Emerging in a blaze of hype over the last year, Little Red are – quite possibly – THE most talked about new Australian band currently doing their thing. As they tour the highways and byways of their nation, with debut album Listen to Little Red setting tongues a-wagging, their buzz is threatening to turn into a deafening roar.

It seems like they came out of nowhere, but that couldn’t be further from the truth, according to Quang Dinh, the band’s bassist. “Maybe for people who haven’t heard of us,” he says of their seemingly imperceptible infiltration into the world of Australian rock ‘n roll, “but we’ve been gigging in Melbourne for a couple of years, just getting our chops down, and getting everything right.”

Rumours abounded as the band were making their first tentative steps towards stardom that they would gig upwards of seven times a week.

“We did play very, very solidly – we just never turned down a gig,” he says of how the band developed their sound. “Rain, hail, or shine, it didn’t matter whether we were sick or not. We just love playing live.”

They’ve managed to capture a lot of the energy from their live sets in their recorded sound – it’s a sort of bastard child of doo-wop and trad rhythm ‘n blues that comes complete with a very British Invasion beat. It harkens back to a time in the past when bands were in it for the music, not for making profits.

Yet after the first wave of hype, apocryphal tales had it that Listen to Little Red was likely to appear on a major – and that every pack was chasing the band, furiously trying to convince them to sign on their dotted line. Instead, the album is coming out independently.

“One of the reasons we needed to go independently,” Quang explains, “was because we write so many songs. We wanted to do the thing that no-one really does anymore – we’d love to release an album every year. Or even more if we could; we’ve just got so many songs.”

The album positively flies by – with sixteen cuts stretching in at barely forty minutes length, it’s the sort of album that sets a great leaping-off point for the band to go from here.

“There’s no grand plan,” Quang states. “We just want to make classic albums – let’s just see if we can do that! At this point, I think we just want to come up with classic songs. I think for the first album the songs were really concentrated on, and the musicianship…we’re not natural musicians. We’re all self-taught. But by playing around so much I think we’re pretty good of playing as a band now.”

While he may claim that, as a band, Little Red are far from proficient at their instruments, perhaps the benefit of them all being at around the same level is that they’ve been able to learn and develop at the same pace together. “We want to keep progressing and get better,” he agrees.

“We’ve got songs for the second album,” he says, “but for the first album we wanted to do the ones that we all comfortable playing. The other ones are a different vibe – we’ve got some reggae-ish tunes, and some real r ‘n b ones, and they should all fit on the second album.”

Given that they want to follow up relatively quickly, it looks like Little Red will record quickly once more. Listen to Little Red itself was recorded in a scant two sessions – one over a year ago, and one only a few months before the release. “We approach both sessions pretty differently,” Quang says. “The first one we tried to get everything as perfect as possible.”

It’s hard to believe, given the gloriously shambolic sound found on the album. Part of the beauty of it is that it DOESN’T sound like everything’s perfect.

“That’s why we needed to go into a second sessions,” he says. “We re-recorded a lot of the songs [from the first session] and by that time we’d written a lot more songs as well, so it was a case of setting everything up and playing, sing live, and record it in two takes. We just wanted to get everything down as quickly as possible.”

Between Little Red and fellow Melbourne buzz band Eddy Current Suppression Ring, there seems to be a real D.I.Y. ethic emerging amongst like-minded groups – it’s more about capturing the vibe than getting everything perfect.

“I think more bands can do it now,” he opines. “You can make really good product out of your own bedroom, and it’s easy and quick – and especially for us it’s been good for us because live gigs are where the excitement happens.”

Little Red’s Listen to Little Red is out now, with the band currently touring nationally.