“Usually when bands do a self-titled album later in their career, it’s like a statement, which this album is,” DMA’S guitarist Matt Mason tells Apple Music. “It’s a coming home, sonically.” In that regard, Mason refers to the Sydney band’s fifth studio album as being for the “day-one” fans—those who fell in love with the Britpop-inspired indie anthems of the group’s 2016 debut, Hills End, and its preceding EP. “We did go on a bit of a sonic journey with the last couple of records,” admits Mason. “You can’t please everyone, but the fans I really hold close to my heart are the people who have been there from the very beginning. We definitely had [those] people in the back of our minds when we were making this album.” Here, Mason walks Apple Music through DMA’S, track by track. “El Alamein” “The fountain in Kings Cross is called the El Alamein Fountain. There was a Battle of El Alamein [in Egypt during World War II], and the first verse is about someone who’s at the battle. The rest of the song goes into someone who’s a bit strung out walking past the fountain in Kings Cross, who could potentially be the grandson of the person who was at the battle, going through their own kind of mental battle. It’s like this intergenerational story.” “My Baby’s Place” “It’s about someone longing for a relationship, and it can be really difficult. But the chorus is about someone who’s finally found that, and it’s like, ‘I don’t want to be here. Fuck everyone, I’m going to my baby’s place.’ So the verse is, ‘I want something,’ and then the chorus is, ‘I’ve got it. Screw everyone, I’m going to my baby’s place.’” “Hurracane” “There are a few song titles that are spelt wrong on the album. When you’re coming up with a working title and you type in something a bit silly, you’ll be like, ‘I’ll fix it later.’ And then it kind of grows on me. ‘Hurracane’ is an interpolation of a dance song that charted in Belgium, and the chorus is borrowed from that. The song is about someone’s house getting repossessed, and using the hurricane destroying the house as a metaphor.” “Killing Time” “There are three verses and they’re repeated. The lyrics were written really quickly in the writing session with Styalz Fuego. And we went back to rewrite the lyrics and [our A&R] at Sony was like, ‘These new lyrics don’t feel the same. We need to keep the original demo lyrics, even though they don’t mean that much.’ There’s not that much to it. It’s kind of just keep a good vibe going.” “Heatin Park” “This is another one of those working titles that stuck. We had this [chorus] and were like, ‘Fuck, it sounds a bit like LINKIN PARK.’ The verses are from a completely different time, a really old session, and we ended up putting those two together. We’ve played a few shows at Heaton Park, that’s a Manchester legacy venue. And I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny just to call it “Heatin Park,” but with an ‘i’ as a reference to LINKIN PARK?’” “Emailz” “This one is about having families and where we’re at and having to make sacrifices. Back in the day, we’d get to go on a month-long party [touring]. Now, you can’t wait to get home and you’re feeling a bit guilty about being away.” “One & Only” “We used an AI stem splitter to take the lead vocal from a very old demo because we couldn’t recreate the magic that Tommy [O’Dell, vocals] originally sung. And then we stretched it to fit into the new recording. That’s an interesting part of the conversation of AI—the generative side of it’s ugly, but the extracting of unusable old music is a less talked about benefit.” “Dancing Luck” “Probably the most over-the-top production song we did. We really tried to strip a lot of it back with this record to give it that 2016 DMA’S kind of sound. But we went a bit hard with the production on ‘Dancing Luck.’” “Concrete” “I was listening to a lot of ’80s Manchester music, and this song was inspired by that. The song is about [how] we’re all spinning around a star. We’re all touching concrete. We’re all in this together. We all need to band together to fix everything.” “Windows” “When I showed it to my wife, she was like, ‘What is this song about?’ And I was like, ‘I wish I was with someone else and this relationship sucks.’ And she was like, ‘You’re all married and in long-term relationships! Why would you write this?’ [Laughs] I do need to preface this by saying that we are all in happy relationships and no one feels this way about their significant other. But it is a song about someone who is in a relationship that wants to get out of it.” “Distance” “This song is again about how touring is less of a boys’ trip now. And more of just like, ‘Is everything all right back home?’ Even though we love touring, we try and keep it as succinct as we can so that we can get back to our responsibilities here. So it’s kind of about distance.”