With an illustrious career that has spanned over 15 years, The Panics continue to be an act that define the contemporary Australian indie and alternate sound with their unique voice and perspective. Today they add to that impressive track record with the release of 'Weatherman', the first official single to be lifted from their forthcoming fifth album, 'Hole In Your Pocket'- set to be released in Australia, October 7 via Dew Process / UMA. To celebrate the release of the album, the band will be embarking on a national tour throughout October, kicking off in Sydney Friday October 14 at the Oxford Art Factory before heading to Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth. Special guests to be announced and tickets are on sale now.

 Featuring their trademark, big sky, cinematic soundscapes and frontman Jae Laffer's enigmatic and evocative lyrics, 'Weatherman' is familiar as the kind of rich and multi-layered composition we've come to love from The Panics, but gives it a new wave injection, featuring digital textures and a pulsating beat that sounds refreshed and unleashed.

"This world is fatiguing and intriguing and strange," Panics' frontman Jae Laffer says. "What else can you do but paint a picture? It's better than having nightmares about it." 

"When I sing 'Don't complain to the weatherman,' I first thought of the Earth's changing climate," Laffer explains. "We've had fair warning. It's not gonna fix itself... But the same applies to being burnt in life. Whether it's one life or the human race, we have a responsibility to ourselves and to the world around us." 

Unlike 2011's Rain On The Hummingwire, which was written, recorded & mixed in New York, 'Hole In Your Pocket', was produced by the band on home soil, in their studio in Melbourne.

Laffer's songs include tales of suburbia, racism, community displacement and climate change. He drew from journal entries from his life for inspiration to create an album filled with new characters and landscapes. There is the same sense of nostalgia and imagery of Australia's vast plains, and sometimes unforgiving landscape that has been a staple of their career and linked them to iconic acts like The Triffids, The Go Betweens and Nick Cave. But 'Hole In Your Pocket' filters it all through a majestic union of sound and poetry to create a movie both strange and eerily familiar, instantly arresting in its melodies and images but slow to reveal every layer of shared experience.

Laffer has seen plenty since Rain On the Humming Wire, The Panics' fourth ARIA nominated album, hit the ARIA top 10 in 2011, he released his deck-clearing solo album 'When The Iron Glows Red' in 2013. Much has naturally changed too, in the lives of the band he led out of Perth in '03: Drew Wootton, Myles Wootton, Paul Otway and Jules Douglas. In the UK where 'Cruel Guards' was critically embraced they went on to sell out tours and play festivals on the back of the huge radio success of 'Don't fight it'. Mojo Magazine says 'they have all the drama of a marauding gang riding into the sunset"` and The Daily Mail UK called their songs 'Modern hymns for a generation, anthems of rash joy and quiet heartbreak"

The multiple WAMI award winners have earned a numerous amount of awards and accolades. 2007's Cruel Guards has reached Gold status in Australia, selling over 54,000 copies and took out the J Award for 'Album of the Year' as well as being voted in at #62 in The Hottest 100 Australian Albums Of All Time and in 2008 took out the ARIA for 'Best Adult Contemporary Album'. It was also nominated for two other ARIA Awards 'Don't Fight It' was nominated for the ARIA for 'Best Breakthrough Artist - Single'. The song was voted in to the number ten position in the Triple J Hottest 100, 2007 and reached #43 on the ARIA singles chart.

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