A Quick Chat with Dom Moore

Congratulations on the release of your new EP The Sprint to Sleep! Across the EP, there’s a sense of movement and reflection. What themes, ideas or emotions kept resurfacing while you were writing the songs?

For me, the record is about acknowledging the cyclicality, addictiveness and, often, absurdity of franticness. I am a culprit for indulging in ‘busyness’ without restraint and it can come at the cost of living life with a genuine sense of connection. It’s not a secret that we’ve become ‘phone-obsessed’ and I have this sense of simplicity, curiosity and dagginess being discarded from society’s fabric. I want to give a nod to our addiction to productivity and retreat from it a little to appreciate and critique it.

If you had to describe the EP to someone who hasn’t heard it yet without using genre labels, how would you describe it?

I have gone into my first two EP’s with the mantra of not creating a collection of tracks that blend into one another through sameness of sound. The tracks differ sonically and I want there to be a sense of the beginning of the ‘sprint’ as the album commences that then slowly, and inevitably, falls into a ‘sleep’ at the record’s end. There are definitely aural linkages between the tracks; warm synths, ambient guitars and layered vocals are aplenty. I also went into creating the record with a focus on rhythmic coalescence and looked to interlace each instrument’s parts rhythmically. Overall, I hear a sense of nighttime drives, midnight reflections and occasional celebration in the record’s aural output.

Where do your songs usually begin – with a lyric, a melody, an image, a guitar part, a feeling, or something else entirely?

I have my acoustic guitar within arm’s reach most of the time at home so plenty of ideas will start there and morph into whatever they become. Melodies seem to be what attracts my ear the most so when something out of the usual scope of my melodic composition grabs me, whether it be from a mistake I made while playing or hearing an alternative melody in music I’m listening to, I feel most inspired to create a track from there, knowing that melody draws me in and, at least my guess is, the listener.

Is there a particular lyric, line or moment on this EP that you’re especially proud of? What makes that one stand out to you?

Musically, I have particularly positive associations of the last 60 seconds of ‘Forget the Time’ because of the practices and performance we have done of the track. Hearing our drummer play that groove for the first time in practice and having my guitarist compare the track’s outro to the music of one of my favourite shows of my childhood ‘Friday Night Lights’ was special.

Lyrically, I feel most content with ‘Houses’. The line ‘I wonder how little I really know of what’s in the front room of your mind’ comes from that concept of individual loneliness amongst so much possibility of connection. It devastates me sometimes to think about how we might never truly know someone or have someone else truly know us.

What did the recording process look like for this EP, and how different were the finished recordings from the versions you originally had in your head?

The recording process was done over the summer of ‘25/’26 back home where I grew up in Maitland, NSW. I set up the recording gear in the back room of my family home and over a couple of months had enough material ready to go for the EP. I then took some parts to a studio in Sydney, like saxophones and drums and also recorded the featured vocals of Gabi Ellicott there too. The tracks will always end up differently to how you picture them. This used to frustrate me a little but I’m at the point of benign grateful for the unpredictability now and try to avoid envisioning too far ahead of where I’m at.

Who or what has had the biggest influence on the way you make music – artists, records, books, films, places, people, experiences or otherwise?

Yarns about artists being independent creators are the ones that most inspire and influence me for sure. First hearing about the now mythological story of Justin Vernon (Bon Iver) going into a cabin in the wilderness and recording an album changed a part of who I am in that it adjusted the realms of freedom and creativity. Hearing the story of Sam Bentley (lead singer of The Paper Kites) adjusting his sleep schedule to be awake from 12am-4am each night for an extended period to see what his creative output would be was another key moment in how my perspective on musical creativity was formed.

If you could sit down for an hour with any musician, living or dead, who would it be – and what’s the first thing you’d ask them?

I’d love to know about the process of creation of Matty Healy of The 1975. Their music is so diverse in its sound and lyrical content, I’m always wondering where his starting points are or if there is a recipe to the seemingly mad manner in which their final products appear.

When you’re not writing or recording, what does an ideal day look like for you?

Running, reading and writing are the big three I always look to for peace and pleasure. Writing in this case is finishing off a novella I’ve been working on the past couple of years. Heading out for dinner with mates never fails and as a predictable Australian, I’m never unhappy on a beach.

Finally, if you could have one person discover this EP five years from now and tell you what it meant to them, what would you hope they took away from it?

I hope that person would find joy and a brief breath away from reality in the EP, to then of course return to reality with something in them changed, hopefully for the better. There’s no way I can hope or predict with any sense of sanity about how a certain person would respond to this EP, which is a beautiful concept of uncertainty in itself, but I do hope there is a moment in the music or lyrics of the record that finds a part of that person that they hadn’t had found before. That might be the biggest honour of creating and listening to music.

Can you take us through each track in two sentences – what is the song about, and what does it mean to you?

“Call”

'Call' is driven by pounding rhythms and glittering guitars. An energetic pop-rock song made for dancing and driving, it combines hopeful nostalgia with honesty about the mutual, but unspoken disintegration of old relationships.

“Rushes of Weather”

There are these rare and bizarre moments when I step outside and the specificity of the weather will rush me back to what feels like a carbon copy of that day’s weather years and years ago. It feels almost mythical that these memories are preserved in the day’s atmosphere and I wanted to commemorate that feeling.

“Collateral”

For about 20 years now, I have found a lot of my approach to life is dictated by the process of running. This song is a love letter to that process; both in confusion and in gratitude.

“Forget The Time”

I have said to my friends and family for a while that I think the key to being happy is forgetting the time. I come and go with the idea but I had this track title in mind from the beginning of the EP and incorporated the idea into a second interpretation of the phrase in that of not looking at time wasted in the past but appreciating it and carrying on with the relentlessness of time’s waves.

“Houses”

‘Houses’ is an acknowledgement of the possibility of each of us, even those we are closest to, and even ourselves, living with inner loneliness. It’s a concept I might forever struggle with and the track speaks of this and how I try to comprehend it all through running the streets at night.

The EP title itself

The concept of 'The Sprint to Sleep' actually comes from a moment a couple of years ago with one of my mates. It was on an evening where a few of us had gone to the cinema to see the new James Bond film. After all the trailers and the movie having a longer run time than we expected, we didn't get out of the cinemas until close to midnight. This friend of mine is pretty stringent with getting to bed early so this routine was already in grave danger. Upon getting in the car to get home, he proceeded to run multiple sets of red lights and reach stupidly dangerous speeds in the pursuit of getting to bed. From reports of those in the car, he was doing his best James Bond impression on this drive home; all in the name of getting a good night's sleep.

The image stuck with me; the unbelievable irony behind 'sprinting' to something so peaceful as sleep. It became pervasive in my life and I began to consistently, and maybe wrongly, see it in the lives of others. Particularly in a city lifestyle, there is often a zeal for franticness. It can devastate our appreciation of connection and blind us to our complete adherence to efficiency.