Sitting down over a couple tall boys at the festival’s headquarters, the band, visibly jet-lagged, diverts to topics around other music mythology, including how the original version of “Love Shack” was 40 minutes long; about drummer Charley Drayton playing with everyone from Miles Davis to Mariah Carey; that time Bob Dylan asked session musicians to record a half-hour jam in the style of Anthrax; and about how painter Joe Becker once made a cover for their single that featured “18 erect dicks.” Guitarist, keyboardist, and vocalist Erica Dunn, with an almost parental mix of loving bemusement and tender annoyance, spends half the interview reminding the band to stay on track, to little avail. In the end, through overtired giggling, guitarist and vocalist Gareth “Gaz“ Liddiard finally says “The new album is good.”

At first, that radiant liveliness seems strange from a band that has devoted the bulk of its music to skewering the ugliest, most carcinogenic aspects of collective human behaviour. Vile conspiracy theories, sycophancy, fake news, the Dunning-Kruger Effect, Epstein Island, death through automation, and a general stench of cognitive decay have all figured as primary themes for their nervy, shuddering songs. Their latest, the excellent Fairyland Codex, is no exception, but when they aren’t touring and playing re-enactments of this grotesque real-time play, the band is focused on existing in a much more idyllic place. A few years ago, they moved from Melbourne into a far more remote, bucolic part of Australia, to escape both the rising, gentrified prices and the neuroses permeating daily city life.

“The studio we record in is in the bush next to the river. We spent most of the Southern Hemisphere summers there recording, swimming and drinking beer. It’s really nice, and we don’t have to rush,” says Liddiard.

All this isn’t to say that Tropical Fuck Storm are seeking some sort of banal Zen balance. There is no detachment on display here, and it’s wildly intoxicating to see how engaged they are with contemporary life. Unlike most lyric-writers who constantly try to write ornate lyrics that ape 20th century writers, reaching for sterile immorality, the band’s lyrics trace a direct trajectory of modernity, a trilobite of this particular time in history.

“What’s going on is the same as it always was. Fucking Shakespeare probably said something like ‘I put my frilly fucking collar on and picked my fucking quill up and stuck it in his eye.’ Is that dated? No!” rages Liddiard, as the rest of the band roar with laughter.