Tidal Peak resurfaces with Treasureville, unpacked track by track by the artist himself.
After a five-year hiatus, Tidal Peak — the dreamy shoegaze project helmed by Kyle Lacko — is back with a brand new full-length album, Treasureville.
Since launching the project in 2015, Lacko has remained the creative core, steadily building a cult following with one full album and several EPs, while occasionally bringing the project to life on stage in Toowoomba and Brisbane.
Now, he has self-released Treasureville via his own label, Innersea Records, with the promise of something deeply personal and sonically expansive.
Entirely self-recorded and produced, the album is a lush mix of dream-pop textures, synthscapes, and coastal nostalgia, crafted with meticulous care over half a decade.
Now that the album’s out, Lacko gives us a personal deeper look into the emotional landscape and sonic architecture that shaped Treasureville. Read it below.
Capricorntown
It was extremely bold of me to kick off the album with an eight-minute beast of a track, but it also fulfilled a creative, adventurous exercise of attempting to open an album with an epic statement.
It is a track designed to take its time whilst never letting up, which is why you’ve got interesting moments such as: The intro which shape shifts a couple of times before the vocals come in at the 1:36 mark; The guitars letting rip with a wall of sound at the 3-minute mark; The phrases of EBow throughout, and the harmonica solo at 5:15 mixed with a skittering synth arpeggio running between the left and right channels.
A friend of mine said the percussion reminded him of the sound of a train going on a long journey along the railway tracks. I can hear what he means.
The drum machine stutters along like a clattering locomotive.
The song is very much a precursor to what comes later thematically as the lyrics are about wanting to return to “Capricorntown” which is really my childhood hometown of Yeppoon.
You will hear about this place many times throughout the album.
You could say Treasureville is a concept album split into two halves, which is quite true, however you do get an actual conceptual suite a little later on, similarly titled Return To Capricorn. More on that later.
Flowing
Not about Yeppoon, mind, but Brisbane; during the album’s making I was struggling with making meaningful connections in the River City’s music scene and found myself in my own corner for a lot of the time.
“Just a smaller fish/trying to swim against the current” is a line that definitely echoes this sentiment of an industry that at times feels unforgivingly competitive and cutthroat.
I did not feel as though I had a place in Brisbane’s music scene, and as the song suggests, it felt hopeless for me.
It did not help that I had stopped playing gigs and was hidden away trying to finish the album.
Thankfully there were a handful of people throughout who supported me and helped bring my confidence back.
The chords are very sad, and the lyrics “I woke up today/and felt like I should wither away/feel like this everyday” are depressingly true.
My mental health has copped an absolute battering over the last few years; Yet I see this song as a poignant reminder of trying to stay above it all when imposter syndrome gets the better of me and I start overthinking again.
I do think I really nailed the mood on this one.
The Here And The Now
This one was sort of about trying to live life without getting bogged down by the lockdowns and all the bad news that came with the pandemic and the state of the world.
The lyrics were very stream-of-consciousness, which I can say was practically most of the album, pulling the right sounds out of the ether.
Very little synths were used here, mostly layers of guitars and a fretless bass which counterpoints the melody and chords.
The drum machine is very Cocteau Twins – gated reverb and all.
It was basically two drum machine tracks spliced together – a Alesis SR-16 which I have used on pretty much everything in Tidal Peak, and a Roland Boutique TR-08 which is a scaled-down version of the famous 808.
Mariner Shells
This was the very first track I composed for Treasureville – recorded on the first day I sat down to start making the album on October 29th, 2019.
At the time the working title of the song was ‘Last Frontier,’ and I originally envisioned it as opening the album.
Obviously things turned out different, but throughout the album’s entire history this song survived and stayed in the final track listing.
I built it up from the demo into something very ethereal, very underwater.
It’s the most shoegazey song on the album. It’s probably the most shoegazey thing I’ve recorded, come to think of it.
I love how the fretless bass is constantly moving and sliding around. I don’t know how many guitar tracks I put on this song but there are a lot.
The intro synth and harmonicas were added much, much later on.
The vocals were also stream-of-consciousness but captured the feeling of love in long distance.
The song is dedicated to my partner as we were initially in a long-distance relationship before she moved to Brisbane.
If you listen closely you can hear backwards vocals throughout the song – that’s me singing “Mariner Shells” over and over before I reversed it.
It adds an entirely new texture to the song, but it is also amazing what a bucketload of reverb can do.
Frangipani Drive
The catchy other precursor to the Return To Capricorn suite.
The title of the song refers to a particular street in Yeppoon that my siblings, friends and I used to always play on. There was a roundabout that connected to various other streets and avenues, the names of which are peppered throughout the song.
For a time we did live just off of Frangipani Drive, and we had all sorts of family friends living in houses along it.
There were always kids riding their bikes up and down the street, which is a lyric in the song.
Frangipani Drive sat right next to swampy grassland and was opposite my primary school, a place I have rather mixed feelings about.
Out of every song on the album this one came together the easiest, probably because there’s less on this track than the others.
It’s just this bubbling little synthpop ditty, almost like something The Blue Nile would’ve done in their early days.
The fretless bass was unfortunately out of action and I had neither time nor the finances to get it repaired.
What I did have however was this nifty little box called a Korg Volca FM which had a bass synth patch that I could program and use as a sequencer, which I did.
The guitars are quite flavourful of Dire Straits/Chris Rea, which was rather fitting in this instance; I was obsessed with the guitar styles of Mark Knopfler and Chris Rea when I was growing up in Yeppoon.
