It's just always been how I process the world.

When PICKLE JUICE started, it was natural to want to write our own music. I've been doing it my whole life. The fun part was learning to write from different perspectives, not just melody and chord progressions, but thinking about where everyone fits. Our first EP feels a bit like singer-songwriter music with rock parts added to it. Our new EP, The Whiteroom, feels much more collaborative because we've developed as a group and understand where everybody sits. We leave space for each other now, and the songs benefit from that. Everyone has room to contribute, and I think that comes through in the final product. When I'm writing independently now I'm thinking about the whole picture and what everybody else is doing. It's a great place to be and I'm super stoked to see where we will end up as songwriters in years to come. A friend of mine, Bambino, who's a bass player, gave me some really good advice about song writing once. He said, “Melody, melody, melody. It's all about the melody.”

- Tim van der Krogt, vocalist

Growing up, my dad always had a passion for music. When talking about his childhood, he would share playing music in the different areas of his life being school, church or with mates. His ability to pick up an instrument and just figure it out was as frustrating as it was inspiring. Watching him made me want to start playing music, first learning how to play the oboe through school, then my parents getting me my first guitar. This led to a few mates from high school forming a garage band where we would attempt to play post-hardcore music (lol, shout-out to Mark’s parents for putting up with that). During that time, Josh and I were attempting to write music with the help of a cracked guitar pro, eventually writing our first song, “Coolio”.

The aspirations of becoming Australia’s next big thing fizzled and new dreams came through. Fast forward to 2023, when PICKLE JUICE formed. I remember being in the basement of my house, roommates getting blasted by noise from beneath the floorboards, and the dream of making music slowly coming back again. Looking around at the lads and the concept of us actually putting in work and writing music seemed like a crazy concept but was quickly realised to be more than a dream. Since then, watching each of us grow in our writing individually and collectively has been an unreal experience. Now we’ve finished our sophomore EP, and it’s hitting the platforms. I can’t wait to see what the future holds for us.

- Ben Matsis, rhythm/bass guitarist

Growing up, my dad always had a passion for silence. This absence of music was something that I never really paid much attention to growing up, and I guess I just don’t have much memory or have been told any stories of being musically interested in my childhood years. I was more into sports. Aside from the school recorder, I had never touched an instrument until my first year of high school.

All of my musical endeavours are attributed to one person, my friend Gary. We met just before high school and he convinced me to get a guitar so we could cover a Bowling For Soup song. I would spend most of my time on lunch breaks either playing football or going to his house and watching the music channels (mainly Kerrang or Scuzz). Those first few years of gorging on bands like Sum 41, NOFX, Anti-Flag, Goldfinger and American Hi-Fi opened up an interest in pop-punk music and playing songs on stage that I gladly walked towards.

I guess it was in the last few years when I got that moment of 'Yes, I want to do this.' We were about two years into the band and had recently played to our largest sold out crowd, which had already put me in a positive mindset about it all. Soon after I flew five hours to go to a Neck Deep concert. Towards the end of their set, lead singer Ben Barlow was doing a little monologue about starting a band and seeing the world, and that “if they could do it, then anyone could”. For some reason I felt like that was directed at me, even though he probably didn’t look in my direction and will most likely say it at every show.

That was the moment, compounded with how I was already feeling about our previous shows, when it all made sense to me that this is the path.

- Tom Brennand, rhythm/bass guitarist

One of my earliest memories of getting into music was listening to ska-punk bands with my older siblings. We’d blast our favourite tracks downloaded from Kazaa while playing levels on Sonic the Hedgehog. I loved the energy of the music, and it naturally led me into skateboarding, as the two scenes seemed to go hand in hand. When I saw my god-brothers’ band, Speeding Bee, at the local SmallPrint shows with my cousin Emily, I knew I wanted to be part of something like that. My cousin Enis inspired me on drums, and my dad’s a huge CD collector and music aficionado. Overall, I owe my passion for music to my family.

- Pete Lavery, drummer

The moment I knew I wanted to make music wasn’t one single moment. It was more a collection of moments that started when I was an awkward teenager using music and guitar as an outlet and maybe a way to process what was happening around me.

