Initially a solo project for frontman Dane Pavic, Mars On Holiday was developed during Pavic’s time in Melbourne during the lockdown of 2021. His initial mission was to create a project that didn’t fit strictly within one genre, opening himself up to experimentation without barriers. As songs were written and the project continued to build momentum creatively, he moved back to Perth and enlisted his friends Daniel Chan, Jack Schubert, and Maks Pavic. Finding the middle ground between experimental creativity and strong, structured songwriting can be tricky, but on ‘We’re Gonna Change’, Mars On Holiday make it sound easy – The rhythm section finds a deep, slick groove here; with shimmering innerspeaker-esque guitars and a melancholic vocal performance from Pavic that washes over the track, mirroring the theme perfectly as he details a fleeting sense of romantic bliss.
“This song explores the inevitability of the end of the ‘honeymooning’ phase, where the initial shine of a relationship is starting to wear off and you’re beginning to feel like you are both slowly drifting apart from each other. You know it’s inevitable, and that it wouldn’t last forever, but you hope that if you simply ignore it and pretend it’s not happening then it won’t happen. Deep down you know it’s probably wishful thinking – but this time it’ll be different…right?”
DANE PAVIC, MARS ON HOLIDAY
The track was independently recorded, and then sent away to Aria award-winning producer Steven Schram (Paul Kelly, San Cisco, Mildlife) for mixing. As expected, Schram has returned a lucious, textured and polished mix here – one that throws the band right into the ring with the heavyweights of the genre; fans of Tame Impala, The Lazy Eyes and Psychedelic Porn Crumpets will almost certainly get around this one.
The music video for ‘We’re Gonna Change’ is of incredibly high quality too, filmed amongst the dunes with self-programmed lighting – and although the band initially thought they had wasted their time on the video, the end product was exactly what they envisioned.
“We’re really lucky in WA to have such diverse and amazing scenery within a few hours drive of Perth – so we always try to take advantage of this when shooting videos. We had this idea in our heads of sand dunes blanketed by a sea of neon lights, but had absolutely no idea how to do it. We’d never shot with programmable lights before, much less even shot a video with anything remotely resembling a budget. To save on costs we basically pre-learned how to program the lights and wrote a lighting script before even being able to test it, so we were really just hoping it would work out on the night.
What none of us managed to realise however, is how difficult of an environment it would be to film in. With the coastal wind in southwest WA it basically felt like shooting in the middle of a sandstorm. Any time we’d go to hit record one of us would get sand in our eyes and we’d have to stop – or a huge gust would make one of the lights fall over. We set out at 10am and by the time we finished it was 2am up in Lancelin, and we still had to ferry heavy gear about 800m to the car, which took over 6-7 trips between the 5 of us. By the time we got home it was well past 5am. I still had the feeling of sand in my eyes a good 5 days later and I was pretty sure I’d scratched it (Dane). None of us wanted to even open the footage afterwards – we were so certain there was no way it would look any good and that we’d just wasted all our money. We basically sat on it for a good month afterwards without daring to touch it. Much to our surprise it ended up looking exactly how we planned it! The hellish time we had does not carry across on the camera at all, it looks so serene – some of the behind the scenes shots really show it though!”
DANE PAVIC, MARS ON HOLIDAY
