“There’s a big change coming and it won’t be long, before we’re all in this together.”

For every up, there is a down. For black, there is white. For day, lurks night. Or so Adelaide band the Audreys discovered following the warm embrace garnered by their debut longplayer, Between Last Night and Us.

The album catapulted the Audreys on to the national stage, but the accompanying success left them high and dry in a songwriting drought. Songwriter, vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Taasha Coates says it took her and fellow songwriter and instrumental whiz Tristan Goodall an age to get back to writing. “We toured so much and everything we did was new,” Taasha explains. “We were just a little Adelaide band that made an album that suddenly had us touring and playing on bigger stages. It was just all so overwhelming and took up so much of our time that is was 18 months before we wrote another song.”

But in a universe controlled by dynamic balance, The Audreys’ songwriting drought was broken by a flood. Rather than a metaphorical flood of songs, it was a soaking of sentiment – a darkness, a foreboding – that seeps into the corners of their sophomore album, When the Flood Comes.“The flood is the end of the world type thing,” Taasha reveals. “It’s a bit of suicide, murder and the like.”

Death, destruction and the apocalypse.

Not exactly what you’d expect from the Adelaide five-piece comprising Coates (voice, melodica, harmonica, ukulele, piano), Goodall (reso-phonic, acoustic and electric guitars, banjo), Toby Lang (drums, harmonies), Mikey G (violin, lap steel guitar, harmonies) and Lyndon Gray (upright bass and electric bass, harmonies).

Yet on When the Flood Comes, The Audreys shatter all expectations. They deliver an album of lyrical and sonic beauty that expands their musical template beyond the alt-country-tinged instrumentation and smoky pop of their gorgeous debut. Musically, it’s a revelation that almost defies categorization. It aches. It breaks. And it drips with passion.

“We always knew it would be a different album because the band is bigger and a bit different but we didn’t purposely set out to do anything particular with it sound wise,” Taasha says.

The dark portent that undercuts opening track Chelsea Blues and reappears on many of the 12 tracks showcases how much the Audreys have grown as a band.

“There are certain strands lyrically that run through the whole album,” Tristan agrees.

It’s there in Chelsea Blues. It resides in the album’s title track and in Here He Lies, a funeral march written about a friend of Tasha’s who died young. Or in Sally and the Preacher, a salvation song where hope is found in the bottom of a bottle.

“Quite a few of the songs are about drinking,” Tristan jokes.

“It is just about how we were feeling,” Taasha says. “And the kind of music that we like is a bit moody and atmospheric. We have people round for dinner and they say ‘Effing hell, guys, can you out on something more cheerful!’, and we have to tell them we don’t have anything cheerful,” she laughs.

After the many months they spent on the road, the Audreys broke their songwriting drought with two of the album’s standout cuts, the first radio single Paradise City and the aforementioned Here He Lies.

“Paradise City has changed a lot from the version we’d started playing live but it’s changed for the better,” Taasha says. “It was originally called Baggage City but we didn’t like that so we changed it and I just started singing Paradise City because of Guns N’ Roses. But I thought it would be weird to call it Paradise City, but ultimately it just stuck.

“I actually wrote the lyrics for that with my sister, Banika … there are a couple of tracks on the album that I wrote with her. She gives me poems she’s written and I might take a few lines out of them. I go to her when I’ve written something… she’s kind of my sounding-board for writing lyrics.”

With the drought broken, Taasha and Tristan decided to tickle their creative juices with an overseas songwriting sojourn, taking in a visit to Nashville and a stay at New York’s famous The Hotel Chelsea (aka the Chelsea Hotel), digs that have housed everyone from Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Janis Joplin to William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Dylan Thomas. (It also lives in infamy as the place where Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols allegedly stabbed his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, to death in 1978.)

“It’s not quite as pretentious as it might sound,” Taasha says of the stay.

“My mum was living in New York in an apartment in Chelsea. It started to get a bit cramped at mum’s and we were walking past the Chelsea, so went in and asked how much their rooms were. We couldn’t believe how cheap they were for New York. So we ended up checking in there for the rest of the time we were in New York.

“Songwriting can be really hard emotionally,” Taasha reveals, “and we just like to string ourselves out on it, so we sat in this seedy hotel and drank too much and fought with each other. It’s part of the process. We’d spend the days writing in the hotel and then we’d go out at night.”

“We wrote a bunch there,” Tristan says of Chelsea Blues, Lay Me Down, Anchor and Small Things.

Once the songs were written, the Audreys entered Yikesville Studios in Melbourne to work with producer Shane O’Mara, who also crafted Between Last Night and Us.

“It took a lot longer than the first album and it was a lot harder. If they’re all this difficult I’m not going to make too many more, I reckon,” Taasha jokes.

“Initially, as far as the bed tracks went, it happened quite easily,” Tristan recalls. “But as we got into tracking and layering up parts we just took our time.”

That time amounted to three sessions at Yikesville, with the Audreys determined to get the album right.

“We’d go away for a few weeks and come back, often with fresh ideas. Sometimes we just wanted to go back and re-do stuff because we weren’t happy with it or had a new idea,” Taasha says.

The Audreys determination to nail the longplayer goes beyond what was laid to tape. The artwork incorporates evocative watercolours, crafted by graphic designer David Homer who has worked with Powderfinger, The Cat Empire and created The Audreys’ eye-catching Sheets to the Wind tour poster.

Now comes the next phase for the Audreys as the band prepare to take When the Flood Comes out on the road. The response should be equally different.

“We were always the folk act at a rock festival and the rock act at the folk festival,” Taasha recalls. “We’re too modern for country festivals, we’re too loud for folk festivals and we’re too quite for rock festivals. I guess we’ve just got our own music.”

Our own music.

Three simple words that captures the essence of the Audreys and When the Flood Comes.