Performance Time - Saturday 6th June @ 5pm

.. On the back of their recent single Sunshower, Melbourne pop darlings The Little Stevies are proud to announce the release of their highly anticipated debut album “Love Your Band”. Making cubby houses has always been a favourite pastime for The Little Stevies. They’ve collaborated to create them since they were knee-high to grasshoppers. Then sisters Sibylla and Bethany and childhood friend Robin discovered music. Twenty years and three uni degrees later, The Little Stevies began work on their most ambitious cubby house yet. In early 2008, at a secret location, out of foam, mattresses, pillows and sleeping bags, they constructed their own recording studio the ‘Crimea Cubby’, and under the guidance of producer Jimi Maroudas (Tim Rogers, Pete Murray, Eskimo Joe), set about recording their debut album “Love Your Band”.

With their sound noticeably matured, and expanded by a swag of guest instrumentalists, The Little Stevies have finally captured their exuberant live energy in a full-length studio work. Sunshower, the first single lifted from “Love Your Band”, shot straight to the top of 'What's Hot' on the Australian iTunes homepage and received strong national airplay everywhere from Triple R through to Triple J. Its accompanying film clip, featuring the song in Auslan, quickly became a YouTube sensation. Named 'Single Of The Week' in Inpress (04/02/09), the song delivered the joyous, saccharine sound audiences have come to expect of The Little Stevies. But it's to “Love Your Band” - in stores Feb 21st through MGM - that all focus now shifts, as the band reveals the full spectrum of their new sound and its darker, often harder edge.

The Little Stevies debut long player is the follow up to their 2006 EP “Grow Up”, tracks from which included Triple J Unearthed faves Little Stevie and Strong And Brave. Triple J chose the band as a 'Next Crop Artist' in 2006, and the band fostered it through numerous festival appearances, their own headline shows, and support slots for artists as diverse as Kate Miller-Heidke and Weddings Parties Anything – a testament to their diversity and versatility as a pop act.

The band themselves have often struggled to define their own sound, but they’ve embraced their 'alt-pop' branding, assured that their edge comes from the myriad of genres and stories their songs draw upon. Having grown up together in families of second and third generation musicians and songwriters (their parents were in a band together, 70s pop sensations Dove), it's not difficult to see why their chemistry works. “Love Your Band” features the Stevies’ signature wall to wall three-part harmonies, adorned by lyrics that detail a band well in tune with themselves, both creatively and within the wider world. The band met producer Jimi Maroudas through a chance meeting. Beth explains: "Jimi saw us play in Melbourne, and came up at the end of the show to buy our EP. He didn't mention that he was a producer and that he'd worked with some of our heroes.

Over the next couple of months Myspace messages went back and forth between us, and we kept him up to date with the demos we were recording. It became very clear that he was the guy to produce our record. He shared the same belief and excitement for the songs as we did." Continues Sibylla: "We didn't take him seriously for a good few weeks! We were messaging back and forth and it wasn't until we looked him up and realised he’d recorded some of our favourite tracks that we suddenly realized ‘this guy is for real!’" Jimi's version of events: "The first time I saw The Little Stevies live, they came onto the stage and I couldn't help but stop and watch. It's a rare event but their show took me away to another space, I just remember being so charmed by their music. It's not often you get to work on music that absorbs you as a listener, and that's what I look for in all the projects that I get involved in". As for the recording process itself, the band spent time in the prestigious Sing Sing South studio laying down the drums and bass. They then moved to the infamous ‘Crimea Cubby’ to lay down the plethora of instrumental and vocal tracks, free from the pressures of time and money that normally come with the recording process.

The result is an album that feels at home with itself right from the first track. The intricacies of the recording process can be seen on the five-minute ‘Postcards from the Recording Studio’ documentary on their Myspace page. “Love Your Band” is alight with love and laughter, stalwarts of The Little Stevies live persona. The stories within scale the heights of joy and depths of despair, drawing on subject-matter that ranges from the wild fun of a disastrous camping weekend to the tragedy of watching a loved-one succumb to Alzheimer’s. And then of course there’s the crowd favourite about ‘the boy who stole a tram’. Cheeky, charming, often raucous, often contemplative, the resounding quality of this collection is its authenticity – that quality of music that comes straight from the heart, without self-consciousness or pretension.