Bloom Take Us Track By Track On Their New Album, ‘The Light We Chase’

With their anticipated new album The Light We Chase officially landing this Friday, October 31 via Pure Noise Records, Eora/Sydney melodic hardcore heavyweights Bloom are gearing up for their biggest era yet. Stepping beyond the walls of their acclaimed debut, the band’s sophomore LP dives head-first into grief, growth, catharsis and renewal 0 weaving shoegaze haze, stadium-ready hooks and crushing heaviness into some of their most ambitious songwriting to date. Featuring guest vocals from Patrick Miranda (Movements), Mikaila Delgado (Yours Truly) and Jack Bergin (Void Of Vision), it’s an emotionally charged statement that firmly cements Bloom at the forefront of Australia’s heavy music conversation.

To celebrate the release, the five-piece have also announced a national headline tour for February 2026, joined by rising Seattle chaos merchants AVOID (USA) and Sydney’s Inertia. But before the band bring these songs to life onstage, frontman Jono Hawkey and guitarist Jack Van Vliet have cracked open the album track-by-track… diving into the stories, sonic left-turns and emotional weight behind every moment on The Light We Chase.

Bloom – ‘Out Of Reach’

01. Belrose

• Jono Hawkey: The song Belrose opens in a very similar way to Maybe In Another Life did with the song An Entry. In Maybe In Another Life, the opening lyric is: “step into my state of mind”, and the opening line for Belrose is: “walk back with me”. There’s intention behind that lyric, you are inviting the listener into what they’re about to experience. I really like The 1975 and how they open their albums with the song The 1975. And whether it’s the same melody, the same lyrics, the same instrumental, I really like having track one being almost meta in a way, kind of speaking wider than just the album. That opening lyric on Belrose, “walk back with me and I’ll show you everything”…it felt like a really beautiful way to be like: “hey, I’m going to let you in on a place that I hold a lot of importance in”. Throughout that intro buildup there’s faces, places, the mulberry tree was an actual tree that you’d walk past on the way home from school. I used to live right next to a cemetery & the power station, and in the first stanza of the song we’re already name-dropping so many of those things. And I think name-dropping locations is a really cool way to set up that nod to our childhood and youth in the album. 
• Jack Van Vliet: Throughout the album there were a lot of homages, and Belrose is definitely an homage to the intro track for Maybe In Another Life. And then references to the rest of our discography are kind of sprinkled throughout the record.

02. Forget Me Not

• Jack: The first thing I think about with Forget Me Not is the very end of the song. We wanted to put something kind of experimental, for lack of a better word, on the front end of the track listing, just so that people would know that it would be wider than a normal metalcore release. This kind of came about when we were just throwing out ideas in the room for the last breakdown of the song, and Sam [Bassal, producer] was just like: “let me cook for a second”. He started messing around with it, it was like: “let’s make this sound kind of whack”. And he was just dragging a lot of the things from all of the elements around. Then he played it – and it sounded awesome.
• Jono: We were talking through the drum mapping, and for the end of the song the very expected thing to do would be: here’s a giant china breakdown. And like Jack was saying, we were in that phase of bouncing stuff around and just mucking around with things. Sam opened up the piano roll and just started dropping notes.
• Jack: At random!
• Jono: It’s really like watching an insane man (laughs). We refined it from that point, but doing that and also doing it so early in the record, like what Jack said, we kind of wanted to be like: we’re not going to do everything that you were expecting. We wanted to drop something in there early. Another fun thing about this song, we spent ages, so much time was spent trying to work out the exact tempo of jumping. We wrote this song because we don’t have a lot of songs that have a really good jump/bounce tempo,
• Jack: Jump tempo. It’s all running tempo songs.
• Jono: Yeah, on In Passing (2020), we have a song called June that is written at a really good jump tempo. We didn’t do that on Maybe In Another Life. When we were writing this one, it had it organically in the demos, it had quite an upbeat, “lifted” sort of feel to it. Then when we were really focusing in on that track, we tried every BPM between 180 to 185, we all stood and we jumped to work out what the exact speed that this song needed to be so that it was perfectly in line with a crowd jumping as one. I’m really excited to play that one live because I need to see if I’m right.
• Jack: And see: what if it’s bad? What if we can’t jump?!
• Jono: We conducted a study to make sure (laughs). 
• Jack: It was focus grouped.
• Jono: It’s on the off beat, but even if they don’t jump, they will at least nod their heads. That’s the minimum expected commitment.

