Australian Hagiographic by These Guy

"In the narrow shaft of clear, bright sunlight where Australians think, there is little room for the view in which we all just seem to bump around in the shadows with little understanding of what it is all about." - Donald Horne, The Lucky Country (1964)

"I've often felt that dreams are answers to questions we haven't yet figured out how to ask." - Fox Mulder, The X-Files (1995)

Australian Hagiographic follows a period of deafening radio silence from the now Sydney-based alt-pop circumnavigator Joe Saxby, aka These Guy. Thankfully though, at least some of that time consisted of intensive communion with the archives and unimpeded exploration of the outer extraterrestrial realms - all done with the sole intention of producing the sound document that now lies before you.

Part-concept album, part-mixtape - Australian Hagiographic is, more than anything, the Nation's first piece of musical sci-fi Australiana. Haunted by recurrent imagery of alien ships searching the outback for their next Abductee, the record sees These Guy pin the entirety of the L*cky C*untry under His psychedelic microscope. No one is spared, and no one comes out the other end looking all that good.

The first half of the album is a sort of examination of the idea of the Australian Dream. It doesn't commit to any particular idea of what that Dream might be. It's more just intrigued by why we've chosen to use the word "Dream" - something imaginary and wracked with mystery - to encapsulate all that we hope for ourselves in the future, and often from a purely material standpoint.

What exactly is it that we collectively hope for ourselves? And are these hopes worthy of a label as lofty and psychospiritual as "Dream"? So goes the refrain from the album's opening track 'Crazy Sounds': "whose dream is that anyway?"

Conspicuously absent from the record's second half is any mention of the word "Dream". That's because it's a deadass confrontation with Reality.

'Australien Skies' kicks off this Reality excursion as a direct reference to the homegrown 2015 documentary of the same name - perhaps the most Realistic and Truthful depiction we have of the Reality of the Alien Presence that still lives among us to this day. The narrator of the song (and album) questions why he's being told by the Authorities to sit and wait away from the scene of the Abduction, but ultimately has no complaints, because at the end of the day it's the Mystery that matters. "I could sit and wait here Forevermore," he trills.

A final word of warning: this wouldn't be a These Guy record without a rampant sense of semi-indulgent eclecticism. Be advised that in this regard, These Guy has absolutely gone off the leash here. Yes indeed, He's gone completely rabid. From the placid, jangling strains of 'Drivin Through Town On A Crisp Winter's Mornin' and 'Somethin Different' to the intermittent heavy metal cacophony of 'Luck's Got Nothin To Do With It' and 'Our Hole', this album is what its Chief Engineer Chris Brownbill labelled, in a moment of understandable exhaustion, "a real journey".

Written over a period of years, recorded in a mere 10 days, and packaged into a purely Australian-made Product for your ears and mind in the southern hemispheric Winter of 2025, Australian Hagiographic is These Guy's manifesto on the absolute state of the L*cky C*untry.

"The truth is out there - let's go have a look."

Just a little bit of somethin different

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