BONFIRE | INTERVIEW + TRACK REVIEW
- Jun 1
- 8 min read
Most grief records ask you to sit quietly with your sadness. BONFIRE asks you to dance with it.
Step into their world and you’ll find flashing lights, euphoric synths, disco grooves and dancefloor energy colliding head-on with loss, longing, identity and survival. It sounds contradictory on paper. In practice, it feels startlingly honest. Because grief rarely arrives neatly packaged as melancholy. Sometimes it arrives while you’re laughing with friends. Sometimes it arrives in the middle of a crowded room. Sometimes it arrives while the music is still playing.
At the heart of Good Grief is the story of love, loss and what happens when someone leaves but never really disappears. Rather than retreat into quiet reflection, BONFIRE transforms mourning into something vibrant, colourful and communal. Their songs don’t separate darkness from hope, or joy from pain. They allow all of it to exist together in the same breath.
Built by a collective of self-described talented misfits, BONFIRE creates emotional worlds where electronic music becomes more than escapism. It becomes connection. A place where vulnerability hides inside grooves, where political urgency shares space with personal heartbreak, and where the dancefloor becomes a gathering place for anyone carrying something heavy.
In this conversation, BONFIRE explores grief, identity, outsiderhood, queer resilience, creative fearlessness and why sometimes the most honest thing you can do is dance straight through the heartbreak.
TRACK REVIEW -
“Good Grief” wastes absolutely no time pulling you in. It opens with a beautifully played bass line, full of warmth and movement, the kind of bass tone that instantly gives a track personality before a single lyric is sung.
Then comes that pulsing melody. It immediately transports me back to the golden era of 2000s electronic music, where huge melodies carried genuine emotion rather than just filling space. There’s a nostalgic quality here, but it never feels dated. BONFIRE manages to take those influences and give them a modern heartbeat.
Vocally, there’s something incredibly captivating about the delivery. The lead vocal has a tone that reminds me of Adam Levine at his best, expressive, melodic and effortlessly sitting above the production. I can genuinely imagine a packed Sydney club absolutely losing itself to this track.
The chorus is where everything really lifts off. The call-and-response between the lead vocal and the female harmonies sounds massive. It’s euphoric without becoming cheesy, emotional without becoming heavy-handed. That’s a difficult balance to strike, and BONFIRE nails it.
What impressed me most, though, is the tension throughout the entire song. The push and pull between the verses, pre-choruses and chorus creates this constant sense of anticipation. Every section feels like it’s building toward something, and when those moments arrive, they’re earned.
Underneath all of that sits some seriously impressive production. Every layer feels intentional. The bass, synths, vocals and percussion all have room to breathe while still contributing to the larger emotional impact of the song.
“Good Grief” is the kind of track that works whether you’re alone with headphones, driving at night, or standing shoulder-to-shoulder with strangers on a dancefloor. A brilliantly crafted piece of electronic pop that proves you don’t have to choose between making people dance and making them feel something.
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Your music sits in this fascinating space where people could dance to it while also quietly falling apart emotionally. Was blending euphoria with grief always the goal, or did that contradiction naturally emerge from the songwriting?
It emerged naturally, but I'd argue it's not actually a contradiction. When you're grieving, you don't stop living. You still go to the supermarket. You still hear a song that makes you want to move. The dancefloor has always been a place where queer communities, especially, have processed everything—joy, rage, mourning, survival. I wrote these songs when I was in the depths of losing Brent, and the truth is, I didn't want sad ballads. I wanted something that matched the full spectrum of what grief actually feels like. Sometimes that's screaming into the void. Sometimes it's dancing your ass off while crying. Both are real.
The title Good Grief feels almost sarcastic at first glance, but also deeply human. What does "good grief" actually mean to you emotionally?
Good Grief isn't about getting over it. It's about learning to carry it. There's this assumption that grief is something you move through and eventually leave behind. I don't believe that. Brent is still with me in every song. The title is partly ironic—like, "good grief, here we go again"—but it's also genuinely asking: can grief be good? Can it teach you something? Can it transform into something that connects you to others instead of isolating you? For me, the answer is yes. That's what the album is about.
You describe BONFIRE as a collective of "talented misfits." Do you think feeling slightly outside the norm allows artists to make more emotionally fearless work?
Absolutely. When you've already been told you don't belong somewhere, you stop trying to fit. That's liberating. Every member of BONFIRE has felt like an outsider at some point—whether because of sexuality, identity, or just being too much for the room. That shared experience creates this unspoken permission to go there, emotionally.
We're not worried about being too raw or too confrontational because we've already been through worse than bad reviews. My background is this global stew—Sri Lankan, Portuguese, Dutch, English—and I've always felt slightly outside every culture I'm part of. That used to feel like a deficit. Now I see it as my superpower. It gives me permission to say what others won't.