This is the song that ends the first half of the album and prepares us for the suite that kicks off the second half.
Are you ready to return to Capricorn with me?
Coasting
You hear distant chimes, then an atmospheric drone and then some crystalline guitars.
This is Coasting, the song that opens up the 28-minute, five-part Return To Capricorn suite.
For the rest of the album you’ll be diving into the narrative of a person (yes, it’s me) imagining their return to the beaches of their coastal hometown and reliving moments with past friends, romances and landmarks.
This song was another contender for opening the album, before I realised it would be better suited for the conceptual suite I had in my head.
It is very introspective; I’m wondering if I’ll still be relevant or regarded in any capacity when I return, all while I’m slowly coasting through my life and feeling left behind. Some very heavy themes indeed…
When I was recording the suite I was inspired by conceptual art-rock pieces like ‘The Ninth Wave’ suite from Kate Bush‘s 1985 album Hounds Of Love and ‘Rio Grande’ from Brian Wilson’s 1988 self-titled album.
All very progressive pop and heavily conceptual… just my kind of thing!
It was right before I finally announced the album that I decided ‘Coasting’ would be the perfect first single.
It was parallel with my own experience of returning to music after such a lengthy absence, wondering if there would still be an audience waiting.
Wilderness Years
This song made my partner cry when she first heard it. No, really!
It started off as one of those very late-night experiments that I had thrown together.
I had laid down the Rhodes chords with some synth pads and a sampled drum kick & snare with an added delay effect.
I didn’t come back to it for several weeks but when I listened back there was something about it that made me want to finish it.
The synth lines underneath made me think of home, of wandering along Farnborough Beach and feeling nostalgic.
It’s very different for me vocally as well. Back then I would’ve hidden my voice behind swirling guitars or a synth, but here it is front and centre; In the verses I have nothing to hide behind except for the looping drum machine.
It seemed to be the song that got the strongest reaction out of people.
As previously mentioned, it affected my partner in such a way that she declared it my best song.
I had a mate in the car with me listening to the album – we were trying to decide on which track would be the next single.
When ‘Wilderness Years’ came on he perked up and said that was the one that really jumped out at him.
It felt like that was the sign that this track needed to be released after ‘Coasting.’
I do think it is one of the most emotional moments on the album, especially as it continues the narrative of returning to your old hometown and reliving the moments that make you nostalgic.
It’s also sad as well, because there are people you were once close to who have long since drifted away, and you think about them but they certainly don’t think about you anymore.
The song is about wishing to be back to those simpler, more joyful times.
A Deeper Seashore
It took many attempts to get this track to come together, mainly because the previous versions didn’t fit the overall feel of the Return To Capricorn suite as I was recording it.
Eventually I arrived on the most simple drum pattern which was programmed into the drum machine and looped throughout the entire song, then the rest came together very naturally.
I believe my best vocal performance was captured on ‘A Deeper Seashore.’
I spent a long time layering, sculpting and stacking take after take, and it comes together rather beautifully.
It’s also chock-full of oceanic references and imagery, rather fitting for a Tidal Peak song.
Nothing has changed really. It fit in nicely between ‘Wilderness Years’ and ‘Salem Court,‘ serving as a bridge between the two with me reminiscing about my own little world in Yeppoon and a throwback to a girl I had fallen head over heels with in high school, who I was charmed by “until she vanished into air.”
I would spend a long time pining for this particular girl after we went our separate ways.
Because Treasureville took so long to make, I ended up with a tonne of demos, outtakes and unreleased tracks.
If I ever end up releasing them as a compilation I already have the title in mind – Collected Seashells which is part of a lyric from this track.
It fits so well for all the odds and ends that I accumulated while the album was coming together.
Salem Court
It’s a song about the street I grew up on in Yeppoon – therefore many strong, sentimental memories are associated with it- and yet it’s the most danceable track on the album, I reckon.
Through the beats, the synths and the layered, rhythmic guitars however is a sense of wistfulness.
‘Salem Court’ was once a barebones street with bushland surrounding it, but as time passed more and more houses popped up until they cleared the bushland to make way for new estates, where the entire thing was “now surrounded by concrete.”
How we wish for the way things once were…
I haven’t been back there for many years, but I can still picture how the street first looked when our house was being built in the late 90’s.
I wanted to capture that feeling somehow in this song, singing of my childhood home by the sea…
Lammermoor
Which brings us to the epic final track in the suite and the entire album.
I wanted to end things with a grand finale, a multipart, progressive pop statement which revisits certain parts of Treasureville.
Indeed, you hear echoes of ‘Capricorntown’ at the start, and ‘A Deeper Seashore’ is also name checked in the lyrics.
‘Lammermoor’ is the name of the beach where we lived very close to, and the place that connects to many of the landmarks mentioned throughout the Return To Capricorn suite.
It’s a beach I’m tied to in spirit, somewhere that holds many memories and is also responsible for my love of the sea, references to which have been scattered across several Tidal Peak songs over the years.
It is hard to pick, but ‘Lammermoor’ is one of my favourite songs on the entire album, along with ‘Capricorntown.’
Mapping out each section took much work but I can hear it all come together in the end, all the multitracked layers.
I also get that feeling of looking back on all the places, romances and friendships in this town I had grown up in.
By the time the atmospheric swells die down and you’re left with the sounds of waves and wind in your ears, you’ve finished a long journey.
For me, that journey took five-and-a-half years with the process of getting Treasureville out into the world.
I’m so glad that we finally reached the end.
