LASTLINGS - Harper's BAZAAR June/July 2020

Bliss out to this brother-sister duo’s hypnotic tunes.

WITH SIX YEARS BETWEEN THEM, Josh and Amy Dowdle might have fallen into an annoying-big-brother/pesky-younger-sister relationship. But they’ve managed to avoid that dynamic entirely: not only do they write music together, which they travel the globe performing, but they also have a knack of finishing each other’s sentences.

The Dowdles, who perform together as Lastlings, maybe in sync now, but their respective journeys towards a life of music were completely different. Amy, now 20, started playing classical piano when she was six, continuing throughout her time at primary and high school, and started singing and writing lyrics at the age of 11. Josh, on the other hand, “quit most things I tried”, until he came across an electric guitar and the music production software Ableton. “I started teaching myself. I started a band in our garage and really loved it, and did music production on the side while I was at uni,” he says. “A few years later, Amy and I recorded our first song together.”

“Josh would play with his band in the garage and, being the younger sister, I would always go and see what they were doing,” Amy says, laughing. Josh picks up her thread: “She would come in every now and then, and after my friends left we would [practise] some more chill stuff.” The result? Two EPs of pulsing electronic dance beats underneath Amy’s floaty vocals; not strictly electronica, not strictly pop — Lastlings traverse genres with such ease that you can imagine listening to them in a sensory-deprivation flotation pod and on a dance floor at 3am in equal measure. The siblings released a few singles, which quickly made them a Big Deal, especially overseas. They performed every weekend while Amy was in high school, until it came to a crucial choice: drop out to pursue music or finish school first and then pick up where they left off. Josh had been studying biomedical science at university, so encouraged Amy to finish school, which she did. “We got a lot of interest in the beginning,” Josh says, “but it was hard to gauge whether it was going to be [sustained] or flaky.”

But it certainly wasn’t a fluke. Since then, they’ve played at mammoth US festivals Coachella and Red Rocks, as well as Splendour in the Grass in New South Wales. They’ve produced remixes for British producer SG Lewis on his track “Flames” and for Aussie dance group Rüfüs Du Sol on their single “Solace”. At the end of 2019, they did “six or seven festivals in seven days” between Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide and Hobart, Josh says, sounding exhausted at the memory. “We got the red-eye back from Perth to play in Sydney. That was rough.”

While we hold out for more live performances, Lastlings’ debut album, First Contact, is coming to tide fans over. “Each song is a different story, but each one is about first times,” Amy says. Josh adds, “They’re about the initial moment when you feel or touch something for the first time — how raw and special that moment is.” The first single off the album, “Take My Hand”, and its accompanying video tell two disparate stories. “We wrote the song after watching one of my favourite animes, called Your Name [by

Makoto Shinkai],” Amy explains. “The song is about being afraid or not wanting to let go of someone — you both don’t want to let go, but you have to go your separate ways.” The video, fittingly, is about escapism. “We’re always looking to escape through a digital platform when we know nature is better,” Josh says. “It’s about having these moments to escape through virtual reality, but towards the end you realise you can’t gain a greater sense of happiness that way. You’ll probably notice all the happy moments in the video glitch away.”

While we speak, the Dowdles are holed up on the Gold Coast, not too far from their familial home in the hinterland, self-isolating due to COVID-19. They’ve had nearly a year’s worth of international tours (America, Japan) and other gigs cancelled or postponed, but if they’re upset about it, it doesn’t show. Instead, they’re using the time to write album number two. “We’ve been really productive,” Josh says. “We’re trying hard to make new music while we’re in isolation. We’re lucky that there’s streaming and all the technology advances that can help us get music out there.”

“It’s a good time to be releasing music,” Amy quips. “Everyone’s at home.”

This story originally appeared in the June/July 2020 issue of Harper’s BAZAAR. Photography: Jessica Aleece.