It’s been four years since the Brisbane four-piece released their last album Waco, which debuted at No.1 on the ARIA charts, and as Boerdam told InQueensland, the title Everything Is A-OK was always intended to be tinged with irony,

“We put that acoustic track out [‘A-OK’], and then the bushfires happened, and I was like, ‘man, this song feels really relevant, more so than ever’,” Boerdam said.

“And then coronavirus has happened, and now we’re putting the album out it’s called Everything’s A-OK, and I was going, ‘man, this is surreal,’ the song and the album, which was meant to be kind of ironic.

“That track (A-OK), that was the last song written for the album and there are lyrics on there that are particularly relevant – ‘they can dance a bunker waltz’, and things like that.”

Violent Soho have already released four tracks from the album, ‘A-OK’, ‘Vacation Forever’, ‘Lying on the Floor’ and ‘Pick It Up Again’.

Pick It Up Again, which was released a single two weeks ago, was accompanied by a video that featured real-life footage of the band going door-to-door to extol the virtues of their music.

In another case of coincidental and inadvertently sardonic timing, the video happened to be released at the same time as Australians were being told to start socially isolating from one another.

“It’s the opposite of what we’re told about music, you know – it’s all streaming, it’s throwaway, people swipe it on their smartphones,” Boerdam said. “So it was like, how funny would it be to just walk door-to-door and actually put in people’s faces?

“It’s pretty ironic but I’m just happy it got done but yeah, it’s a weird world where you can’t do that now, for the moment at least.”

After recording their last two albums with Brisbane engineer Bryce Moorhead at his studio The Shed, which no longer exists, the band decided to work with producer Greg Wales at The Grove recording studios on the NSW Central Coast.

“We picked Greg because he understood where we’re coming from,” Boerdam said.

“He was the drummer from [1990s alternative-rock band] Sandpit and knew [late Magic Dirt bassist] Dean [Turner], he was just really part of a lot of the bands that were around when we first started our band, when we soaked up everything in that whole music scene.

“The Australian ’90s scene is a huge part of our band and influence, so Greg instantly got what we’re trying to do with no misunderstanding.”

Singer/guitarist Boerdam, guitarist James Tidswell, bassist Luke Henery and drummer Mikey Richards are now five albums and 17 years into their careers with Violent Soho, and over the past few years, they have all found ways to supplement their incomes outside of the band.

“That’s actually a choice because we don’t like being put in positions where we’re entirely financially dependent on the band. Like, we feel that if you give people financial control of your life they can put you in positions where you kind of feel forced to do a show you don’t want to do, or feel forced to do a TV ad, which has nothing to do with your music.

“Not many bands can exist four years without putting music out, but we could do that because we don’t rely so heavily on income from Soho, to the point where it’s kind of like make or break, and we really have to put out an album in the next six months. Don’t get me wrong though, it’s not like we don’t use that income for bills and stuff.

“If we couldn’t generate an income from this, or tour, that would really suck, but I think the band would still survive, and it would just be doing whatever we can do to keep just practising and playing music, and if it was touring 300-capacity venues, that’s what this band would be doing.

“All this stuff on top, like big shows and festivals, yeah, of course it’s f—ing awesome, but it’s not why we ever did it in the first place. We didn’t form this band so we could go play to 20,000 people on stage, we did it because we believed in the music and we just want to get out there, we want to play and we want to record – that’s why our band was formed our and that was our bond as four friends.

“How [not being able to tour] will affect us I’m actually not sure. I mean, if we’re all good in six months so we’re doing shows again and Splendour happens in October, we’ll actually be fine, it will just be delaying everything six months.”

Everything is A-OK is out on Friday.