THE old adage goes, you must embrace change or risk being left behind.
In this post-pandemic world that's never been clearer as COVID has irreversibly changed all our lives.
Newcastle emo-pop band Eat Your Heart Out have acutely felt the winds of change.
In 2019 they released their impressive debut album Florescence after a series of well-received EPs and toured extensively.
But in 2020 everything stopped. No shows. No rehearsals.
Eat Your Heart Out vocalist Caitlin Henry, fearing music's uncertain future, started a business degree majoring in marketing.
Yet, three years later Eat Your Heart Out have re-emerged with their second album Can't Stay Forever a little wiser, more mature, but unchanged in their passion for the band they formed as Muswellbrook High School students a decade ago.
"We're all on the same page that we still wanted to be a band going forward, it was just that uncertainty of when will that happen," Henry says.
"After we made the record we all felt revitalised. We felt ready to move forward and reinvigorated and excited again about being a band."
However, not everyone in Eat Your Heart Out could maintain the necessary commitment.
In May guitarist Andrew Anderson announced he was leaving band, due to other commitments, following Eat Your Heart Out's first European tour supporting US band Tiny Moving Parts.
The band's members Henry, Will Moore (guitar), Dom Cant (bass) and Jake Cronin (drums) range in age from 25 to 31.
Henry says the increase in responsibilities outside the band like jobs, study and family were a major influence lyrically on Can't Stay Forever.
"The songs aren't all about the same thing, but a lot of it is about change and realising that situations always have to change, which is partially inspired by COVID, and that sometimes change is very much out of your hands and you have to go with the flow because there's literally nothing you can do about it."
Outside of COVID, change was happening inside Eat Your Heart Out.
"A lot of our relationships within the band were kind of shifting, some positive ways, some negative ways, with different dynamics and people's lives changing outside of the band," she says.
"We're all growing as people. It can be hard when you're this same unit working towards the same thing, but everyone is all dealing with their own stuff and their own personal lives changing.
"There's definitely shifting dynamics within the band due to COVID and because of people growing as adults and humans."
Can't Stay Forever was recorded last November at Durham Studios in the Hunter Valley with Melbourne-based producer Jack Newlyn.
The album isn't a major reinvention of Eat Your Heart Out's sound.
Long-term fans will enjoy the emo-pop angst of Scissors In My Skin and Twenty Something, which deals directly with growing responsibilities as Henry sings, "I'm upside down/ I don't know where I'm going/ I'm lost and found/ I'm just twenty-something."
Elsewhere, Henry channels The Killing Heidi's Ella Hooper on Sour.
"We always wanna expand and do something a little bit different," she says. "We knew it wasn't going to be a radical sound change, but things like Sour are still a rock song but we tried to branch out.
"I remember specifically with that one I really wanted it to have that nostalgic feel in the vocals.
"I said to the guys I wanted it to sound like it could be in a 2000s teen movie."
However, the biggest creative shift on the album is the ethereal dream pop of Poison Devotion, with its use of samples and synths.
"Poison Devotion is very left field," Henry says.
"We've never done anything like that with the ambience and electronic elements.
"From the writing period, I wanted a track like that on the record because we've never done it before."
Eat Your Heart Out's album Can't Stay Forever was released on Friday.
