• Interviews

• All
• Music
• Cinema
• TV
• Comic Books

Jul 24, 2026 Web Exclusive By Andy Von Pip Photography by Jack Saltmiras

After a decade together, Australian four-piece Body Type are still pushing forward. With a new album, a new creative chapter, and the same determination that has carried them from grassroots venues to international stages, they’re proving that longevity in music is its own achievement.

It’s not easy being in a band. Critical acclaim doesn’t always translate into the kind of income that funds tours or provides a living wage, and with grassroots venues closing at an alarming rate and even stadium shows struggling to sell out, live music finds itself in a very difficult place.

Body Type (Sophie McComish, Georgia Wilkinson-Derums, Annabel Blackman and Cecil Coleman) have won over critics since their earliest days and have shared stages with the likes of Pixies and Foo Fighters and appeared in a Julia Jacklin video. Yet despite the praise and opportunities, they’ve often found it difficult to make the numbers add up. Fittingly, the band’s third album is called Tally.

When we sit down for a chat, singer and guitarist Sophie McComish is disarmingly honest about life in a band. “It has gotten harder,” she sighs before adding, “but it’s also very important to keep doing it.”

This year marks the band’s tenth anniversary. The industry has changed a great deal since they started, but some of the casual sexism they encountered early on has proved remarkably persistent. “It hasn’t stopped, no,” she says, rolling her eyes. “Recently, I was asked if I knew how to adjust a microphone stand.”

The band have had some downtime after releasing two albums in quick succession. “Yup, Expired Candy was 2023, and before that, Everything Is Dangerous But Nothing’s Surprising was 2022,” McComish says. “So we kind of went bang bang, and then we took a minute to do the next one.”

During that time, the band members kept busy with other projects. “Georgia plays in this awesome punk band called G2G. They put out a record called The Gherkin, which was great,” McComish explains. “Annabel has a solo project, aptly titled Solo Career. She also put out an amazing record. Cecil plays drums in a few other bands, but she was also doing a law degree, which she just finished. And I run a little record label, Blossom Rot Records, so I’ve put some time and energy into that. So yeah, we’re always doing something.”

As for why it felt like the right time to come back together, McComish puts it down to the way Body Type naturally works rather than any grand plan. “I think with Body Type, it kind of just naturally happens. The way that we write is that Georgia, Annabel, and myself are kind of the main songwriters. So we’ll build a little collection of demos and start sending them to each other. And then it kind of reaches a point where there’s enough material to get in a room and start playing with it a bit.” She pauses to work out the timeline. “I think we started writing it probably in mid-to-late 2024. Because then we recorded it at the start of 2025.”

Once they were back in the same room, things came together quickly, and Tally began to take shape. “As is the Body Type way, once we’ve got the mission in mind, it’s like, all right, let’s go, go, go,” McComish says. “And we were kind of in a really fortunate position where we got some funding to make the album, with Stella Mozgawa from Warpaint producing in LA. So we had to work around Stella’s timeframe, and between getting the funding and hitting go and locking in Stella, God, we didn’t have much time at all. We had maybe three months to tie everything together.”

She shrugs it off. “So yeah, that all happened pretty quickly. But we’re pretty good at not being perfectionists or married to an idea. We’re pretty good at being flexible, and we don’t mind if things are a little rough around the edges.”

Mozgawa was clearly a great fit for the band, and McComish is still amazed by how naturally the collaboration came together. “I’m still pinching myself, and it just worked out even better than we possibly could have hoped for. There was such a natural connection, and she just totally got the sound that we were trying to go for.”

Mozgawa, who is originally from Sydney and happened to be back in Australia at the time, meant the band could squeeze in some pre-production before flying to Los Angeles.

“When we were playing through the songs, she just immediately started rattling off ideas, bands that were totally influencing her. She was like, ‘Oh, I’m getting some Pavement guitars with this one,’ or ‘a Guided by Voices vibe here.’ And immediately we were like, ‘Yeah, she gets it, this is going to be awesome.’ Whether we actually ended up sounding like any of those bands, I’m not sure. But the vibe was right.”

The band arrived in Los Angeles not long after wildfires had torn through the city, and for a while it was uncertain whether the trip would even happen. “The overall consensus was that maybe it’s actually a really beautiful thing, to go to a city that’s been ravaged by fire and going through such a hard time, and go and create art there,” McComish says. “Thank god we did.”

The record also throws in a few surprises, including bongos, a mellotron, and sounds you would not necessarily expect from Body Type. Those additions came largely from Mozgawa rather than anything the band had been experimenting with themselves.

“We’ve never done anything so fruity,” McComish laughs. “Stella’s an amazing musician and an amazing producer and just has all this awesome gear at her disposal.” The bongos in particular arrived almost by accident, late one night after the band had finished their studio time and moved on to overdubs at Mozgawa’s home setup.

“Things were just getting a little bit weird,” McComish says. “There’s this great video of her just vibing out on the bongos. It’s on ‘Tally,’ the album’s title track, which is one of Annabel’s songs. I remember Annabel being like, ‘What the fuck is this?’ But it worked.”