03. Out Of Reach

• Jono: When you listen to Out Of Reach, you can hear it’s similar, in its opening at least, to Pittsburgh by The Amity Affliction, it’s got kind of a stadium feel and a really big wide vocal. A lot of this song doesn’t sound like Pittsburgh by Amity, but when you listen to them side by side, they have a similar kind of opener. And for Out Of Reach, it really came back to us saying: this opening needs to be so massive, I want to imagine playing this…
• Jack: At Wembley.
• Jono: Yes, at Wembley. I want to play this to heaps of people because it is kind of different to anything we’d done before. It’s the type of song where I want to say the first word and put the mic out and that’s when I hear the thousands of voices. The whole song came together from that starting off point of wanting a big opening. When Amity played Pittsburgh at Hordern Pavilion, it’s loud as hell! Also on this song, I sing the cleans in the chorus. I’ve sung in Bloom stuff previously, but it’s more so as a backup or to complement Jarod [McLaren]. For this one we went: fuck it, let’s do something different! 
• Jack: This was another song where we were in the room, and Jono pulled out this kind of Parker Cannon-type of tonality in his voice. No one had ever heard it before, and Sam was like: “that was awesome. That’s going to be on the record”. How much did you re-record that from the scratch?
• Jono: None of it!
• Jack: Yeah, there you go.
• Jono: When you’ve been in a room for so long and the cabin fever has set in, you just start pulling shit out that you didn’t know you could do. It kind of has a Stick To Your Guns-style chorus, and I just fucking belted that.
• Jack: Ripped it!
• Jono: Even when we were working on the scratch tracks, the demo stuff; that is what made it through to the finished product for this one. That was similar to Forget Me Not as well, with a different unexpected ending. We kind of continue that theme with Out Of Reach, because you would expect a clean chorus to be sung by Jarod. But that’s me this time! 

04. Keep You (Feat. Patrick Miranda)

• Jack: This is my favourite song that we’ve ever done. And I had very little to do with it, which is very funny (laughs). The working title for this song originally was Daylily when Oli [Oliver Butler] wrote it. I remember having a car ride back with Oli, when we were coming back from the studio and I was like: “oh, it’d be so sick if we could get Pat [Patrick Miranda] on this song. That would be the feature to get”. So it was very front of mind from the beginning. Also, the demo was more “rock-y”, for lack of a better word, and then Sam put more layers on it and there’s a little bit more fuzz in there. As much as the album is an homage to us in our childhood, Keep You kind of sounds like a 2000s Australian garage rock song. It’s like we’re actively doing the thing that we’re talking about in the record lyrically, which I think is also pretty cool. It’s awesome and it’s a really good song.
• Jono: This is the first Bloom song where the three vocalists, me, Oli and Jarod have a section, we each have a bit that we get to do. It’s really cool, we played it live in Sydney a couple weeks back and all three of us singing harmonies together is magical, it’s so much fun. And like Jack was saying, the vibe of that song is that nostalgic early 2000s Aussie rock. It feels so much fun to play because it’s less busy than our other music, it really has a groove to it. Performing it live and in combination with all the different voices we’ve got going on is so much fun, and obviously Pat’s part is truly the icing on the cake of that song. And like Jack was saying, it was written to have Pat on it. But even if you take away Pat’s part, you still have the three of us rocking out and doing our things vocally. And when we play it together, it has such an awesome feeling to it. I think that’s probably one of the biggest risks, it almost doesn’t sound like it’s going to be a Bloom song, but through a lot of love and nurture and experimentation, we really embraced it. I think it’s probably one of the best songs we’ve ever written. And at the same time, it’s probably one of the simplest songs we’ve written. There’s nothing fuck-y going on, but it’s just got a really good feeling to it.