A lot of electronic music focuses on escapism, but your work feels more confrontational emotionally. Do you think the dancefloor can also become a space for processing pain rather than avoiding it?
That's exactly what we're trying to do. The dancefloor has historically been a sanctuary for communities that weren't welcome elsewhere—queer people, Black communities, anyone who needed a space to be fully themselves. It's never just been about escapism. It's been about survival.
What I love about electronic music is that you can hide something real inside a groove. You're sweating, you're moving, and then suddenly you realize the lyrics are about digital surveillance or losing someone you love. That moment of recognition—that's what I'm chasing. I want to make you think while you're dancing your ass off. If the beat gets you in the door, the lyrics should give you something to carry home.
There's a cinematic quality running through BONFIRE's music and visuals. When creating a project, do you think more in terms of songs, scenes, or emotional worlds?
Emotional worlds. Always. The song is just one dimension. When I'm writing, I'm already seeing the video in my head. I'm imagining where someone might hear this—alone at 2am, or with friends at a club, or crying on public transport.
Bonifer and I talk constantly about building rooms made of sound that you can actually live in. The visuals are extensions of that. Look at the music videos for "Blindness" or "I Can't Stop" or "Another You"—they're not just promotional tools. They're films. They have narrative, tension, politics.
My background as a journalist and comms strategist means I think about communication on every level. Sound, image, word, context. It's all the same thing, really.
The idea of turning mourning into something vibrant and colourful feels almost rebellious. Was subverting traditional ideas around grief important to the identity of Good Grief?
Completely. There's this expectation that grief should look a certain way—muted, quiet, dignified. I call bullshit on that. Grief is messy. It's angry. It's absurd. It's also, sometimes, weirdly euphoric.
The visual identity of Good Grief—Mondrian meets Jersey Boys meets West Side Story—was intentional. I wanted colour and movement and life precisely because the album deals with death. Brent was vibrant. Our love was vibrant. Representing that with something grey and sombre would have been dishonest.
The dancefloor has always been a space for processing loss in queer communities. This album belongs there.
Your influences range from The Chemical Brothers to Midnight Oil, which is a huge emotional and sonic spectrum. How do you stop those influences from pulling the project in too many directions while still keeping BONFIRE cohesive?
Bonifer and I have a shared filter, which is: does this make you feel something? We can pull from Kraftwerk's cold precision and Nile Rodgers' disco warmth in the same track because both serve the emotional truth of the song.
The Chemical Brothers taught me that electronic music can be physical and primal. Midnight Oil taught me that music can be political and urgent. Grace Jones taught me that style and defiance are indistinguishable. What holds it together is authenticity.
Every influence has to pass through our lived experience. We're not copying sounds—we're using them to say something true. The studio is like a lab where Bonifer builds these sonic architectures, and I fill them with stories that actually matter.
A lot of artists separate darkness and hope into different songs or eras. BONFIRE seems determined to let both exist at the same time. Why was it important not to simplify those emotions?
Because that's how life actually works. You don't feel hope on Monday and despair on Tuesday in neat little packages. You feel both, simultaneously, sometimes in the same breath. When I was writing after Brent died, I didn't want to create a grief album that was only sad. That would have been a lie. There were moments of anger, moments of joy remembering him, moments of absurdist rage at the universe.
"Tick Tick Tock" is the most honest I've ever been—it's basically me screaming "What's the point of any of this if we all fucking die?" But then "Move To Love" exists on the same album, and it's about reconnecting with life. Both are true. I'm not interested in simplifying the human experience. I'm interested in reflecting it honestly.
There's something deeply communal about your music despite how personal the themes are. Do you think shared emotional experiences become easier to process once they're transformed into collective moments through music?
That's exactly what I've discovered—and honestly, it surprised me. I wrote these songs thinking they were private conversations with someone who's gone. I didn't expect strangers to respond the way they have. But music does this thing where it transforms personal pain into shared understanding. When someone comments "I lost my mum last year and this song is everything"—that's the magic.
The dancefloor becomes a place where we're all carrying something, and somehow that makes it lighter. I've learned that people are interested in my personal perspective, and that vulnerability resonates far more than I expected. Sharing the story behind the art first—not just "OUT NOW"—is what actually connects.
If someone walks into the world of BONFIRE for the first time through Good Grief, what do you hope they feel first, catharsis, connection, escape, or the uncomfortable recognition that they're not alone in what they're carrying?
The uncomfortable recognition. Every time. I want someone to hear a track and think, "Wait—this person knows exactly what I'm feeling." That moment of being truly seen is more valuable than escapism. Catharsis comes after. Connection comes after. But first, I want them to feel understood.
That's what Bowie did for me. That's what Grace Jones did for me. They made me feel less alone in my weirdness and my pain. If Good Grief does that for even one person who's sweating on a dancefloor wondering if anyone else feels the same way—job done.
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