Oli Leimbach isn’t used to taking a vacation. On his last pleasure-trip to Japan, with brother (and second half of Lime Cordiale) Louis, he ended up shooting two impromptu music videos—one up in the snowy mountains, the other amidst the bustling Tokyo streets.
This balmy evening in June, he’s finally taking a break. “I think our management are a bit angry,” he tells me, “for having a holiday leading up to an album release.” But he seems happy to have a reprieve in paradise: swimming along the Sicilian shoreline, free from the sharks that plague the waters back in his Australian homeland. On Aug. 18, they’re launching a two-month European tour in Hamburg, Germany before heading home for a few October dates down under.
Ahead of their third album, Enough of the Sweet Talk (out July 26), the duo recently released the single “Cold Treatment,” which isn’t afraid of a tight poppy hook—so long that it maintains that signature Lime Cordiale edge.
“Cold Treatment” can have many meanings—what inspired the song?
It was a song that we wrote quite a while ago, and it might’ve even made it onto the deluxe side of our second album, but we wrote this a while ago. It’s about getting the cold treatment from your partner. We wrote the song pretty quickly and sat on it for a while and mucked around with it for ages in the studio.
There’s some songs that come really easy to us, and we can just write in a day and then whip it out. And they tend to be the cheeky songs, you know, but this one took us a while to get the right feel for it. I sing this song, [but] my brother sings the majority of the songs in our band. I always find that whenever I sing a song, it feels really different because people aren’t necessarily as used to that.
“Cold Treatment” has just been kind of up there in our probably going to make the album folder for quite a while. And, well, it’s a pop song. We get scared of pop songs. We get scared of something being potentially too poppy. This was maybe one of those ones where we were a bit worried. But we just kind of embraced the pop vibe and went for it—you know, two male Taylor Swift pop stars.
We actually wrote this one with our producer Dave Hammer. And he was just bashing on the piano and came up with that opening riff. I think then I just was scrolling through these, like, ramblings and saw cold treatment. That line just pretty naturally came out.
I think I have about 800 notes in my phone right now.
If my phone got stolen and someone got into the phone, probably the one thing I’d worry about is the embarrassing amount of notes and voice memos on that. I don’t really care about the photos—and there’s some weird, weird photos on there, and there’s some nudes—but yeah, it’s the notes.
How does humor play into your music?
I think we like to often talk about heavy subjects and sing about them in a fun way. We take our music and what we do seriously, but I think we don’t take ourselves seriously. And I think that makes it easier.
It feels like you can’t judge something that’s too, too silly. Maybe that’s our go-to, maybe just making jokes out of things means, ”Oh, well, you know, how can you really judge us on what we’re doing if we’re taking the piss of ourselves. You can’t take the piss of us if we’ve already done it first.” I think it’s just a natural thing that we do. I think, in all of our music videos, there’s a little bit of tongue-in-cheek in them. Our go-to is just to make something funny and dumb. And we have to pull back from that.
The seriousness of your musicianship comes through, though.
I’m a clarinet player. I studied classical clarinet at the conservatorium in Sydney. And that’s where we met the other musicians—like, our drummer started studying jazz, and the other two guys in our band went and studied at the con as well. But, you know, Louis was a visual artist. When we were growing up, he played trumpet and I played clarinet. Our mum was a classical cellist and piano player. And she’d always be like, “Play a little duet for your granny at dinnertime.” And we’d be like, “No, I don’t want to do it. It’s so embarrassing.” You’d have to force us into this room together to be playing music together.
Then I think as [we] get older and the age gap seemed to get a bit smaller, we started enjoying the same types of music and sharing music. And then eventually we just really naturally started writing a few songs together. Nothing that we’ve ever done has been planned.
On this new album, we’ve got some good trombone and horns and strings, and a lot of that classical stuff comes in and a lot of the weirdness of the world music and classical and jazz music that we have always been inspired by—I think that comes out.
Can you talk about Largo beer? Is that what you imagine people drinking when they listen to Lime Cordiale?
People have like some pretty vague describing words when they, like to describe [our music], they’ll [say], you know, “summery, summery, summery.” I don’t know how to get away from the “summery.” I’d love to write a wintry song. What do I have to do to write a wintry song—go into a log cabin and do a little acoustic album?
As for the beer, I feel like we just wanted to create a beer that we could enjoy constantly and not get over it. It’s got a nice little flavor, but it’s sessionable. So that was the key word of that beer. And we’ll hopefully bring it over to, over to New York and throw Budweiser out the window.
As for listening to this new song, “Cold Treatment,” I don’t know: scream it in the car, scream it at your loved ones, put it on if you’re having an argument. That’d be a fun experiment.