05. Glen Street

• Jono: Glen Street is a street in Belrose. Jarod, myself and Andrew [Martin] all went to the same high school, and Glen Street Theatre is an old theatre where we did a lot of our school productions. It’s funny to think about, I haven’t really considered it in this way, but when we were in high school, we were performing at Glen Street Theatre. Now we’re performing in a different way, and singing in homage to that older place. As for the song itself, it’s the first song on the record that is truest to our style of writing, it’s true to how we typically have written songs in the past where you have a big opening and then it all drops down and swells back up to this big kind of melodic hardcore-style ending. And I think it’s probably the only song on the record that is true to some of our earliest writing, songs off Past Tense (2018) and In Passing (2020). This song in particular nods back the most to our first songs.
• Jack: Also, I got the chorus for this song after I watched 10 Things I Hate About You. I was like: “there’s a song here”. 

06. Life Moves On Without Us

• Jack: This song was actually a combination of two demos, one of Jarod’s demos and one of Oli      demos. And it was actually a patchwork song for a lot of the time. I think this was maybe the longest we spent on a song instrumentally, just trying to figure out what works best. And what worked the best in the end was actually cutting sections out. The song was a lot longer at the beginning and it just felt a little unfocused, and things came in where they didn’t really meet properly. So we just cut out a whole section, moved everything forward, and then it flowed really naturally. That was the most laborious song instrumentally, but at the end it was one of the most rewarding. A lot of us by the time it was finished were like: this is in single contention. We all really liked that song. Also, the hooky section in the pre-chorus, before the chorus, where there’s the clean vocal…that was more of Sam’s 90s flavor coming into it with that melody. It originally started a little differently and he was like: “it’d be more vibey if it’s more like this, more drawn out”. That was a big Sam contribution to this one.
• Jono: Like Jack said, it was the song that went through the most amount of changes, and it was probably the hardest we had to work on a song. A lot of these bits came quite naturally. Because we were bouncing around so many ideas, we got to a point with the song where we went: “yep, this is how it should be. Cool? Perfect”. With this one, we did a chunk of dates in January, which is when we pretty much wrote the album, and then we came back around April to finish it. We had the demos from January, and in April we went in to put the finishing touches on, and this song was the only song that we brought back in and were like: we need to do something here. It really became a case of: okay, what bits work and what bits don’t work, what part of the song am I starting to feel bored or uninterested in, or just doesn’t flow super nicely. It was a full patchwork, take what we’ve got there and just keep the good bits, and we’ll work out a better way to have this song written. By the end of it, we went from a song that we all thought was one of the weakest songs on the album to being like: cool, this is genuinely on par with everything else.

07. Act II (Feat. Jack Bergin)

• Jack: This one’s another homage, there’s a lot of homages to an earlier Bloom song Sink Into The Soil, especially the lead riff. This is built around Sink Into The Soil, and a lot of it is very referential to that track. There’s this line from Sink Into The Soil, “desperate to be like them”, and in Act II it’s “desperate to be like you”. The melody’s different and the part where it comes in on the chorus is different, but it’s still referential to the same kind of feeling. 
• Jono: Yeah, the working title for Act II was SITS II. This one was fun because the basis of the song was very grounded and familiar, and then we were able to add new flavors to it. There’s definitely parts that are super comparable to the song that it’s a sequel to, but there’s a bunch of stuff in there as well that’s more of our newer influence in there. It was great to be able to take an older track and put a new coat of paint on it and really flesh it out from that earlier stuff into the newer Bloom world.
• Jack: In the lyrics, and even in the title, there’s a lot of hidden meanings. Act II is Act II because it starts the second side of the record. It’s also Act II because it’s about the theatre stuff that’s kind of throughout the album, and it’s also the second version of Sink Into The Soil. There’s a lot of things that tie in, and there’s a lot of lyrical stuff in the song that means a lot of different things for any deep divers out there.

