Howling Bells – The Loudest Engine (2011)

Australian rockers Howling Bells release their third album, The Loudest Engine, on September 12 through Cooking Vinyl. Recorded at Battle Born studios in Las Vegas with The Killers’ Mark Stoermer producing, the album is said to “forge a sonic union with Nevada’s expansive surroundings and Las Vegas’s street-soiled vibe.”
Whittled down from thirty demos to twelve full-fleshed out songs, much of the album was written on the road – a fact often reflected in the lyrics. Take the album’s title track for instance: “We wrote this song about the soul of the tour bus,” says frontwoman Juanita Stein. “A wise ol’ beast, she sees all, hears all, knows a million and one stories. And when you’re spending as much time as we do in a vehicle, lying there at night contemplating a million different things, you develop a relationship with the space. The lyrics came about as a poem one night when I couldn’t sleep, the sound of the engine kept me awake: ‘I spend my days on the loudest engine of all, a think tank, your road priest, she’s everyone’s favourite whore’.”