ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON 29 AUGUST 2022
For close to ten years at the start of the century, The Butterfly Effect was one of Australia’s most popular rock acts. Their sophisticated collision of progressive rock, alternative metal and post-grunge hard rock put them at the forefront of the local scene with two Top 5 albums, a string of Hottest 100 entries and accolades from across the industry.
The long creative process around their third album, The Final Conversation of Kings, led to tension within the band however and vocalist Clint Boge eventually left in early 2012 after several years of artistic wrangling. A promised fourth album was never completed as The Butterfly Effect limped on to a final tour with a different singer while Boge fronted Brisbane’s Like Thieves, a band that seemed to come and go for a while without really breaking out.
Finally, at a point in between The Butterfly Effect’s official break-up and a surprise Like Thieves reformation in 2018, Boge and TBE guitarist Kurt Goedhart renewed their acquaintance at a gig in Brisbane.
“There was a lot of growth, there was a lot of maturing,” admits Boge now, taking up the story.. “There was a lot of letting things go. When Kurt and I caught up at the Dead Letter Circus acoustic show in Brisbane in 2017, I gave him a hug and just said ‘Hey man, I don’t care what happened before, I’m quite happy to let things go. I just want to say hello’. He was of the same mind. He was like, ‘It was what it was. Let’s just move forward from there’. It was great. I was really happy with that.”
Boge explains that he “wrestled… for a couple of months” to get back in touch after that. He sent out an email asking if there was a chance the band could be put together again. Ben Hall and Glen Esmond got back to him pretty quickly. Goedhart took a little longer.
“We started communicating with each other on a different level, which was amazing”
Clint Boge
“He said, ‘I just wanna catch up. I just wanna have a beer and talk to you on the level and I’ll make my decision then’,” Boge says. “And then after we did that, it was our tour manager who just said, ‘You guys are doing it’. We put the Brisbane shows up on the reformation tour and it sold out within ten minutes. So I think the die was cast!”
Once they started working together again, Boge says the vibe was “incredible”. He was getting on better with the rest of the band and there was a lot more discussion about where they wanted to go with the music. The singer puts it down, once again, to growth and maturity.
“I think we needed to evolve. We needed to mature and have that evolution just to be able to speak to each other again. Because when we left each other, it was pretty bad. When we got back together, the vibe in the band room was unbelievable. I’ve never gotten on better with Kurt. I was really stoked with that, and also, we’d never talked about music the way we’d spoken about it when I came back. It was a case of, ‘What do you need me to do for the song? What do you need me to sing? How do you want me to construct these melody parts through the chord patterns?’”
It was an approach The Butterfly Effect had never taken before with their composing.
“We just sort of inherently trusted each other to do whatever we were going to do,” Boge says. “But we started communicating with each other on a different level, which was amazing. I think when you hear this album, especially the new singles, you generally get a sense of the band working as a band.”
The Butterfly Effect has been drip-feeding new songs since late 2019; so far the band has released four singles as they tease the fabled fourth album later this year. Some of the songs were left over from the troubled sessions that had caused the band to split originally. Others were just taking shape.
“We had, like, 20 or 30 demos from the back of Final Conversation of Kings that were never used, and we cherry picked the best of what we had,” Boge begins. “The song that came to my mind, over and over again, was Visiting Hours. I said to the guys, ‘We have to do that song. And that was number two! That was written as number two of the back of Final Conversation, probably early or middle 2009. When Kurt wrote Nil by Mouth and So Tired, they were brand new riffs.”
The first of those songs struck a strong chord with the singer.
“I remember walking into the band room one night and hearing this thing and thinking that was like New Noise by Refused. I loved it straight away, so I picked up the mic and laid it down almost immediately. I remember Benny saying to me, ‘I’ve heard you do that only a few times and you got it. Keep that’. And, funnily enough, we happened to be recording at that time, so we captured the demo. So I listened back to it and was like, ‘OK, this is what they want! Sweet!’ It’s pretty muchly the same as it was when we demoed it.”
COVID may have put the damper on any plans The Butterfly Effect had for touring but the break afforded them the chance to work on songs for the new album.
“COVID really hurt a lot of us,” Boge says evenly. “Many people, not only musicians – family, and people by and large. But what we did was, we basically went to ground. I think Queensland had it better than most states. NSW and Victoria had it terribly and WA locked themselves off from the rest of the world, but in between when we were allowed to see each other, we were in the band room, and we were working on new songs. And a lot of bands did that. I know a lot of bands around the world did that. So we were very fortunate that we lived in the state where we had those brief reprieves from not being able to leave the house.”
The next challenge for the band was coming up with a title for the new album. Since Unbroken, each new track from The Butterfly Effect has been accompanied by imagery of a single, silver bullet which Boge explains as a metaphor for the next album acting as a “cure” for the band – “what it’s gonna take for us to cure ourselves, and each other,” as he puts it. But that has nothing to do with the title of the album. Calling it IV was Ben Hall’s idea.
“I threw around some names: ‘Let’s call it this, let’s call it that’,” Boge says. “I can remember Benny sitting behind his drum kit saying, ‘Let’s just call it IV.’ One of my favourite Stone Temple Pilots albums is called No. 4. And there’s a whole bunch of bands that have named their albums using the numerical code, and so I thought, ‘Bugger it, let’s do it’.”
The album will be released on September 2, and then The Butterfly Effect hit the road on their first full national tour in almost a decade. They’re taking with them a hand-picked undercard featuring two of Australia’s current best, Melbourne altern-metallers Thornhill and fellow Brisbane proggers Caligula’s Horse. Boge is stoked that his personal choice, Thornhill, will be along for the ride.
“I really wanted to make it a bill, a line-up. I said to the guys, ‘We’ve gotta take Thornhill with us’, and then when Caligula’s Horse got floated across the proverbial bench, everyone was like, ‘Yeah man, let’s take those guys!’ I wanted to make it a night, almost a mini-festival, if you like, of three bands you may not see together, with an invigorated fanbase. You’ve got all the old school fans that love Butterfly Effect, plus all of the new fans who love Thornhill and Caligula’s Horse, and I just want to put that together.”
Clint Boge promises that all this is merely the beginning of a new chapter for The Butterfly Effect. They still have songs left over from the current sessions and it’s clear he’s confident that big silver bullet has killed off their problematic past. Expect more to come.
“There will be new music from The Butterfly Effect. You will not have to wait 14, 15 years to hear us. It’s great because I’m really excited that off the back of this album we wrote a bunch of songs, because we had nothing else to do! We just kept writing, so there’s 5 or 6 songs behind the album and there was talk of releasing an EP pretty quickly behind this, but I don’t know. Maybe we’ll do another album, but you won’t have to wait 15 years.”
IMAGE: Kristina Wild
