Adelaide’s newest outfit discuss nerves, songwriting, mental health and why their debut show felt like jumping off a cliff.
There is a particular kind of madness that infects musicians.
The sort that convinces you spending three years writing songs, obsessing over details, questioning every note, every lyric, every decision, is somehow a reasonable use of your time.
The sort that makes you stand under hot stage lights in front of strangers and expose pieces of yourself that most people spend their entire lives trying to hide.
It’s not rational.
It’s not healthy.
And it’s exactly why bands like Thirteen Days exist.
Fresh off their debut performance at the Barriers single launch in Adelaide, I sat down with Joel and Max from one of the city’s newest heavy acts to talk about where the band came from, the strange chemistry behind their songwriting, and what it feels like when three years of work suddenly gets compressed into a twenty-minute set.
The answer?
Terrifying.
“I’ve honestly never been more nervous than any show that I’ve played,” Joel admitted.
This from a musician who has spent years playing live.
Three years of writing. Three years of planning. Three years of refining a sound.
Then suddenly you’re standing backstage wondering if the whole thing is about to explode in spectacular fashion.
Or worse.
Work exactly as intended.
Because success can be just as frightening as failure.
What struck me most during the conversation wasn’t the technical side of the band. It wasn’t the gear, the recording process, or even the music itself.
It was how openly they spoke about why they create.
For Max, music isn’t a hobby.
It’s survival.
“Whenever I’m having these big moments in my life, it’s sort of been therapeutic for me to express them poetically.”
That’s the sentence that hung in the air.
Not because it’s unique.
Because every musician watching this interview will immediately understand it.
The need.
The compulsion.
The inability to simply leave it alone.
Later in the conversation, the discussion shifted toward performing live and that strange withdrawal musicians experience when they’re away from the stage.
I found myself nodding along harder than any journalist probably should.
Because I know exactly what they mean.
That feeling when you attend a show and spend the entire night wishing you were the one standing under the lights.
The itch.
The addiction.
The thing that refuses to go away.
“I don’t want to go on stage and run around and scream. I need to go on stage and do that.”
The room got very honest after that.
The kind of honest that only happens when musicians stop pretending they’re normal people.
The band’s sound comes from what they describe as a “fire and ice” approach to songwriting. Joel gravitates toward melody and huge emotional moments. Max pulls from darker places.
The collision between those opposing forces has become the band’s identity.
And honestly?
You can hear it.
It’s there in the soaring melodies.
It’s there in the atmosphere.
It’s there in the tension between hope and despair that seems woven into everything they write.
This isn’t a band trying to fit neatly inside a genre.
This is what happens when two songwriters pull in opposite directions and somehow arrive at the same destination.
By the end of the conversation, the discussion had drifted toward Adelaide’s heavy scene, favorite local bands, upcoming shows, and future plans.
But the thing I kept coming back to wasn’t any of that.
It was the image of two musicians standing backstage before their first show together after spending years building something in private.
Wondering if anyone would care.
Then stepping out anyway.
That’s courage.
Or stupidity.
In heavy music, those two things often look remarkably similar.
Watch the full interview with Thirteen Days below as we discuss their debut show, their full album release, songwriting influences, the Adelaide scene and what comes next for one of the city’s most promising new heavy bands.
This is the gospel.
I bite crowd surfers.
Killer.
