Baked Beans are babbling into the BC

I remember coming home from school and eagerly looking in the pantry for some goodies and hearing my mum say, “Oh, there’s Baked Beans…” A statement to which my response was “piss off, mum.”
I also remember looking at this years Gizzfest line-up and thinking “Oh, there’s Baked Beans,” but this time, I couldn’t have been more excited. And rightfully so, with Beans being the most recent local act to sign to Flightless Records (King Gizzards revered home-grown label) as well as seeing them release their first album this year, there is a bloody lot to be excited about.
If you’re unfamiliar with them, Baked Beans is comprised of Matt Blach (The Murlocs, The Rusties), Jack Kong (Gonzo, Traffik Island), Lachlan McKiernan (The Rusties, The Grunes), Vincent Clemenston and Mitch Rice. After jamming together since they were 16 and playing under a lot of different monikers, the band officially formed in 2016,
“Before that we used to always play around in my dad’s basement in Ocean Grove and jam out mostly three chord covers that we would start playing after we’d had a few drinks, it was really fun,” states the groups lead vocalist Matt Blach.
The two years since have seen the band gaining notoriety for their unique prog-esque ballads, with their debut album ‘Babble,’ selling out online purely in presales. Speaking of the response to ‘Babble’ the band said,
“We knew there was a little bit of hype, just from people commenting on Flightless posts saying ‘when are you going to do Baked Beans stuff’ and Reddit had a few threads that mentioned us which is really exciting,” Mitch says, before Jack interjects, “Vinnie is the master of all the threads, he sits in his room and researches us all the time.”
“Vinnie’s got supply and demand covered,” Mitch continues. “He just goes on Reddit and posts, ‘can’t wait for the new Beans album’ and hype just builds from there. If you actually look at the names of the people posting about us online they will all be stuff like, ‘Vindog420’ and ‘BigMickyClem’.”

Releasing Babble through Flightless, the response has been immediate, with the album’s first single ‘Slow’ already scoring a play on the National League Baseball (USA). “The response has been insane. I find it really crazy how the album has sold out before we have even played shows with most of these songs before. We are waiting for the album tour to play a lot of it,” states Vinnie
Luckily, the wait isn’t much longer, with the band having recently announced both their spot at Gizzfest, as well as their own headline tour in support of the album and the lads are couldn’t be more stoked.
“We’re really excited to be back at Gizzfest this year,” responds Mitch, “the timing has been pretty great having it at the tail end of the Babble Tour. We’ll also be including some new material we’ve been eager to let loose.”
When & Where: The Barwon Club, Geelong – November 9.
Written by Alex Callan