The Goon Sax have announced they are breaking up. “To all fans of the Goon Sax we have some bittersweet news…” the band wrote on Twitter. “After nine years of giving it our everything we’ve decided to draw the curtain on this band. It’s taken us places stranger, more beautiful, and far beyond anything we could have imagined, and brought us to meeting and working with so many special and incredibly inspiring people. Our gratitude to everyone who’s been with us and allowed the madness of the last 9 years to happen is far beyond anything we can palpably express.”
The Brisbane trio have also canceled their scheduled US tour, including shows with Interpol and Spoon as well as Pavement, but “promise we will play one or two more shows in Austalia before we finally say goodnight. For us it feels like a happy ending. We love each other and we love you! Thank you for everything.”
Louis Forster, James Harrison, and Riley Jones were in high school when they released their debut album, 2016’s Up to Anything. Its follow-up, We’re Not Talking, arrived a couple of years later. After signing with Matador, the Goon Sax put out their final album, Mirror II, which was produced with John Parish, last year.
In our Artist Spotlight interview ahead of the release of Mirror II, Jones said: “We’ve known each other for so long now, we’ve spent so much time together. It’s kind of like beyond friendship. It’s more like family, but it’s also something else. Like, I wonder sometimes how I exist outside of this context, because it’s such a huge part of my life. And I think that I maybe lean on James and Louis just as I go about, you know, doing my thing in the world. I kind of always know that they’re there in some way.”
Forster added: “We really learned how to play music from playing together, and there’s a lot of instruments that we play in this band that none of us really played a whole lot before. I feel like I learned how to play lead guitar over Riley’s drumming and Jim’s bass playing, and I think that’s true for all of us. It’s like going to primary school together and learning how to read and write from reading each other’s texts or something.”
— The Goon Sax (@thegoonsax) July 12, 2022
