Culture Wars: A Debut Album Crafted In Stadiums

This December, Austin-based outfit Culture Wars are touring in support of their debut album, Don't Speak. The debut album comes after the band have already built up a loyal following through their constant touring and high-profile support slots. They've toured the world with the likes of Maroon 5, Amy Shark, LANY and Wallows, playing in front of tens of thousands of people.

Vocalist Alex Dugan joins The Note from a hotel room in Berlin between sold-out shows on their European tour. The band couldn't be hotter - in terms of popularity and actual temperature - due to most of the shows in Europe not having air conditioning during this summer heatwave. Dugan shares that only a couple of days ago the band played one of their sweatiest shows yet with a sold-out room in Stockholm, Sweden. 

The upcoming Australian tour is the official beginning of Dugan's Australian summer holiday. He comes every year with his Australian wife - who grew up in Sydney - for some rest and family time.

Culture Wars were most recently in Australia as support for Amy Shark and LANY, on two separate tours within days of each other. The band originally were meant to tour with LANY in June 2024; however, LANY had to reschedule their dates to November. Culture Wars were then already booked to support Amy Shark, but LANY's team had to call in a last-minute favour. This meant that at one point Culture Wars played four shows in four days in Adelaide, Melbourne, Perth and then Adelaide again. 

"When they rescheduled the dates, they had an Australian opener already," Dugan explains. 

"Then it turns out, I think it was like the week before the tour was supposed to start. Something had happened, unfortunately, like with the family of someone that was in the opening Australian band. They had some sort of family emergency thing, and they had to cancel. So they came to us and were like, 'Hey, you're already here', and I'm like, 'Well, yeah, we're here, but we're in the middle of another tour'."

"So we literally were bouncing, we played Adelaide twice within a week by bouncing back and just abusing Qantas, but it worked!" 

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The writing process for their album Don't Speak officially started in 2020, but the band have been working towards this debut for 11 years, ever since Dugan met drummer David Grayson. It took time to have the band locked into the lineup it has now. 

"The real band was solidified really in 2019, 2020, and we started kind of doing this. We wrote an entire album, and then we did a lot of touring in that 8-month stretch with a lot of different people, including LANY, Maroon 5, Wallows and Keane."

The band weren't happy with how the back half of the album was sounding and began to become apprehensive about playing it live. 

"If we don't like it now, we're not going to like it later," Dugan admits. 

"I think when we went to go play it live, we were like, oh, this doesn't feel right. Doing those tours and doing those bigger stadium arena gigs, especially in Asia where it's 40,000, 60,000 people on different nights and it's a different animal. I think it gave us this sense of, oh, when we're under pressure, or whatever you want to call it, this is the music that we feel represents us. As opposed to being in a dark room writing and being like, 'I think that's cool'. Just the human interaction of putting yourself out there, not necessarily like the audience’s reaction. I mean, that does matter, but we weren't necessarily gauging that. It was like, we don't feel like this is us. So we learned a lot from doing that."

When touring with Maroon 5, playing stadiums, the band were able to watch and learn what it's like to perform at the highest level. When speaking with the band, they learned that Maroon 5 toured their debut album for three years. 

"We were like, 'Oh, we're not doing that for three years. We don't want to play it now. We're not gonna play it for three years!' We were like, alright, let's go back to the drawing board, let's keep writing. Worst case, we have what we have, right? If we don't beat it, it's done, right? So the risk was low.

"But we ended up replacing half the album, and that half of the album is 'Don't Speak', 'In The Morning', '(Tokyo)', 'Bittersweet', it's like a huge chunk of the album. To me, it kind of is the album. If it hadn't happened, I don't know what would have transpired."

Catch Culture Wars performing at Lion Arts Factory on Wednesday 9 December. Tickets on sale at moshtix.com.au