Royel Otis Talks Moody, Viral Covers, Who's Your Boyfriend, and New Album 'Hickey'

Zach Sang Show

Sangasong, LLC

Tv & Film, Music

4.7 • 658 Ratings

🗓️ 25 September 2025

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Arguably one of the best Aussie exports since Tame Impala, along with artists like Amyl & the Sniffers and Spacey Jane, duo Royel Otis are breathing new life rock music. Having made waves back in 2022 with the Surf Curse-esque bop ‘Oysters in My Pocket,’ their covers of classics like ‘Linger’ by The Cranberries and Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s early-Aughts disco devastator ‘Murder on the Dancefloor’ sent them to the next level.

Back with their second record hickey, written in a pressurized few months off from the endless tour of PRATTS & PAIN, with a raft of the top songwriters in the biz — Amy Allen, Omer Fedi, Josh Lloyd-Watson and Lydia Kitto (from Jungle) to name a few. We talk about all this, the covers, the topsy-turvy world of being in a band on the up-and-up and what that means for their personal relationships. They also open up about the vulnerabilities that inspired ‘Jazz Burger,’ how Royel getting suspended seven times in a year was key to his musical development, and how it came to be that Lola Tung from The Summer I Turned Pretty wound up in their video for ‘who’s your boyfriend,’ plus so much more.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Your first great love story is free when you sign up for a free 30-day trial at audible.co.
0:05.5	com.
0:05.5	U.K.
0:06.2	slash Wondery.
0:07.5	That's audible.
0:08.3	dot code.
0:09.1	ukesl-wondery.
0:14.8	Hi, beautiful human.
0:18.1	This is very exciting.
0:19.1	I'm Zach.
0:19.5	That's Dan.
0:20.1	And today we welcome to the studio for the first time ever. Aussie indie rock duo, Royal Otis. Yo! What's up? Hickey. It's great. It's so good. Yeah? Yes. Oh, yeah. Have you not been able to feel how great it is because all you're doing is working right now or what's up? Pretty much that's it.
0:38.4	Shit.
0:39.7	That's it.
0:40.9	That's it.
0:42.8	I feel like we'll start, once we start playing the songs like live and start touring them and stuff, we'll get a bit more of a feel for it.
0:50.8	But right now it's just kind of in the Spotify, Apple, music, Amazon
0:55.6	world. I totally understand that, right? You just hand over this album, this thing that you've
1:01.8	labored over and you've given your entire reality to. And yeah, it's just now data to a certain
1:07.5	degree. Yeah, exactly. It's in the grid. Is it It is in the grid. Matrix. What does it feel like to have something so personal? Because this album is personal, right? In the grid. Depends what song. Some songs are personal. And some, the other songs are... Some just, like, rhymed. Yeah. Some songs, yeah.
1:28.2	Some songs rhymed was the first thing we could think of.
1:28.5	Yeah.
	...

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