The Rubens on their bold and confident third record

After winning the revered triple j Hottest 100 in 2015, The Rubens showed Australia that they are truly a force to be reckoned with. Moving on to constant sell out tours world-wide, it seems life has been a bit crazy for the New South Wales five-piece over the past few years.
Speaking with the groups lead vocalist Sam Margin, Forte sussed out the recording process of their third album, LO LA RU, and how The Rubens may have made up their own country…
So what is ‘LO LA RU’?
“We were looking for something that symbolised the record and the process that we underwent making the record. We found the producers ourselves, we did it in our own studio, our bass player Will was the engineer, and so we did this record in our own way,” Margin explains.
“We also recorded this album in our hometown, which is a very different dynamic to New York, which is where we recorded the previous two albums [The Rubens, 2012 & Hoops, 2015]. We ended up in this weird little world that we had created for ourselves so we thought it would be funny, or not as much funny, but it would be representative of the recording process to name the album after a fake nation that we had made up.
“We spoke about it and came up with the idea of making it sound like a tropical paradise in the South Pacific, some little Island that was ours. And so ‘LO LA RU’ sort of just stuck,” he continues. “The album art is the flag for this made up country and it was also something we could go really far with so all of the album merchandise and everything are all centred around this fake nation we had created.”
So there you have it, LO LA RU is in fact a fictional place (so stop looking for cheap flights online).
But could it ever expand to be more than just fiction? Could it ever become a festival by the band to take listeners to the world of LO LA RU?
“We absolutely will, well, our plan is too,” laughs Margin. “We have always thought about putting on a festival or trying to run an event with heaps of bands that we like and book them ourselves. There is the thought that we will maybe do a ‘LO LA RU’ Festival some time next year.”
Other than taking the journey to a fictitious utopia, The Rubens also branched out of their comfort zone for album number three by collaborating on the song ‘Never Ever’, with none other than the APRA Breakthrough Artist, Sarah Aarons.

“The album was done so we weren’t even trying to write a song for The Rubens,” he explains. “We were just doing a song writing session to see what it’s like to collaborate, as we hadn’t done anything like that before. We thought maybe if we write a song, we could possibly give it to someone else to perform.
“We ended up writing ‘Never Ever’ which was written in about five hours and we didn’t even say anything to our managers about it and we didn’t think about it for like a week. And a week later our managers got the song and they lost their shit, so then we had to consider trying to fit it onto the album, which we did,” he continues. “The biggest dilemma was ‘can we have a feature on an album by The Rubens?’ as we had never done that before… but eventually we thought, fuck it, you can do whatever you want these days – it’s not as if there is rules – so we put it on.”
LO LA RU will be released on June 29 through Ivy League
Available for streaming and purchase
Written by Alex Callan
Photo by Ali Lander-Shindler