Pacific Highway Music, the new album from Skegss, reintroduces the Australian band as the duo of Ben Reed (vocals, guitar) and Jonny Lani (drums) presenting their most masterful and fully realized work to date. The Byron Bay-bred band’s third full-length—the follow-up to their acclaimed sophomore album Rehearsal, which debuted at #1 on their homeland Australia ARIA Albums Chart and led to their first-everCoachella appearance and a sold-out U.S. tour—brings a newly heightened creative energy to every aspect of their explosive yet introspective form of rock. Centered on Reed’s frenetic and playful lyricism, Pacific Highway Music ultimately finds Skegss exploring the more complicated elements of the human experience with sincerity, soul, and unabashed joie de vivre.Skegss’ second full-length for U.S.-based label Loma Vista Recordings, Pacific Highway Music was created following the departure of co-founder Toby Cregan in 2023, and with producer Paul Butler(Devendra Banhart, Michael Kiwanuka, St. Paul & the Broken Bones). The album expands on the combustible riffs and euphoric rhythms of Rehearsal(an LP whose triumphs also include a Rolling Stone Australia Awards nomination for Best Record), but also finds Reed and Lani embracing a more experimental and free-flowing approach to its sonic architecture.“In the past I’d deprived myself of using things like synthesizers, not realizing how much texture and atmosphere they can add to the music,” saysReed. “Working with Paul felt like letting our guard down and completely opening up in terms of what these songs could be.”Recorded at two iconic L.A. studios (The Village and Topanga Canyon’s Fivestar Studios),Pacific Highway Music partly owes its wildly unpredictable sound to the period of time Skegss spent cutting demos at Rancho de la Luna in Joshua Tree with studio owner Dave Catching (a musician/engineer known for his work with Queens of the Stone Age, Mark Lanegan, and more). “Sometimes it’s hard to explain what you hear in your imagination, but Dave was incredible at deciphering my rambling andfinding exactly the right guitar to get the sound I wanted,” says Reed. “We were in the desert during a meteor shower so we’d jam all day and watch the sky at night, and the whole experience felt like magic as far as discovering new sounds for the album.”