08. Withered

• Jono: This song was hard to write lyrically. Obviously, we’ve been a band for eight years as the song implies, and we spend so much time climbing the hill, we’ve got to do this next thing, we’ve got to release this. We’re very fortunate to be a band that is growing, and I think a lot of the time it’s very easy to push down or not acknowledge the growing feelings of strain, whether it’s on friendship or our personal lives or the financial strain that coincides with being a busy band. When we started writing the lyrics for Withered, we decided to write a song about this thing that the five of us experience, which is: being in a band is really fucking hard. It’s hard for us as individuals working together, and running a business. It’s hard on our loved ones. It’s hard in the careers that we have outside of the band. And there’s not many songs that I know that really acknowledges this sort of thing. I think we’re in an interesting time for music where artists are a lot more open with the inner-workings of the music industry. It started with bands speaking out about merch cuts, and now the fans have been let in to see the world more and more and maybe go: oh, this is actually pretty fucking awful.
• Jack: It was daunting to be vulnerable on a song in this kind of way where it feels like it could almost be alienating for people to listen to, maybe they might be like: “I’m listening to you, I’m doing the thing, and that still doesn’t mean anything to you?”. That’s kind of what we were thinking at first. But it anchors the album in a way because this is the thing that we’re all trying to run away from and striving towards at the same time. And it feels like it would be a disservice if we weren’t going to be honest and vulnerable about it.
• Jono: Yeah, by no means is this a song where we’re like: we’re trying so hard and you guys don’t care. And by no means is it putting the onus on the fan. But I think it is interesting to put on display: hey, we’ve been doing this shit for you guys for so long, and I have these nagging thoughts like, if I give up now, what does that make me? Or have I lost things in my life because I’ve poured so much of myself into this? The closing lyrics of this song are: “Withered me, never bloomed / Withered life, dead for you”, and I think that’s kind of the anger of the song, like: I have pushed and given everything into this thing, and it could go at a moment’s notice, and I could be left with nothing. There’s a lot of fear and anxiety that surrounds that.

09. Only Sky

• Jack: Only Sky was a song that I had as a skeleton, or bones to put flesh on. It started with a lot of references to trains and stations that were instantly taken out. It was originally a poem rather than lyrics. We had the lyrics originally (laughs) and Sam turned and looked at me and he was like: “what are you doing, this can’t be serious?”
• Jono: I think the opening line was “I’m waiting for a train”. That got scrapped straight away.
• Jack: “That’s so silly, this isn’t Inception. Stop it!”. So, this song was referred to as Train Song for forever, and it is still referential to all of that. You still have little gestures of it throughout. But this one was originally more train-y than it currently is. 
• Jono: It’s funny, now that we’re speaking through a track by track, there’s a lot of things that I’m realising, like: oh, we actually did this a couple of times! Similar to how Act II is a nod to Sink Into The Soil, and similar to how Glen Street is a nod to our earlier stuff, Only Sky is similar, in how it was written as a song, to Carve Yourself Into My Lungs from our last record.
• Jack: Interestingly, I think the big difference is that Carve Yourself Into My Lungs is a duology. It’s someone talking to another person, like someone in a relationship whereas Only Sky is someone completely alone. It’s all screaming, no clean vocals, just the loneliness of it rather than the dialogue. It’s an homage, like how a lot of these songs are homages, but it’s different in the way it’s executed because of the thematic content of the lyrics.
• Jono: Sonically as well, it’s more of that slow build, atmos-heavy thing really building to that big, big moment. And I think of all of the songs on the record, this one probably puts the most emphasis on the lyrics, and is the most metaphorical too. That works out nicely, it’s the song that’s the most ambient and the lyrics are the least literal. It’s an ethereal song, which is cool to do. 