One of the more unexpected threads running through Tally is its connection to the artist Louise Bourgeois. It began with an exhibition that came through Sydney, Has the Day Invaded the Night or Has the Night Invaded the Day, which bandmate Georgia Wilkinson-Derums was keen to see. “I didn’t know much about the artist, but Georgia was a big fan,” McComish says.

Outside the Art Gallery of New South Wales stood one of Bourgeois’ enormous sculptures of a spider called Maman, which McComish describes as overwhelming in its power. She visited the exhibition with her own mother, making the experience feel even more personal. “It was very visceral, all about themes of womanhood, menstruation, and childbirth. It just felt so female in a way that I feel is quite hard to achieve without being obvious sometimes. It kind of felt like what we maybe try to do.”

McComish found herself scribbling down thoughts throughout the exhibition, while Wilkinson-Derums returned several times and did the same. Those fragments eventually fed into “Eye Is a Mouth Is a Face,” notably the first song the band wrote entirely together in the studio, without a demo to work from beforehand.

“We were trying to write the words and the melodies, and those were the things I’d jotted down in my phone from that show,” McComish says. “And then that just kind of spread out into everything else we were writing, those themes of womanhood, in all its glory and all its grossness.”

As McComish has just mentioned grossness, it seems like the perfect time to discuss the band’s video for “Sick Bag,” which sees her singing while, for want of a better word, puking. “Nice segue,” she laughs.

The video was made by Maddy Purdy, a longtime friend and collaborator who has now directed four videos for the band. McComish explains how the idea came together. “Maddy was like, ‘I’m just going to make a video for you guys.’ And we were like, ‘Oh, we don’t know about the budget.’ And she was like, ‘Don’t worry about it, I’m just going to come with an idea, and you guys just trust me.’”

The brief given to the band was simple. “We’re in boring business suits, running around the city of Sydney. We basically just rocked up and got told what to do.”

Purdy had also created a fake vomit mixture for the shoot. “Pineapple juice, peas, oats, lychee, I don’t know. It was absolutely revolting. But that’s how that came about. It was all her genius.” McComish is quick to praise the concept behind the video too.

“I really loved how she managed to take a song that’s a pretty soppy heartache song and turn it into something completely different, while still making it work with the themes.”

It’s not the first time the band have found themselves performing in public while commuters walk past, largely unaware. The video for “Mulberry,” made by another close collaborator, Jax O’Mara, saw them doing much the same thing.

Far from being uncomfortable, McComish says she actually enjoys the experience. “I kind of love it, actually. Everyone is just so fixated on their own lives, their own work, where they have to go, no one even really notices you. It’s kind of fun. It kind of feels like you’re really toying with the general young professional public.”

The final track on the album, “Everything All in a Row,” is a notably tender moment, a shift from the record’s more upbeat, rockier stretches. “I like that you noticed that one, because I feel really proud of that one,” she says.

It’s a song that had been sitting unfinished for a long time.

“I have a thing with the more emotional, tender songs. I think it’s because I prefer playing the rockier stuff live. I prefer getting that immediate reaction from an audience, and the energy that comes from playing the more upbeat things live. So when it comes to the tender ones, I’m often like, ‘Oh no, let’s just leave that; we’ll do that another time, we won’t record that one.’”

This time, though, bandmate Cecil Coleman pushed for it to be finished, which meant McComish had to return to lyrics she had first started writing nearly a decade earlier.

“It kind of meant that the original lyrics got combined with some new feelings and some new thoughts. I feel really happy with where that one landed.”

The band remain with Poison City in Australia, but Tally is being released everywhere else through p(doom), the label run by King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard. McComish first met the Gizzard crew while living in New York in 2014, and they remained friends over the years. Body Type later played one of the band’s Gizz Fest events and supported them at one of their biggest Sydney shows.

It finally came full circle earlier this year at the afterparty for King Gizzard’s orchestral performance at the Sydney Opera House.

“I was talking to a bunch of them, and I was like, ‘Hey, there’s a new Body Type album, do you guys want to hear it?’ And they were like, ‘Hell yeah, show us.’ They really liked it, and their label team really liked it too,” McComish explains. “It felt really organic, and also so flattering that they wanted to put it out. It’s a nice testament to enduring friendships in the music community.”

Body Type’s music has always had a way of sneaking up on you: nimble little guitar lines weaving in and out until, after a few listens, everything clicks into place. It’s a quality that runs through their entire catalogue, and one McComish doesn’t feel has changed, even a decade and three albums into the band’s journey.

Asked whether revisiting the earlier releases feels like listening to a completely different group, she responds: “Nah, it just feels like us, you know? The same holds true for Tally. I’m really happy with it. It still has that Body Type sound. Even though we’ve been a little more ambitious, maybe a little more experimental, with a bit of mellotron and a bit of bongo, I think it’s just the nature of how we write, and how we’ve learnt to be a band and play our instruments. I can’t imagine us doing anything different.”

www.bodytypemusic.bandcamp.com/music

Subscribe to Under the Radar’s print magazine.

Support Under the Radar on Patreon.