Tora's Jai Piccone On Why Losing A Member Means Big Things For The Band

Imagine not even being 20 and having played Glastonbury - the same year as The Who, and Kanye West, and Florence + The Machine - without even having released your debut album.

That's the reality for Tora guitarist Jai Piccone. Last week saw Tora release their long-awaited long play Take A Rest, next week they'll be kicking off their latest tour, and this week they're at home in Byron Bay, honing the sounds of their upcoming live shows.

This tour will be different for Tora though - in April, they announced that founding member Toby Tunis was leaving the band to "explore other avenues and interests at this stage in his life". "Toby was still writing with us at the time that we were writing the album, so a lot of it's written with Toby and by Toby," explains Piccone. "In terms of future sounds, it's sort of a mystery because we're all still really inspired about writing and excited about what happens next but we're not really sure... In terms of the album that's just come out, Toby wrote a lot of that so his influence is definitely a big part of that album."

Tunis' presence has already been missed when it comes to the live shows. "Jo [Loewenthal, lead vocals/guitar/samples] and myself have had a big, big role change within the band in terms of the live dynamic because there's one less member, which means an extra person's worth of work has been distributed between myself and Jo," says Piccone. "Now in a live situation, I'm playing a lot of synths, and piano, and singing more, and so is Jo. It's become a more content intensive way of performing for us personally, which is really exciting because it makes us a bit better and focuses harder on the music."

Take A Rest comes after five years of being a band, an 180-day tour of Europe, the US and Mexico, and two EPs, 2013's Tora and 2014's Eat The Sun. "It was sort of a slow decision for us because we wanted to do an album earlier but when we were writing the first two EPs we weren't exactly sure what we were going for in terms of what we wanted it to be and they just ended up as shorter bodies of work," says Piccone. "So when it got to the point the Eat The Sun EP had been out for a year and a half and we already had a bunch of songs in the works, we were like 'it's definitely time to put out a full body of work'. It just was sort of expected from fans and we wanted to do it for a long time, and so it was something we were really striving to get to."

Piccone says that fans can expect something different from the Take A Rest tour, with everything from the updated line-up to a greater focus on their light show. "We're just super excited to play the songs and they're sounding really tight. I think it'll be really special for everyone that comes."