As they bring their Inhale / Exhale world tour to RAC Arena this weekend — RÜFÜS DU SOL frontman Tyrone Lindqvist sounds both grateful and grounded.
“It’s been a great year,” he tells us from sunny Sydney over a Zoom call, a couple of hours before jumping on the plane to Perth.
“Our touring looks really different to what it looked like before… We’d do three-month tours because it made financial sense and we’d run ourselves into the ground a bit.
“Whereas now we separate them into three- or four-week periods. My voice isn’t destroyed halfway through the tour — it’s good. It just means the shows have been really consistent and good, and the crowds have been really receptive.”
It’s a balance the Grammy-winning trio have clearly earned. Since releasing their fifth studio album Inhale / Exhale late last year, they’ve headlined Lollapalooza, sold out the Rose Bowl Stadium in LA — only the second Australian act ever to do it after AC/DC — and they still keep finding new fans around the world.
“South America feels really exciting right now,” Tyrone says. “Mexico and those shows have been growing and escalating really fast. It’s a cool feeling being in that part of the world and connecting with people.” The momentum’s spreading in Europe too, with bigger crowds and better sets creating slow-build that has been gathering momentum for a number of years now.
Writing apart, together
With Jon George and James Hunt now based in Miami and Tyrone in California, Inhale / Exhale was their first album written across different cities — something they’d never tried before.
“We were pretty nervous because we’d never written a record in separate cities. We tried to separately and it didn’t work. Then we met in Austin for a two-week writing trip and that felt exciting and doable,” he says. “We did about eight of those trips. When we meet up, it’s like: let’s see what we can do. You’re locked in for two weeks, properly stuck into it.”
That separation, he says, keeps things fresh. “When I’m home, I’m trying to balance being dad, make music, be with your partner. It’s nice that when we’re together, it’s just the three of us locked in.”
Ten years of Innerbloom
This month also marks a decade of Innerbloom, the nine-minute anthem that became their defining moment and has now passed 500 million streams.
“It’s a surreal thing,” Tyrone says. “We made it for fun — we’d done most of the record and were like, let’s just have some fun. We played it for friends and they were like, yeah, it’s cool. Then we played it live in Melbourne before it was released and a few people cried in the front row. I’d never experienced that.
“You think a song might get old or lose its effect, but it still connects. Every time we play it, it’s special. It’s proven me wrong.”
Gratitude and growth
The scale of what they’ve achieved isn’t lost on him. After that huge Rose Bowl show, sleep didn’t come easy: “I couldn’t sleep because in my head it was like a shower of all the people who’ve played a part in getting us here,” he says.
“Thousands of people — from the person selling shirts to the person who played our song for the first time on triple j. It’s overwhelming. We’ve done a lot for ourselves, but it’s been such a collaborative team effort. There’s a crazy amount of gratitude that we still get to do what we love — and it still feels like it’s growing.”
And that growth hasn’t just been professional.
“We’ve done therapy together,” Tyrone reveals. “We’ve learned ways to communicate healthier. Writing looks so different now — less conflict, less tension. It’s more like, let’s try this idea and this one. It just feels like a more enjoyable way to make music and be friends.”
Back to Perth
RÜFÜS DU SOL’s connection with Perth runs deep, stretching back to the early Wonderland Festivals to the last ever Big Day Out, right up to their 20,000+ person headline show at Langley Park in 2022. “Perth’s always shown us love,” Tyrone smiles. “It feels like we’ve grown up with them.”
RÜFÜS DU SOL play RAC Arena on Friday 7 and Saturday 8 November, final tickets via Ticketek.
Image Credit: Supplied/Boaz Kroon
