While the titular road might be fictional, Perry Street Park sing of Sunrise Highway with a candid reminiscence.
Perry Street Park have shared their new single Sunrise Highway, marking the Queensland band’s first release since their 2022 debut EP Bad Habits, Broken Hearts. A head-banging ode to road tripping, Sunrise Highway sees Perry Street Park combine their efforts for a sunlit and nostalgic sonic joyride, complete with pop-leaning hooks and the kind of blissful guitar strums that’d soundtrack a wide-open outback road.
Fittingly, the single opens with mention of “set[ing] out on a wandering highway,” with the song’s remaining runtime chronicling the band’s highway-bound journey. References to far-flung horizons and newfound treasures on the road are sprinkled atop the track’s infectious summery tune, with the result mustering all the retro energy of an early INXS cut. “If I had it my way,” the band sings sentimentally on the explosive chorus, “I’d be on the sunrise highway.”
While the titular highway might be fictional, Perry Street Park sing of their road-bound misadventures with an enviable reminiscence, as though listeners are right there with them in the passenger seat of a rickety Volkswagen. Sunrise Highway’s three-part harmony and masterful guitar groove only amplifies the nostalgia — a feat that could only be achieved through the collective collaboration of all bandmates Benny Nelson, Sebastian Jennings-Hingston, Ryan Brook and Harry Shakespeare-Davies.
Sunrise Highway was borne out of a songwriting retreat that Perry Street Park attended in November of last year. The single recounts one of the band’s road trips from north-west NSW to Brisbane, during which they encountered “people from all walks of life,” the band recalled in a press statement. Travelling 100km/hr on their way home, Perry Street Park enjoyed “a night sky unpolluted by city lights,” and “watched the most beautiful sunrise in western QLD one could imagine.” From there, Sunrise Highway essentially wrote itself.
Sunrise Highway marks Perry Street Park’s first release since Bad Habits, Broken Hearts, the debut EP home to their breakout single She!. Since then, the band has served as the halftime entertainment at home games for the NRL Gold Coast Titans throughout the 2022 season, and was named on the lineup for Airlie Beach Festival of Music’s 2023 edition, as well as joining the lineup for Bluesfest 2023 & ‘24
Listen to Perry Street Park’s new single Sunrise Highway below, and keep an eye out for their sophomore EP set for release soon. Elsewhere, catch a behind-the-scenes look at the songwriting process behind Sunrise Highway in the video above.
