Sametime is on the rise

For indie-pop duo Sametime, the notion of “getting out” was less about escapism and more about expansion, pushing them to make a move that would ultimately change the trajectory of their careers, and form the crux – and the title – of their newly released EP Get Out While You Can!.

Before becoming Sametime, Australian brothers Tim and Sam Aitken started out as two kids who simply loved music, something that they largely credit their parents for. The pair were born into a musical household with their dad being a musician throughout his entire life, singing in various bands and participating in musical theatre. “Growing up, every Sunday, there would be a concert on,” Tim remembers fondly. “It would be Phil Collins, The Eagles, Robbie Williams at Knebworth, things like that.”

Naturally, when Tim and Sam’s dad picked up on the slightest bit of musical interest from the pair, he was quick to respond to it. “He got us playing instruments when we were super young,” Sam tells me. “I got put into drum lessons because I would find paintbrushes, take them in the car, and tap the back of the seat. Tim was very interested in guitar at a young age, so mum and dad bought him a guitar as a birthday present, and he started playing it.”

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Tim, the eldest of the brothers, quickly got to work writing songs with their dad. “I wrote a little bit of a song, or what I thought was a song, anyway,” he laughs. “But he would sit there and actually work through it with me.” With those early compositions under his belt, Tim started busking in their hometown of Caloundra, on the Sunshine Coast, using the streets as his stage. As it would happen, having a guiding hand throughout his songwriting process would pay off. Tim went on to enter a busking competition, which he won, earning both prize money and a spot performing in the main amphitheatre of a local festival.

Although Tim had the songs, the melodies, and a clear affirmation of his talent, something was missing: rhythm. With Sam developing an affinity for the drums, Tim used his prize money to buy Sam a cajon. From that point on, the pair hit the ground running: “The very next year, we both entered that competition and started busking," Tim recalls. "We were playing around town, entering more competitions, and found a lot of success in them."

At just thirteen and ten-years old respectively, Tim and Sam went from busking across the coastal towns of Queensland to playing bars, pubs, and even festivals. But as they matured, so did their songwriting, and the desire to become an “actual” band became more pressing. “We got to an age where we started getting girlfriends and life started picking up a bit, so we actually started writing songs properly,” they explain. “From there, we went, ‘Oh, well, let’s be an actual band’. So, we came up with the name Sametime.”

As the duo took themselves more seriously, so did the music industry. Upon forming Sametime and playing their original songs at a local gig, they caught the attention of TV and radio presenter Ian “Dicko” Dickson, who formerly worked at BMG and judged Australian Idol. “A couple of weeks later, he took us on board to manage,” Tim explains. “A couple of weeks after that, he showed our songs to Sony Publishing.”

With that exposure – and at only fourteen and sixteen-years old – the pair landed a deal with Sony, some of the youngest writers to ever do so. “For a publisher to come along and say yeah, these songs are well and truly good enough, it gave us so much confidence to keep going and keep writing,” Tim says. “We even started learning how to produce music ourselves. It was one of the best things that’s happened to us, and we were very grateful it happened when we were young.”

With that confidence in mind, Sametime released their debut single “Where The Wind Blows” in 2017. While the Aitken brothers maintained a shared appreciation for artists such as Ed Sheeran and Passenger as they started out – admiring their journeys as buskers who ascended to world tours and large-scale headline shows – their tastes began to diverge as they got older. Tim leaned towards “Brit rock”, while Sam had a preference for commercial pop, but they found common ground in The 1975. “They were the first band that we ever agreed that we both liked,” Tim notes. “We found them right as we started taking a step away from the folk busking sound that we were doing at the time.”

“It was definitely a pretty big influence on what we do,” Sam adds. This would inform not just the inspired ambient pop sound of Sametime’s first single, but also the three EPs they went on to release: the self-titled Sametime in 2018, Maybe We Can Get High? in 2021, and GOLDEN in 2022. But by 2023, the band’s relationship with the music began to change. Although they consistently released music throughout the global pandemic, they were restricted from playing live, which is what excited them most about being in a band.

“We’d fallen out of love with what we were doing,” Tim admits. “Our main focus had always been on putting on live shows, and suddenly we couldn’t do that any more. We’d gone from playing five nights a week to being shut in our childhood bedrooms for what felt like forever.”

In a last-ditch effort to salvage their relationship with music, which they’d nurtured for more than twelve years, Tim and Sam decided that it was time for a change of scenery. They trekked across the world to Brighton, hoping to break the stagnance that caught up to them in Australia. “In Australia, after a while, we were doing the same thing and expecting a different result,” Tim says. “It wore us down to the point where we didn’t actually like what we were making.”

