Premiere: Perth's Old Mervs strive for glory with Out Of Luck, announce launch shows

The new single from the south-west surf rockers opens an exciting new chapter, with new shows and new management behind them.

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Header image by Daniel Hildebrand.

West Australia's rock world is amongst the healthiest its been in a long while, and although there are a lot of charting heavyweights helping push it both nationally and internationally, a big reason for its growing presence in the last year or two comes from an exciting next generation of artists, each giving the genre their own distinct spins and twists.

South West WA-based duo Old Mervs are a group synonymous with that exciting, potential-filled next generation. Over the last three years, they've transformed from a passion project between friends to a go-to across playlists and live music venues across the state, bolstering a rough-around-the-edges surf-rock sound full of charm and energy that has grown alongside the two-piece; the duo being one of those rare league of acts who genuinely get better with everything they do.

There's a progression and evolution that you can trace through singles littering their discography since 2018, as the pair - Margaret River-based David House and Toodyay-based Henry Carrington-Jones - fill into their shoes and they explore the outer fringes of surf-rock, indie and punk. Take Wait Around as a new single arriving earlier in the year, for example, and its ruckus-inducing grit that feels indebted to the early days of Australian surf-rock and the genuine charisma and charm that fill each guitar-rich melody and each anthemic chorus.

Likewise, it's something that shows on their new single Out Of Luck, which when paired with the single that comes before it, feels like the beginning of an exciting new chapter for Old Mervs, one that has the whole state in their corner. Out Of Luck shows everything there is to love about Old Mervs in a three-minute burst of rich indie-punk, with grunge-y instrumentation leading the charge amongst David's vocal, which turns in on itself and looks inwards as Out Of Luck marks itself as a song on the more reflective and emotive side of Old Mervs' discography.

"[Out Of Luck is about] when you’re trying to convince yourself that things aren’t bad or worrying you, and that you don’t need to overthink that stuff at all," he says on the song, recorded with Sam Ford (POND, Abbe May). "But you end up thinking about all those things anyway, which can be really hard to deal with on a daily basis." As Henry continues, the song was seemingly an easy one to smash through, as he explains: "The studio process was fluent and over the course of two days it allowed us to finish the song in a way that we were happy with."

As mentioned, Out Of Luck feels like the opening of an exciting new chapter for Old Mervs. Alongside Wait Around, there's a pair of singles here that soundtrack evolution and growth, and with new pals coming on board - take SIDEQUEST (the management company behind Perth favourites Sly Withers, Flossy and Ursula), for example - it seems like Old Mervs' trajectory is facing up and up and up.

In the meantime, you can take a listen to Out Of Luck as it premieres on Pilerats below, and be sure to catch the pairing as they launch the show with a pair of south-west dates in August (at YMCA HQ and Jack Rabbit Slim's to be precise, on August 27th and 28th respectively).