EZEKIEL OX is still ecstatic to be lead singer of MAMMAL. JODY MACGREGOR tries to keep up.

Ezekiel Ox is very excited. He’s come straight from a recording session in his home studio – his ‘fold-up studio’ he calls it – where Mammal have been working on a new song. Not for any specific album or project, just for fun. They still have a blast playing together in spite of having played over 200 shows in their last two-and-a-half years of touring all over Australia and New Zealand. He’s clearly energised by the music and talking a mile a minute as he tells me about their punishing tour schedule.

"We have the goal of developing in front of an audience, not being selfish with our art and not being selfish with what we were doing, actually giving people a chance to fill it out with us and that’s been really exciting, letting the audience grow with us."

Among those 200+ shows Mammal have played was the support slot for KISS on their Australian tour. It was a slightly unusual choice. "They bought us a really good rider, which is all at their expense, so much respect to them for that," says Ox. "They’re not really our bag as a band. They’re very much a sex, drugs and rock & roll band. We’re more like a politics, drugs and rock & roll band, but to their credit they were very lovely guys, complete professionals and they were very polite to us and we had a great night."

When it came to recording their studio album, they tackled a lot of it as live as if they were on stage, completing 12 of the songs in 12 days. Ox put down most of his vocals in two takes. "We didn’t actually treat the studio as if it was the master of us. We went in and took that extra bit of time we had to make it sound extra punchy, but it was recorded very much off the grid. We only used click tracks on three songs, so we took all of those elements out of hard rock that most bands are using nowadays that make it sound sterile and ditched them and made a record like our favourite bands would’ve, like Metallica would’ve with Puppets or Zeppelin, where they would have been playing for their lives and that was something that was really important to us and I think that’s one of the reasons the album really jumps out of the speakers at you and doesn’t actually sound overthought."

They’re not slowing down yet. A second live album, following on from 2007’s Vol 1: The Aural Underground, has already been recorded and mixed and they’re about to play the Loud 09 festival and a gig of their own on the same day. They’re still having a good time and a big part of that comes from being able to make their own decisions about their direction.

"We have to enjoy it first otherwise we may as well get a job in a call centre and actually earn some money. The thing is, we struggle along financially because we believe we’re creating something that we can look back on in 50 years time and be really proud of and if we made decisions for other people we would probably look back in 50 years not being super proud of the choices we made."

MAMMAL play alongside The Butterfly Effect, Pez & 360 and others at LOUD 09 at the Gold Coast Convention Centre on Sunday Jun 7. They play the same night at The Zoo with MM9. www.myspace.com/mammaltheband

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