Life on the road can be a fertile well from which artists often draw. While Josh Pyke’s second album isn’t a weary reflection on never-ending stretches of highway, many of its ideas were penned during the Sydney singer-songwriter’s lengthy world tour in support of his 2007 debut, Memories & Dust. As a result, romantic reflections on the comforts and familiarity of home pepper the record, particularly in “Our House Breathing”, with Pyke singing of his Sydney home coming “alive in the heat/All the curtains sucked to the screens/Then they billowed back out into the hallways/As if our house was breathing”. “Don’t Wanna Let You Down”, meanwhile, makes a promise to a lover at home: “I’m gonna buy you a house and a dog/And I’ll try to stick around”. Pyke’s interest in seafaring folklore and maritime history are also recurring themes, with the album taking its title from a particularly violent whaling term used to depict the impending death of the creature. Indeed, references to the sea feature throughout, whether bottling “up the sea breeze” in “The Summer” or airing his fear that “we are all but corks on the sea” (“Don’t Wanna Let You Down”).