The Gin Palace, who include members of Crow, Glide, The Aerial Maps, Charlie Horse, Copperline, Joeys Coop, Caligula and The Finalists in their ranks, have just released the second single from their forthcoming album The Year Of The Dog.

‘Unsettled‘, written by Peter Fenton (Crow) and Jim Moginie (Midnight Oil), is a dialogue with this country’s troubled past, an unflinching, poetic and honest look at a nation’s failings. An essential process required before all Australians can do a healing walk, together, from the Uluru Statement From The Heart to the Indigenous Voice to Parliament and beyond.

With its haunting melody and emotive lyrics, the song captures the unsettled feeling that many Australians experience when confronting the country’s history of colonialism and the ongoing struggle for Indigenous rights.

Musically the song launches out of a sonic bushland, soaring high as Fenton paints an evocative landscape populated by long tall men, waterholes, frangipani dresses and military tyre marks in the red dirt. 

Moginie describes the track as “clear eyed, with a warm heart but a brutal sound,” exemplified by the guitars of Paul McDonald and Mark Tobin, shimmering and swerving like the haze of summer heat. Behind them the rhythm section is stridently rock solid, propelling the song forward and underpinning the weight of the subject matter.

The video clip for the song, which featured nationally on ABC TV Breakfast, finds the band performing with the spectacular backdrop of the Blue Mountains, a sonic message and clarion call, dispatched from on high.

Recorded at producer Paul McDonald’s Blue Mountains studio, it’s a suitably grand and eloquent musical canvas for a song that addresses issues of this magnitude.