For a man in his late 20s, John Floreani has lived through more than most people twice his age. Not all of it proudly. Scenes from an unsettled past were the backdrop to last year’s The American Dream, the third and breakthrough album from his New South Wales band Trophy Eyes. Armed with a candid nature and a pitch-black wit, the frontman alluded to a journey filled with bad decisions and bad drugs; the song You Can Count On Me included the immortal line, ‘Thanks to everyone that bought tickets to my shows, I put all the money that you spent right up my nose.’

For the past five years, John has also had his occasional solo side project, Little Brother. A primarily acoustic venture, it has been a place for the ideas in the singer’s head that didn’t fit the shape of Trophy Eyes’ punk-rock songs. Now trading under his own name after learning of the North Carolina rap group also named Little Brother, he is about to release his debut album, tellingly titled Sin, with influences ranging from EDM to backwater country. The record also sees the Australian delve further into his own story. It starts with Oh Brother, an acoustic heartbreaker about ending an unhealthy relationship with his sibling, and one that John promised on social media would make fans cry. We joined the singer so that he could tell us more.

Hi John. Tell us about how this project started.

“Well, I’ve been doing it since probably 2014, a long time ago. I wrote a little acoustic song that was going to go on Trophy Eyes’ first EP, Everything Goes Away, and it didn’t fit. With Trophy Eyes we wanted to be fast and aggressive and punk rock, so we canned the song. It was called The Distance, and I ended up filming it in my manager’s basement, and we put it out on YouTube. We didn’t properly record it until, I think, two years after that.

“It wasn’t ever a serious thing. It was just the songs that I liked that I didn’t want anyone to mess with, or songs that Trophy Eyes didn’t like that I would remake into acoustic songs. I’d never taken it very seriously, but then all of a sudden people really liked the songs. So I just kept writing…” Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.