10. Tongue Tied (Feat. Mikaila Delgado)

• Jono: This one is full credit to Jarod. When we started the record, there was one day, the very first day, Jarod wasn’t able to make it, but he was going to be there from the second day onwards through to the end. On the first day of doing the album, it was a case of: let’s look at every single song that is even possibly in contention. No matter how finished or unfinished it is, put it in the session and we’ll listen to it, we’ll make notes on it and go from there. Tongue Tied was a song that none of us had heard prior to the studio. Jarod wasn’t in the room that day, we were just going through this Dropbox that he’d sent over, like: “hey, this is some stuff I’ve been working on”. We sat down and I remember Sammy pressed play on it. It started with an acoustic guitar, and it was just like: “oh…..!”. From that point on it was like: it doesn’t matter that it doesn’t fit our image, our sound, our style. None of that matters, the song is so good and it’s going to be on the record. There were no ifs or buts. There were a couple of changes that we made to the structure of it, and we got Mikaila [Delgado] on the song too, so we shuffled some things around to make that work. But pretty much, the song stayed as it was. It was a very big “wow” moment because none of us were expecting an acoustic song on the album, and Jarod wasn’t even there to say: “hey guys, there’s an acoustic song coming up!”. And I think by releasing it as a single, we wanted to catch people by surprise as well. We almost wanted to pass on that feeling of: this song’s fucking awesome, and you’re not going to expect it from us.

11. Show Me Who I Am

• Jack: While we were experimenting with a lot of things for this record, I think Show Me Who I Am was kind of an experimentation in simplicity. A lot of the lyrics and the phrasing, and how everything flows together, is all very simple – but not in a way that it’s simple because we just threw it together. It’s actually quite hard to craft something that is simple and very effective at the same time. It was about saying what you mean in frank terms, and just leaving it there as it is in its original form.
• Jono: It’s really hard to write album enders. How do you wrap up this album, not only sonically, but also what’s the bow, what’s the final chapter of the book? I think with this one, it kind of happened organically. We knew this song would be the album closer pretty early on, hey Jack?
• Jack: Yeah, I think it was always going to be this, or Tongue Tied. 
• Jono: Pretty early on it was like: this song has a feeling. The way I see it, it’s like slow motion running in the rain, and the credits are about to roll. As Jack said, we did want to make something simple and something that you would sing along to. And it has this kind of happy sadness to it. 
• Jack: Also, on the last homage, this song is kind of an homage to Belrose, the first track on the album, but instead of you taking someone and pulling them somewhere, you are asking for someone to do that for you. It’s transferring the responsibility and trying to ask for support rather than only ever giving it, and showing other people all of the things that you’re doing. It’s kind of like a transference. And that’s why I think it bookends really nicely with the first track.
• Jono: And for this one, we also kind of leaned into the corniness of it.
• Jack: Yeah, big time.
• Jono: We went back and forth, is the lyric “one day I’ll just breathe” too cheesy? It ended up staying in because I think it reflects so much of the album, and so much of how Bloom writes music is: I have a lot of thoughts in my head. I have so many things that I’m thinking, and my brain is constantly wondering did I say the right thing? Remember when I did this? I really hope I can do this, and all those sorts of thoughts. So I think the lyrics “one day I’ll just breathe” is like: I can’t do shit about it, but I know that one day I’ll exhale.
• Jack: There will be some peace.
• Jono: It’ll all finally be at peace one day, one way or another. And if there’s a message to take away from the album, not necessarily for the listener, but even just for us as the people who wrote it, it would be: there’s a lot of stuff on this album that is really bad and painful and emotional. But one day…one day I’ll just breathe.
• Jack: Take a breath, man.

Bloom 2026 Tour Dates

With AVOID

• WED 11 FEB – Crowbar, Brisbane
• FRI 13 FEB – Mo’s Desert Clubhouse, Gold Coast
• SAT 14 FEB – Hamilton Station Hotel, Newcastle
• SUN 15 FEB – Crowbar, Sydney
• TUE 17 FEB – Dicey Rileys, Wollongong
• WED 18 FEB – Max Watts, Melbourne
• FRI 20 FEB – Pelly Bar, Frankston
• SAT 21 FEB – Lion Arts Factory, Adelaide

Pre-sale tickets on sale: Tuesday 28 October @ 9am local time

To Gain Early Ticket Access Register Here -> https://daltours.cc/BLOOM2026

Further Reading

Bloom Announce New Album ‘The Light We Chase’, Share ‘Withered’

Bloom Announce 2026 Australian Tour With AVOID

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