Fortitude Valley is a brand new project for the songwriting talents of Durham based Brisbanite Laura Kovic. Having spent the majority of her musical career playing keyboards in other people’s bands, bringing their songs to life with a melodic flourish, it was about time for Laura K to find an outlet for her songs: awkward power-pop that’s bound to appeal to fans of The Beths, Weezer or The Pixies. She’s assembled quite the band too: Martha’s Daniel Ellis on lead guitar and Nathan Stephens Griffin on drums, and Night Flowers’ Greg Ullyart on bass.
Laura explains a little more: “Over the last couple of years I’ve started to feel musically restless and I wanted to try my hand at being the songwriter in a band, but had been going through writer’s block for a couple of years, so I bought a guitar in February 2018 to see if doing something different would help me…and it did! I sent some tracks to Nathan and he told me I should start my own band. I asked him if he’d be in it and he was like “obvs”. I already knew that I liked playing in a band with Greg, so that was easy and I wanted someone on guitar who could shred, so Daniel was an obvious choice. We managed to have a few practices before recording (but only one with all 4 of us, because we live in different cities), but everyone is very good at what they do and it worked out surprisingly well.”
Fortitude Valley – or just The Valley if you’re from Brisbane – is the heart of the city’s music scene; at least it was during Laura’s time playing in bands in Australia 13 years ago, before moving to the UK. It was a place that objectively felt mythical, a suburb with a special meaning, looking back from the other side of the world and many years later. Completing the circle, Fortitude Valley is also named checked in the Martha song Brutalism by the River (Arrhythmia). Wreck was recorded with Tigercats’ Giles Barrett at Soup Studios in London and mixed and co-produced by Allo Darlin’s Mikey Collins at Big Jelly in Ramsgate. Fortitude Valley will be playing their first show in January 2020 at The Winter Sprinter at The Lexington.
They’re finishing their first full length record to be released in the summer of 2020. Fortitude Valley are Laura Kovic (Tigercats, Mikey Collins, Ski Saigon), Daniel Ellis (Martha, Onsind), Greg Ullyart (Night Flowers, Mikey Collins) and Nathan Stephens Griffin (Martha, Onsind).
