, it feels bruised. This is the aftermath song. Not the dramatic breakup. Not the screaming match. The bit afterwards when you’re staring at your phone and wondering whether sending one more message will make things better or substantially worse.

There is something very Australian about DMA’S emotional directness.They don’t need twelve metaphors to tell you someone is hurting. They’ll just tell you. And O’Dell is particularly good when the band leaves him somewhere quiet.

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7. One & Only

“One & Only” has one of the strangest histories on the album. It began as a six-year-old Johnny Took demo. The original stems were lost after a hard drive was deleted, leaving only an MP3.

When the band tried to recreate it, the new vocal didn’t have the same magic. So they used the old vocal. They extracted it, stretched it into the new arrangement and built around it.

Which feels like the perfect metaphor for the entire record. Take the old thing. Don’t recreate it. Keep the part that mattered. Build something new around it.

“One & Only” is a big, uncomplicated love song, but there is something slightly moving about hearing a voice from six years ago sitting inside a record made now. It gives the song its own ghost.

8. Dancing Luck

This is where the album takes its biggest breath. “Dancing Luck” is acoustic, stripped-back and almost startlingly gentle. Johnny Took wrote and produced it, and the band have described the album as allowing more space for songs like this rather than forcing everything into the same polished shape.

DMA’S have had an impressive romantic streak, but “Dancing Luck” feels less like the romance of being young and more like the romance of having survived a few things. The kind we all live up to eventually.

There is still something worth believing in. There is still a light on. And for a band who have spent a decade writing songs about longing, distance and wanting something just out of reach, that feels significant. Like an accomplishment of sorts.

9. Concrete

“Concrete” is one of the more understated tracks, and that might be why I keep coming back to it. There is an almost ‘80s jangle to the guitar.

This is the sort of song that could easily get overlooked when an album has bigger moments. Which is a shame. Because this is where the record’s new looseness really works.

There is room around everything. The guitars don’t have to announce themselves. O’Dell doesn’t have to demolish the roof. The song can just exist. The understated middle-album gem.

10. Windows

Then comes “Windows”. And this is the one.

There are songs that sound like heartbreak, and there are songs that sound like the moment after heartbreak when you finally understand what actually happened. “Windows” is the latter. It is simple. Almost painfully simple. The arrangement leaves O’Dell’s voice exposed, and the song revolves around the tension between keeping yourself open to somebody and eventually accepting that they may never come back.

That emotional directness has always been one of DMA’S’ greatest strengths, and here it is almost embarrassingly effective.

It feels like a song someone wrote at 2am and then was brave enough not to overwork. That is exactly what this album needed. The standout. The one I’ll still be listening to when the rest of the record has settled into memory.

11. Distance

And then, inevitably, DMA’S give us the big ending. “Distance” is stomping, cinematic and built for thousands of people to sing back.

Which could feel predictable. Instead, it feels earned.

After all the songs about memory, relationships, mistakes, wanting, losing and trying to move forward, “Distance” feels like the credits rolling. The record began with a place loaded with history. It ends with distance. That’s a neat little circle. And it is exactly the kind of song that reminds you why DMA’S became a live band in the first place. You can already hear the crowd.

The easiest thing to say about DMA’S is that it sounds like a return to form. But I don’t think that’s quite right. A return to form suggests they had lost the plot. They hadn’t. THE GLOW was a band pushing outward. It was bigger, shinier and more electronic, and it deliberately challenged the idea that DMA’S had to spend their entire career being Australia’s answer to Oasis.

Contemporary coverage at the DMA’S does almost the opposite.It pulls inward, takes away some of the bits that are supposed to hold It together. Leaves in the demo vocals, keeps the mistakes. It lets guitars sound like guitars, songs be three minutes long.

You know back at school when you were solving a math problem and had to show how you got your answer?! I feel like that’s a fair comparison here. They are showing you how they got there. In the most human way possible.

There is something quite lovely about hearing a band ten years into their career realise they don’t need to outrun their younger selves. They can simply bring them along.

That’s why the self-titled name makes sense. It’s DMA’S saying: this is who we are, this is how we get to be ourselves.

There are eleven songs here and barely forty minutes of music. Nothing overstays its welcome. There are no enormous conceptual detours, no bloated eight-minute statements about artistic rebirth. Just songs. Really truly good ones.

DMA’S is the record where they remember why they wanted to become DMA’S in the first place.

Stream the whole album