Tristan Courtney-Prior is best known around Sydney as guitarist for the bands Peabody and Shearin’ but over the last year or so he’s stepped out of the shadows of those bands to release a couple of singles in the lead-up to his debut album Replication which is set for release on September 13th.

As a solo artist, Tristan dives deeper into dark, post-punk guitar rock. The kind of place where Sonic Youth honed their craft at the finely-balanced point between the mainstream and the slipstream and where Interpol decontextualised the rhythms and atmosphere of Joy Division. 

The first single was ‘Elevator‘, a tumbling, tension-laden post-punk dispatch and now I’m pleased to be a blue to premiere the video his latest single ‘Irene and I‘. Over pummelling drums and guitars that hurtle headlong from the speakers, Tristan describes as “what would happen if the characters from Bob Dylan’s ‘Tangled Up In Blue’ grew up in the Blue Mountains.” The irresistible melodic rush of his vocal matches the  rhythmic clamour of the music perfectly, his voice recalling some of the icons of early 80s post-punk such as Julian Cope of The Teardrop Explodes.

The video clip finds Tristan mirroring the urgency and the melodic rush of the song in various daily monochromatic locations, while guitars clang and dive-bomb around him.