7 May 2026

Following the release of the singles 'Save Myself', 'Mr Mary Read','California Widow', and 'Holding Onto My Hip', Queensland's Rusty Pickups release their debut album I Don’t Think About You At All (…some days), ahead of their Australia/New Zealand album tour.

The upcoming New Zealand tour will culminate in an appearance at the Tussock Country festival in Gore, and after a successful competition campaign, that drew over 1000 entries, the band will be joined by two fans who won an all expenses trip from Australia to NZ for the festival.

The Darling Downs group (Michael 'Cookie' Cook, Lee Fielding, Amily Le Brocque, Ayden Roberts, and Waylon Katz) have a traditional, down-home, classic country-folk sound, built on their ability to effortlessly blend splashes of riverboat keys, melodic clawhammer banjo, rolling upright bass, and charming acoustic guitar, with classic story-telling vocals, memorable songs and four-part harmonies.

Since the release of their six-song EP Rattle In My Heart in 2023, they've been on a golden run, picking up shows, tours, and festival appearances that would be the envy of many in the Australian country, folk, and alt-country scenes. Most recently, the band played Woodford Folk Festival, and made a Toyota Park main-stage appearance at Americana In The Park at the Tamworth Country Music Festival.

The new album was a true labour of love, with a desire to serve the song and not give a shit about what the band were 'supposed' to do when it came to recording a roots music album.
The resulting ten songs are testament to the band's commitment to those goals, with stylistic diversity and thrilling virtuosity at its core.

With songs written and recorded over a two-year period, Cookie is amazed by and proud of the flow of the album. “Ultimately, it became about us choosing a song to record, deciding what we needed to do to honour it and make it the best we could, and the next thing we knew, we had an album's worth of songs, and they just kind of magically fit together into something we loved!"

The band all share writing credits across the album, and even when the most recent member, Amily, joined late in the recording process, it was essential that they were able to go back over many of the tracks and add in her voice and fiddle to a number of tunes – further strengthening the album's cohesiveness.

Across the album, there are songs about widows waiting for either a letter notifying them of a dead husband, or a prodigal spouse returning loaded to the hilt with gold from his ventures (California Widow), Fielding's tale of an historical figure who stole a ship and masqueraded as a man to break through the glass ceiling of 16th-century piracy (Mr Mary Read), and a heartfelt and moving confession about Cookie's past battle with alcohol, on 'Save Myself'.

On the Katz-penned title-track, things are pared back to piano and vocals – a beautiful barroom soliloquy, featuring an exquisite guest vocal from Goldheist.

'Big Heart For Small Things' is another powerful and personal song from Cookie, with an important universal theme. In it, he sings honestly about all the little things that take a toll on your heart in life, including having a trans kid dealing with their place in the world, and another child with an intellectual disability and a heart defect.

Rounding out the album, 'Dog Days Are Done' is a dark, cinematic, twelve-bar blues song written by Fielding, about "a man trying to clear house when the juice isn't worth the squeeze anymore."

"To sit down at the end of it all with a test pressing on vinyl and run it through the player was such a treat," says Cookie. "There's songs on there that we might never play live but that mean a lot to us individually, and there's songs on there that we've been playing for years and I feel like we recorded them just right which is a rare thing."

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