My parents had split up, my dad was dealing with a pretty gnarly injury and life suddenly felt different. I was an anxious teenager navigating a different life. Music became an outlet that somehow made me feel better than anything else. I still listen to a lot of the bands I loved back then because those records are tied so closely to that period of my life.

At the time I was obsessed with bands like Bullet For My Valentine, Avenged Sevenfold and Escape The Fate during the Ronnie Radke era. I was also listening to completely different stuff like Wolfmother and eventually The Strokes’ Comedown Machine (my first breakup album). I spent hours learning riffs and writing my own.

I think one of the first moments that made me want to seriously make music was writing a guitar riff for one of my high school bands. It had some tapping in it, and I remember thinking, ‘This would be sick live.’ It wasn’t about fame or success. It was the feeling of creating something that didn’t exist before and imagining what it would be like to hear a crowd react to it.

I was in a few bands throughout high school. We started with an indie rock band called Age of Panic playing Green Day and Bloc Party covers. Then came Primal Fate, which leaned more into post-hardcore and pop-punk influences, and later Left Without Reason, which mixed pop-punk with heavier hardcore elements. Most of my early song ideas had highly sophisticated titles like “Sick Riff V7” or “Coolio”.

One thing I’ve noticed about myself is that whenever I see someone doing something interesting, a voice in my head says, ‘Surely I could do that too.’ Maybe that’s confidence or maybe it’s delusion, but it’s pushed me into a lot of things throughout my life. I felt it watching bands as a teenager, and I felt it again years later when I saw local musicians playing after I’d moved to Canada.

There was a long period during my 20s when music took a back seat. I didn’t completely quit, but I stopped pursuing it seriously. Then during COVID I picked up the guitar again and learned The New Abnormal by The Strokes front to back. Not long after, I moved from the Gold Coast in Australia to Revelstoke, British Columbia.

For about a year and a half after moving, I wasn’t making music. Then I started seeing local bands play and realized I wasn’t hearing the kind of music I wanted to hear live. At the same time, that old feeling came back. Watching other people perform made me think, ‘If they can do it, why can’t I?’ That eventually led to forming PICKLE JUICE and getting back on stage.

At 31, my relationship with music is different than it was when I was a teenager. I told my bandmates that if we ever made it, I’d get a full sleeve tattoo. I’m still waiting on both the sleeve and the “making it”.

Now I’m a lot more realistic about how difficult it is to break through as a new artist. But I also appreciate the experience more. I love my life, but I know every chapter eventually changes. Opportunities don’t last forever, and sometimes you have to commit to something while the chance is there.

Playing live is still one of the best feelings in the world. Getting on stage and ripping your own songs with your mates never really gets old. Those moments are rare, and that’s exactly what makes them special.

Right now we’re getting ready to release our EP, The Whiteroom, on June 12 and then we’ll be turning our attention toward a full-length album.

If someone listens to our music and it makes them want to go snowboarding, then honestly, I’d say we’ve done our job.

- Josh Radford, lead guitarist

My artist name, Heliara, has a connection to the sun, and just like sunlight, music became my way of bringing warmth and light into the world. That childhood realization in London evolved directly into my newest, most intimate project recorded right here in the capital: my EP, Everything's a Love Song. From exploring the chaotic fun of "Self-Love" to capturing real-world relationship dynamics in "I Know That You Love Me", my songwriting has become a universal meditation on connection. The journey that began on a piano bench came full circle in the studio, where I even recorded the tender track "Confessions to my Daughter" alongside my own three-year-old. Music had chosen me all those years ago, and today, on the stages and studios of Ottawa, I continue to follow it.

I also think being Welsh is part of it. Wales is the Land of Song. Music is in the blood there. Singing means something. There’s pride in it, passion in it. So maybe there wasn’t one lightning-bolt revelation. Maybe it was always there and I was just slowly becoming aware of it.

What I know for sure is that I wanted to make music the moment I picked up my dad’s acoustic guitar, hit a bass string, moved my finger, heard the note change and felt a whole world opening up in front of me. After that I kept going and never really stopped.

I still haven’t.

Whether it’s through Bleed Electric, producing other artists, making beats or playing guitar with my kids, everything traces back to that same realization: music can make people feel something they can’t get anywhere else.

Once I felt that, I was all in - forever.