Powderfinger arrive on the red carpet at the 2010 ARIA Awards at the Sydney Opera House on Nov. 7, 2010 in Sydney.
No, it’s not a comeback. But Powderfinger do have new music out, sort of.
On Friday (Sept. 18), exactly two weeks after the release of a 20th anniversary deluxe reissue of their monster album Odyssey Number Five, the Aussie rockers dropped “Day By Day,” their first new track in a decade.
“Day By Day” was originally cut in 2003 during sessions at 301 Sydney for their No. 1-charting fifth album Vulture Street.
The song was “never completed until we opened the archives and went sniffing around for tracks that had never been released,” comments vocalist Bernard Fanning.
“We never even really had a rough mix of it as we had obviously decided at the time that it didn’t quite fit with the rest of the songs on that album," he continues. "Looking back now, I’m not sure why and I’m actually amazed we didn’t find a place for it on the record.”
Once the band rediscovered it, they tapped producer Nick Didia to kick it into shape.
“Like a few other songs on Vulture Street,” Fanning adds, “it deals with the temporary nature of life and is a call to live in the moment, to be present".
The final result is a beefy blues-rock number with breezy harmonies, augmented with keys, an instrument conspicuously absent from The 'Finger's best-known works.
“Day By Day” is the first single from a forthcoming album of unreleased works, spanning a decade of Powderfinger’s career.
The five-piece called it a day in 2010, bowing out with the rare distinction of having five consecutive ARIA No. 1, and ranking third all-time among ARIA Awards winners with 18 pointy trophies. It’s only a matter of when, not if, they’ll be inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame.
A decade on, Powderfinger have been usually active this year. The classic lineup of Fanning (vocals), Ian Haug (guitars), Darren Middleton (guitars), John Collins (bass) and Jon Coghill (drums) reactivated the band’s social accounts, and reunited in May for the One Night Lonely virtual concert, which raised more than A$500,000 for charity.
Earlier in the week, the special edition of OD5 returned to the national albums chart at No. 2, beaten only by the all-star Music From the Homefront triple-album release.
Stream “Day By Day” below.