Last month, Australian duo, Oh Pep! announced their debut album, Stadium Cake, which will be released June 24th on Dualtone. To mark the occasion NPR’s “All Songs Considered” unveiled one of the tracks off the forthcoming album, “Doctor Doctor.” Now, the girls are pleased to unveil the music video for the track, directed by Chris Murphy. Stereogum said the “ultra-fun video for their single ‘Doctor Doctor,’ shows two friends just simply having a great time together. With an instantly captivating synthscape, the track builds to a cathartic chorus that sees vocalist Olivia Hally repeatedly yelling ‘I know what I want, and it’s not what I need!'”

In addition to “Doctor Doctor,” Oh Pep! have also shared the “Bushwick” from their forthcoming album. “This is pop at its most kinetic, propelled forward by a steady snare beat, the rhythmic scratch of strings, and the undeniable energy that exists between songwriters Olivia Hally and Pepita Emerichs,” said Consequence of Sound.

Oh Pep! will be on tour throughout the world for the rest of 2016 including a full U.S. headlining tour and support dates with Lord Huron and Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats. Festival highlights include The Great Escape in the UK, Primavera Sound in Barcelona and Vancouver Folk Festival. The band is also pleased to announce a string of fall dates with indie-folk legends, The Mountain Goats.

Olivia Hally and Pepita Emmerichs formed Oh Pep! while at music secondary school in Melbourne, Australia. With three EPs under their belt since 2012, Oh Pep!’s Stadium Cake is a coming of age for the duo, who have been touring internationally since early 2015. The band made a huge impact at October 2015’s CMJ festival where KCRW chalked them up as one of their top artists that ‘Won’ CMJ, as did NPR’s Bob Boilen, who proclaimed “The Melbourne band’s music is infectious. Their harmonies are sweet, with lyrics that are thoughtful, deep, funny and poetic.

The band have already recorded NPR’s Tiny Desk giving U.S. music fans a chance to see Pepita Emmerichs’ virtuosic playing on both mandolin and violin and Olivia Hally’s gorgeous voice and heartbreaking delivery.

US TOUR DATES
+ w/ Lord Huron and Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats
# w/ Lord Huron
* w/ The Mountain Goats

May 28 – Liverpool Sounds – City, Liverpool, UK
May 29 – The Hug and Pint – Glasgow, Scotland
Jun 2-5 – Primavera – Barcelona, Spain
Jun 6 – Fillmore Theatre – Philadelphia, PA+ SOLD OUT
Jun 7 – Wolf Trap – Vienna, VA + SOLD OUT
Jun 8 – Red Hat Amphitheater – Raleigh, NC +
Jun 10 – House Of Blues – Myrtle Beach, SC #
Jun 11 – Georgia Theatre – Athens, GA #
Jun 24 – The Drake – Toronto, ON, Canada
Jun 29 – Mercury Lounge – NYC, NY
Jul 7 – Jammin’ Java – Vienna, VA
Jul 8 – World Cafe Live – Philadelphia, PA
Jul 9 – Green River Festival – Northampton, MA
Jul 11 – Schubas – Chicago, IL
Jul 12 – Cedar Cultural Centre – Minneapolis, MN
Jul 15-17 – Vancouver Folk Festival – Vancouver, BC, Canada
Jul 19 – The Sugar Club – Victoria, BC
Jul 21-23 – Calgary Folk Festival – Calgary, AB, Canada
Jul 25 – Revolution Roof Deck – Portland, OR, U.S.A
Jul 27 – Rickshaw Stop – San Francisco, CA
Jul 28 – Bootleg Theatre – Los Angeles, CA
Aug 1 – Larimer Lounge – Denver, CO
Aug 3 – The Demo – St. Louis, MO
Aug 4 – High Watt – Nashville, TN
Aug 5 – Evening Muse – Charlotte, NC
Aug 6 – Cats Cradle – Carrboro, NC
Sep 18 – Rams Head Live – Baltimore MD *
Sep 19 – The National – Richmond, VA *
Sep 20 – Jefferson Theatre – Charlottesville, VA*
Sep 22 – Buskirk-Chumley Theatre – Bloomington, IN*
Sep 23 – The Castle Theatre – Bloomington, IL*
Sep 26 – The Englert Theatre – Iowa City, IA*
Sep 27 – Pabst Theatre – Milwaukee, WI*
Sep 28 – Majestic Theatre – Madison, WI*
Sep 30 – The Waiting Room – Omaha, NE*
Oct 1 – Madrid Theatre – Kansas City, MO*
Oct 2 – The Blue Note – Columbia, MO*
Oct 3 – Codfish Hollow Barnstormers – Maquoketa, IA*

Olivia Hally and Pepita Emmerichs met in music secondary school in Melbourne, Australia, drawn together by a shared love of songs with no boundaries or expectations. The duo, now both 24, have since unveiled three EPs, but it’s their debut album, Stadium Cake, that truly showcases Hally and Emmerichs’ uniquely compelling collaboration.

Hally and Emmerichs decamped to Halifax, Nova Scotia to record with producer Daniel Ledwell. After initially meeting Ledwell in early 2015 and recording two tracks with him for their Living EP, Oh Pep! felt that he had the right sensibility to carry these new album songs through the recording process. The band spent their August in Ledwell’s studio, and celebrated the culmination of the recording by swimming across Lake Echo, which neighbors the studio.

“One thing Dan won’t let you do in the studio is overthink, which is beautiful because it made it really fun and creative,” Hally says. “There’s a sense of humor in it.”

Stadium Cake marks the first time Oh Pep! recorded with a multi-track approach rather than recording live. They wanted to be completely open to new ideas and approaches, and to not confine themselves to preset conceptions of how the music should be made. “Doctor Doctor,” the album’s first single, is a pop song with elements of the unexpected, revealing the band’s interest in experimental and occasionally dissonant melodies as Hally sings “Where is the light, for me it’s the darkest night.” A sense of light and dark stitches together the tapestry of Stadium Cake, continually bringing a sense of tension to each song. It’s heard in the texture of “Tea, Milk and Honey,”as Hally sings with sparse accompaniment before the delayed entry of the band. That tension can also be heard in the jarring time changes of Emmerich’s line in “The Situation”and “7 Babies.”

“Our process really changes all the time, which is probably why we’ve done it for so long,” Hally says of their songwriting. “There are definitely no rules about how we’re going to write a song,” adds Emmerichs.

Oh Pep! has been bringing their recordings to the stage for years, first trekking around Australia and then touring internationally since early 2015. They’ve performed at CMJ, SXSW and Nashville’s Americana Music Festival, and for Seattle’s KEXP and NPR’s Tiny Desk. KCRW named Oh Pep! an artist who ‘won’ CMJ and NPR’s Bob Boilen proclaimed that “the Melbourne band’s music is infectious. Their harmonies are sweet, with lyrics that are thoughtful, deep, funny and poetic.” In 2016, Oh Pep! will tour Europe for the first time supporting Lake Street Dive, and in North America with Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats and Lord Huron before making a triumphant return to Australia later in the year.

For Hally and Emmerichs, success is secondary to the actual creation of the music. They knew it was meant to be when they first dismantled a cover song together and their shared sensibility of strange, engaging approaches to music remained. Hally thinks back to that session that “it was possibly the worst idea we could have had, but the fact that we were both so excited about drastically changing this perfectly cohesive song said a lot about who we were and how we connected.”