It’s rare for a song to float into my horizon and immediately overwhelm my senses with pure positive bliss. But Spike Vincent, the latest convert of Burger Records, has done exactly that, in under six minutes no less. The Sydney-based singer-songwriter is their new favorite thing right now, and I’m right there with them, absorbing his “Australian-tinged brand of pop/rock” like a thirsty cactus, straight to the dome.

“After releasing self recorded singles over the last two years,” Spike says, “I’d mustered together a live act that took my initial demos to a new place that was more chaotic, free and powerful. The natural thing to do was record them live and capture that energy. My goal with Spike Vincent has always been to do something original, honest and personal. With all the songs being inspired by true events in my life that I felt a need to write about to try and comprehend, move past and learn from.”

We back that process 100%. Music, like any art form, should be pure expression, absolved through pen and paper or paint or instrument, whatever tool necessary to create that ultimate release. And in Spike Vincent’s case, he’s doing it over the expanse of an album, honed in the underbelly of the Sydney underground community, and fine-tuned with a strong dose of perspective set to catchy guitar hooks, crooning vocals, and a slab of sweet synergy.

His self-titled debut drops Friday, February 16 on Dinosaur City Records via Inertia Music in Australia and Burger Records in the US, and today we’re sharing the very first taste with lead single “Lie In The Dust,” an upbeat burst of raw adrenaline soaked in melodic chords that’ll make your heart pump with joy, and then break in a million pieces. It’s easily the most infectious song I’ve heard this year, and yet it sounds like it could’ve fallen off a late 80’s post pop forklift.

“‘Lie In The Dust’ was really the beginning of Spike Vincent as it stands now. I jammed it up with my drummer and good friend Pauly McLean who played on this recording. I wrote the lyrics while working at a call centre in-between surveys while the auto-dial system did it’s thing. It became a song about the duality of my relationship to the idea of death. On one side having a fear of dying, without having achieved anything, without finding love or realising any of my dreams, that kind of stuff & on the other side the state of wanting to die when I’ve felt alone, lost & depressed. I’d been pretty badly heartbroken before I wrote the song. Thinking back to the days I spent chaining cigarettes in my attic bedroom, listening to side one of The Velvet Underground (self titled LP) over and over just watching the smoke drift up through the skylight. All I had was my records, a mattress and a pile of dust in the corner. Brushed aside, abject, unwanted, I felt a kinship to this image and the correlation to the dust we all become one day, when we inevitably return to the earth. I felt about as good the dust in the corner of my room, I wanted to become dust, or as it came to be, Lie In The Dust. Although the song speaks from the perspective of my depressed state, there’s a resolve to keep on keepin’ on that comes in confronting these thoughts and feelings rather than letting them take control. Writing, recording, & performing the song helped me to move past this moment in time and eventually carried me to another place where now people are dancing and singing along to it! Last year a few people said one of my songs really helped them get through a hard time or something like that, that’s huge for me, that’s what it’s all about! The process of writing this tune certainly helped me and every time I play it I still feel a release or gain a greater perspective on it. So I’m happy to finally share it, it’s a realisation of the fears in the song washing away! Not to die with your music in you some would say. C’est la vie, such is life, la dolce vita.”

“Lie In The Dust” joins previous singles “I Like You” and “Faded” on the album, both of which were rerecorded with the full band for the first time after circling through the live show gamut in Australia, much to the support of influential late 70s post-punk band The Scientist – which is so fucking cool. Spike Vincent will be launching the album with a record release show on February 16th at the Union Hotel in Newtown, so if you live in that zone, don’t sleep on this. For now, we’ll just be listening on repeat. –Maya Eslami