MANUEL SHARRAD of INFUSION tells JODY MACGREGOR why they’re a bit bored with dance music.

"It’s all very well writing club tracks, but the trick is to write club tracks that people can sing along to," says Infusion’s Manuel Sharrad. About a year ago the dance trio drifted along the electronic axis from somewhere closer to the deep club end towards the pop end. No longer is their music, as Sharrad puts it, "some dark, dirty thing that you listen to at four in the morning. Because we’ve been there, we’ve done that and we’re all a bit bored of it to be honest. It’s nice playing festivals where people are singing along in the front row. I think that’s a really good experience and people are dancing as well. You can do both."

Part of the inspiration for this directional shift, captured on their new All Night Sun Light album, came from the fact they discovered rock & roll didn’t suck any more. "I have found myself listening to a lot more crossover bands, rock bands. Stuff like TV On The Radio or Deus, Peter Bjorn And John, even stuff like The Shins. A big influence a couple of years back was that Postal Service album, just for the fact that people were starting to write happy, quirky little pop songs again, which I thought was great."

The other half of the inspiration came from the fact that, sharing a house with bandmate Jamie Stevens in Melbourne, Sharrad hasn’t had access to a piano to write songs on for a good long while. "I think that in itself shapes the style of the tracks that you end up with. I have noticed that the songs I write on piano which end up as Infusion tracks and the songs I write with guitar which end up as Infusion tracks end up in very different areas, from a mood point of view. Piano stuff tends to be introspective and grandiose whereas the guitar stuff is a lot more stadium rock I guess." He laughs, "You can do moody stuff on the guitar but I’m just not that good a guitarist to be able to pull it off really."

Demonstrating that cheerful, definitely non-moody sound is their new single 2-Player Game, full of bleepy 8-bit samples from arcade games like Bubble Bobble. Sharrad says of the tune, "It sort of lent itself to a song about getting stoned and playing computer games with your mates, which I’m sure a lot of people have done in their time. It just lent itself to that retro feel of that part of your life where you are sitting on the couch way more than you should."

The new album’s songs will be heard on their current tour, for which they’re bringing along Perth’s synthy dance-rockers The Dirty Secrets. "We like playing with other bands really. It’s fun. It’s lonely playing in clubs at four in the morning when you’re an act and all the other DJs are wandering out and disappearing and you’re left there to pack up and move all your gear around and all that sort of stuff and everyone else just kicks off at the end of the night, it’s kind of boring. Boring and lonely, left packing up at the end of the night when everyone’s gone."

INFUSION play at Family on Thursday Jul 2. Their new album is out on Friday Jul 3 on Futuresque. www.myspace.com/infusion

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