The Rubens are set to light up Dubbo again ahead of fourth album release

As part of their album launch tour The Rubens will play six shows across NSW before their fourth album '0202' releases on Friday 12 February.

After performing as part of TripleJ's One Night Stand in 2013, followed by a performance at the Garden Hotel in 2019, The Rubens are quite familiar with performing in Dubbo.

Keyboardist Elliott Margin says the band love the town.

"I guess every time we are there (Dubbo) we get a really nice reception, I think a lot of the time when we play at remote places they obviously don't get as many bands as you do in the major cities so they are really appreciative," Mr Margin said.

After an disrupted 2020, Mr Margin admits it was a bit different going back in for rehearsals.

"Slowly things are getting back to normal, so for us rehearsing and dusting off our old songs it's a bit like 'oh we are back again',"

The pandemic may have helped the popularity of The Rubens music as several songs which feature on the album were released as singles during 2020.

"We were releasing music during a pandemic so people I guess will read into it a little more then if they weren't a pandemic,"

"We were pretty lucky because as we finished the record in March, so it was lucky that the writing and the recording process wasn't affected by everything that was happening,"

A fully self produced fourth album was never the original plan Mr Margin said, but things just happened.

"We didn't plan on doing it this way in the beginning, our bassist Will has a studio in Camden our hometown and we kinda planned hey let's record a song and just do it ourselves and put it out as a kind of in-between song before whatever the record is when we work on that down the track because this won't be apart of that,"

"That song was 'Live in Life' and we recorded and released it and that song was received really well and we were like maybe we can do this ourselves for the record,"

'Live in Life' went on to go double platinum in the ARIA accreditation and was nominated for ARIA Song of the Year.

This is the first time that the band have fully-self produced their own album and Margin admits the experience was 'really fun'.

"It's kinda of a nice re-affirming thing, we as a band have been working together for a long time now this is our fourth record, we have worked with a lot of producers from around the world and it's kind of exciting to back ourselves and go into to it and produce it ourselves and see how we go, it was a really fun experience,"

The fourth album '0202' is 2020 backwards as bass player Will joked that 2020 was a backwards year and this album is like nothing The Rubens have released before.

"We like to experiment and keep things fresh to us otherwise we would be making the first record again and again and again and that wouldn't be fun for us,"

The Rubens will perform at the Dubbo Convention Centre on Friday February 12 and tickets are available at the Convention Centre's website.

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