“During Covid, we were making songs to try to get big on Triple J, the big radio station in Australia,” Sam adds. “We were seeing that people were doing disco pop music, which isn’t what either of us would listen to. We just knew it was doing well in the charts, so we thought, ‘Oh, we’ll be a disco pop band’. But if you don’t like what you’re making, everyone can tell.”

The pair came to the UK with the collective mindset that they wouldn’t be going back to Australia unless they’d earned the right to do so through touring, or ultimately becoming successful. “Moving here was what re-sparked the passion and the fire underneath us, because we have no other option,” they agree. “It was our last big Hail Mary swing. When you have that kind of pressure, the benefit is that we were able to find the passion again,” Tim notes

Finding the passion in Brighton came with returning to form, and understanding what they wanted out of their place in the seaside city that they now call home. “We come from a sunny place, we’re both very bubbly, upbeat people,” Tim explains, "so we wanted our sound to be a little pocket of sunshine in what can otherwise be a grey, depressing country."

In order to do that, they dived headfirst into Brighton’s musical community to do what they knew best – busking – and were met with remarkably warm reception. “The best thing we did was go back to busking,” Sam asserts. “We stopped doing it years ago in Australia. It was a pride thing. If we had stayed there, we wouldn’t start busking again. But coming over here, no one knew who we were. This was a fresh start.”

“We quickly realised after the first couple of busking sessions that we’ve made a good move, because we were getting good crowds,” Sam continues.

“We were even blocking up streets our second time doing it,” Tim adds.

Sametime also managed to sell out the first five gigs they ever played in Brighton, which they credit to the reputation they’d built by simply performing on the streets. Through their own search for community, they were bringing people together, whether it be within local venues or across the pavement on a sunny day. “We felt this little community building and thought, ‘Let’s just do a headline show and see what happens’,” Sam tells me. “And that sold out. So we did another one and it sold out. So we thought, okay, something is happening here.”

As they played to fresh faces, energised by the welcoming culture they were immersed in, they regained the desire to head back into the studio. With the help of their friend and fellow Australian producer and songwriter Matt McGuffie, they started building the foundations of what would become Get Out While You Can! “We moved into a place that we loved in Brighton with a little box outside that we turned into a studio. We just started writing music that we loved, not thinking about it, and not trying to please anyone but ourselves,” Sam recalls.

“We did a session with Matt and wrote our song ‘Some Things Never Change’, which we released a couple of years ago,” he continues. “Then we wrote ‘Is This The End?’, the last song on the EP, and we realised we had a good connection. We’ve written two songs that we love, some of our favourite songs we’ve ever written, and focused on that collaboration.”

Together, they decided to make Get Out While You Can! with McGuffie on production duties. The pair wrote nearly fifty songs, which they whittled down to a tight seven that appear on the EP, released this past month. They made the trek to SS2 Studios in Southend-on-Sea and recorded the tracks across twelve days using everything at their disposal, including grand pianos, twelve-string electric guitars with violin bows, vintage amps and synthesisers.

The triumphant EP chronicles the process of Sametime uprooting their lives to rediscover the creativity that drove them from the very start, finding a new way to tackle a well-established indie-pop sound that looks forward rather than back. Startlingly fresh and deftly sequenced, it reveals the Aitkens as agile songwriters in touch with their craft as much as the listener.

The record's songs touch upon a range of complicated emotions – from the unbridled optimism of “Pickles”, which carries the message of “When life gives you pickles, just make some lemonade”, to the longing that arises from maintaining a long distance relationship on “I Don’t Know Much (But I Know That I Need You”.

Now firmly embedded in a supportive creative network within the tightly-knit fabric of Brighton, the pair boast nothing but positivity about what’s next for Sametime. “For our whole lives, we’ve been sitting on songs,” Sam tells me. “But when we moved over here, we said we’d stop thinking and just do. So we’re working on new music. We just locked in dates to go back to the studio next year. And we’re just gigging and playing as many shows as we can.”

“We’re just having so much fun, and that’s the most important thing,” Tim adds. When I ask about what it feels like to continue into the unknown, and how they quieted the second guessing that could have otherwise held them back, their answer is straightforward: “The nerves are the excitement,” they agree. “You have to always put yourself out there. And if you’re feeling a bit stuck in the mud, you have to do something different and see where that takes you.”