Following one of the standout album releases of 2025, Rory Trobbiani and Luke Scott of HighSchool returned to Australia earlier this month for a run of live shows. While the Melbourne duo have spent much of the last year living in London and touring throughout the US, we caught up with them on home soil to talk finding inspiration overseas, creative influences, fashion, and what's next:

How is spending more time overseas and in London and going to all these different places, writing and playing, is influencing your sound and your live shows?

Rory: I think when we moved to London, we started making way more angsty sounding music because life is just really stressful there. You're constantly broke, living off meal deals. Weather's shit. But there's also this obviously amazing energy there of art and the music scene. So you feel pushed to produce music or produce art. I feel like moving to London gave our music a slightly more stressful tone to it or something. Would you agree, Luke?

Luke: Yeah, I reckon. I think it's just good to see what's happening in other places other than Australia. There are a lot of great bands and great art that come out of Australia, but also so much from other parts of the world, and it's great to access that.

Rory: We lead a pretty chill lifestyle in Melbourne, so I feel like if we spent too long here we'd end up making some, like–

Rory: Yeah, yacht rock. Kinda like some Jack Johnson Banana Pancakes sounding shit. It’s good to move away from that and find ourselves in more sort of dire circumstances. But yeah, we'll see what we do next. We might have to go somewhere else to find a new sound.

Has there been a live show you've seen over there that has really inspired you?

Rory: Damn, I think the beauty of spending time there is there's something on every night of the week. So we saw a lot of gigs.

Luke: Yeah, plenty. Our bookers were really generous with getting us into shows and stuff, so we saw a lot. But seeing DIIV at KOKO was pretty inspiring. Do you remember Turnstile at All Points East?

Rory: Yeah, their live show is so good.

Luke: Seeing The Hellp in LA recently was really formative. I think seeing great bands and artists is really good for your own art.

Rory: Yeah. Being in London we're just like, “Fuck, the bands here are so tight.” Even seeing bands on a random night that maybe I hadn't listened to much in the studio or streamed that much, but seeing them live… they take live shows really seriously in the UK, and I feel like punters take live shows super seriously as well. It's such an important aspect of being an artist there.

So tell me about your live show, and if there's a song since the album's come out and you've been touring that you especially love to perform or that you realise you're particularly proud of as time has gone on.

Rory: It's interesting. I do start to realise which songs I really love as time goes on. You don't really realise it when you're in the studio. I feel like August 19 is one of the best songs we ever wrote, and I realised that from playing it live. It’s my favourite song to play live, and it always translates so well. The worst thing sometimes is when you tour a song and play it live and think, “I would've done so much differently.”

Luke: Yeah, you wish you could delete it and then re-record it. From the new record I've been liking playing Sony Ericsson live. That's really fun.

I love your visuals and everything that you guys do visually. So in terms of your style, is fashion important to you?

Rory: Yes. Definitely, yeah. I'd say so. Luke's more of the sort of fashion head.

Luke: Oh, I wouldn't say so. Rory's the more stylish one, I think. Everything looks good on him.

Luke: I guess traveling to places where people dress a lot better helps. I think the most important aspect, no matter what clothes you wear… hair is the most important component. You gotta have good hair. I think it's interesting with fashion – as you continue to be an artist, you feel more comfortable wearing pieces that maybe you wouldn't have worn before, and then it just becomes normal.

Rory: I feel like you just continue to push the boundaries more and more.

Luke: But I think everything that surrounds the music, we think of as having equal artistic value as the music itself. Fashion or photography or music videos are equally artistic as the creation of music.

Rory: Luke takes fashion very seriously. In fact, at one point he was flat broke and got offered work from a friend of ours painting something in his photography studio, and he had the option to take cash or a pair of vintage Helmut Lang boots. And he took the Helmut Lang boots, which I always think is badass.

I would do the same.

Luke: I do not regret it. They're amazing. They're like my favourite thing I own.

Which bands do you guys think have good style?

Luke: I really like the style of early 2000s indie bands. At the Drive-In were looking so sick on their Jools Holland appearance in like 2002. The Strokes were looking really sick in the early 2000s. I wouldn't say anymore, but I really like how they dressed back when they released Is This It.

Rory: Fashion in music is so interesting in terms of how long it takes for a trend to be rehashed and have a resurgence. I feel like 20 years is a good rule of thumb.

Luke: Yeah. Fakemink is also always looking steezy these days.

I’m obsessed with him.

Luke: I also like the fashion of dweeby mid-noughties bands like Vampire Weekend – little cardigans and knits and those little woolly hats with baubles and stuff. I feel like that'll slowly have some sort of resurgence. Or the Midwestern emo band vibe – just khaki shorts and polos.

Which bands are you excited about? What have you been listening to?

Luke: Are you guys liking Ear? I've been listening to them a lot.

Love them.

Luke: I feel like they're fucking sick. Yeah. Maybe that's an obvious thing to say, but I love them. I really like that new Babyfather release that came out a couple weeks ago – it's a four-track EP. I especially love the first two tracks, Pop and Slumps. I fucking love Fakemink and Esdee Kid. And 2hollis. I like what The Hellp are doing. Green Star, a band out of London.

Rory: Also a lot of bands we’ve been touring with recently in the US. Touching Ice. Taraneh.

There have been a lot of smaller rising artists here who cite you guys as the band they're most excited about. So do you have any advice for those artists who are just starting to put music out and are just getting started on their journey?

Rory: I think it's really normal and important as an artist to develop your sound based off other music that you like, and the better you get at it, the better you get at hiding who you've bitten your music off. So my advice would be to learn how to find inspiration in genres and scenes that are separate from the style of music you make or the scene you wanna be a part of. We obviously started out very influenced by The Smiths and The Cure and The Strokes and stuff like that, which were really formative influences for us. But I think where we really gained our own sound was from drawing inspiration from other styles of music – Midwestern emo, hip-hop, country, or things you wouldn't expect – and filtering that through the HighSchool sound and aesthetic.

Luke: In order to make good stuff, you need to try things that probably feel a bit wrong or a bit silly at the time. Nine times out of 10 they are silly and they are a bad idea, but I think from having that openness as a creative, you eventually find these gems that you maybe wouldn't find if you were being too safe with what you were doing.

What's next for you guys? Are you already writing new music?

Rory: Yes. We had plans to go and do some festivals towards the end of the year in Europe, and potentially back in the States, but we've decided to shelve that idea for now and just go straight into writing a sophomore record. Just take the rest of the year to put our heads down, lock ourselves away for a bit, and devise a new kinda plan for this project or whatever. Spend the rest of the year writing, then release another record and go back on tour and stuff. We’ve just come off such a long tour. I think it's a great time to totally go quiet for a bit and just focus on writing.

Stay tuned.‍

Listen to HighSchool HERE.

@_highschool._