Interview: Lime Cordiale

Interview by Sophia Blair

Photography credits: James Brickwood

Lime Cordiale, the Australian band formed by brothers Louis and Oli Leimbach, has steadily become one of the most distinctive voices in the music scene. Known for their unique blend of infectious melodies, quirky lyrics, and organic sound, the band captures the essence of Australian culture for a growing global audience. With roots in Sydney, their upbringing and the close-knit Australian music community have played a significant role in shaping their sound.

I caught them on their “Enough of the Sweet Talk” tour, and the show was a blast. The brothers kept the energy high from start to finish, even pausing halfway through for an impromptu wrestling match on stage. They were endlessly funny, with a natural charisma that made the whole night feel like a party. And if that wasn’t enough, they switched it up by playing everything from clarinet and saxophone to trumpet — even a kazoo made an appearance. It was a fun, spirited, totally authentic performance.

We covered a lot of ground in our conversation — from the creative process behind their songwriting to unforgettable moments on tour and even their surprise collaboration with Idris Elba. Oli Leimbach shared stories from their musical journey, what keeps them grounded, and the inspiration behind their latest album, “Enough of the Sweet Talk.”

Sophia Blair (SB): Hey, it’s so nice to meet you. I’ve been a fan for years. My name is Sophia Blair and I’m chatting on behalf of WTBU, Boston University’s student-run radio station. So stoked to talk to you today. My first question is, “How would you describe your sound in 3 words?”

Oli Leimbach (OL): I always find it really difficult describing the sound thing. I’ve already used more than 3 words, I’m aware of that. I think it’s different for me than other people. I think we get other people saying stuff like indie, surf, you know even “Australian indie.” You know, there’s even a Spotify playlist called “Australian Surf Indie,” we’re on that. But I don’t really know what that sound is. I mean, it’s just a whole bunch of Australian bands on there. To me, you know, I would kind of… like, I think that we get pretty weird. It’s like weird, quirky, you know, organic in a way. There is that Australian… I don’t know, there’s that Australian kind of… 

SB: That like bite almost?

OL: Yeah. Something like that. Yeah, yeah. Weird, organic. I don’t mind “surf.” I don’t think we’re “surf.” We grew up on the beaches of Sydney, but I don’t think we have a surf rock sound. But I think it has influenced our music, for sure.

SB: I’m sure your entire upbringing had so much influence on your music with where you grew up and with your parents being musicians and film people. But yeah, I definitely think that in America, any Australian band is kind of automatically considered surfy just because Australia itself is kind of considered surfy. 

OL: Yeah, everyone’s on the coast, you know, and we grew up in the same town as Angus and Julia Stone and Ocean Alley and some of these bands that have kind of, you know, become more international. And those, you know, the towns that we grew up in, it’s, yeah, it’s like having house parties and playing at the pub where everyone’s been surfing all day and then getting absolutely wasted and you’re sort of having to fight for their attention. But then there’s also this kind of like… “It better be cool,” you know, because we don’t want it to be… we don’t want to listen to lame shit, you know. So, you’re kind of like catering to your friends a lot and so they’re really, really critical. We have this thing in Australia called tall poppy syndrome, which is like, if you’re the poppy that sticks out from the rest of the crowd, you get cut down. So if you’re too this or too that, people will hate you for it in Australia, which is a very weird thing. It’s not healthy, but there is a competitiveness that comes with it.

SB: Yeah, I read about that in past interviews. Do you think that it’s hard to keep your DIY spirit alive and stay grounded with that tall poppy syndrome, especially as you guys have grown and grown?

OL: I mean, we’ve let it go a lot, but it is an Australian thing and it’s always in your mind, you know? And, you know, we’re always concerned about doing, being too cringey or being too poppy sounding or being a bit too in-your-face, you know? Too this or too that. But at the same time, it needs to be stuff that your friends like and calling your friends very critical. So it’s this balance, you know?

SB: Yeah, yeah.

OL: We’ve let it go quite a lot and we’ve just embraced being absolute weirdos on stage and putting on almost some strange cabaret-type performance. And people love it, especially in Boston. It’s a wild crowd. And if you can stir up the crowd in Boston, they just start going crazier and crazier.

SB: Oh, hell yeah.

OL: Yeah, one of the best crowds in the world.

SB: I’m from near Santa Cruz, California, and I’m just curious how the California crowd compares to Boston, and then also how American crowds compare to Aussie crowds in general.

OL: Well, Santa Cruz, we’ve only played once, and we played it like 10 years ago. There weren’t that many people there. We played it at that really beautiful… is it called The Catalyst?

SB: Yeah, The Catalyst, yeah, that’s the spot.

OL: Yeah, you know, so it was a bunch of bands on and I think there might’ve just been like a hundred people there. So, I don’t think it was a true representation of Santa Cruz. We’ve been trying to get back there for ages, and we’ve got it on this run. I just can’t wait to know that it’s going to be kind of crazy. Because all of those sort of surf towns in California, like San Diego, is one of our favorite places to play. Cause it’s a lot like home. I think Santa Cruz is going to be a lot like home for us.

SB: Yeah, I know friends that are going, so… Sick. That’ll be good. That’s why I love Australia. It’s like home, but better.

OL: Totally. And then Boston, you’ve got this like… We have a connection with the Irish in Australia because we are… A lot of Australians are Irish immigrants, you know, from a few generations ago. And Boston is like it is on par with the Dublin crowd, which are potentially like the loudest crowd in the world. And they love drinking and they love getting wild and it’s just rockin’. So there’s something about Boston I really love. Doesn’t feel surfy, but it feels like there’s this kind of folk-like culture and tradition there where, you know, like the Irish grow up singing their whole lives and it’s loud and it’s rowdy.

SB: Yeah, you guys are gonna miss St. Paddy’s, but for St. Patrick’s Day, there’s a giant citywide parade in Boston and it’s just crazy and everybody is drunk in the streets and like that’s the energy that shows up at concerts too, for sure.

OL: Damn, when is that?

SB: When is St. Patrick’s Day? Let me look it up. It’s on March 17th. Yeah, but it’s like, it’s a huge citywide thing for sure.

OL: Awesome.

SB: Well, congrats on Enough of the Sweet Talk coming out in 2024. There is such a distinct emotional arc to the album. It tells a story, right? And I’d love to hear about how the personal experiences influenced the songwriting. Did the structure come naturally, or did you realize it was a theme after you had a bunch of songs written?

OL: No, we were, you know, we’re searching for a theme like the whole way through the songwriting process. What happens with the songwriting process is that like, if you spread it out over a year or two, which is what we did for this album, you have like a range of different influences. And also, you know, sometimes Louis and I write together, sometimes we write separately, and so you’ve got different stories from two people’s lives. Even though our lives are pretty similar, we’re kind of joined at the hip, you still get two people’s experiences with different love affairs and breakups and friendships and sort of trying to put that together into an album. We decided to consolidate it into kind of one story of a relationship. So the album is in this sort of chronological order of relationship, which you’ve probably read about. From friends to lovers, lovers to enemies, and then enemies back to strangers again. It goes full circle and within that arc are just different stories of our lives. Something like When I’m Losing It is very personal to Louis, you know, in particular. Some of these other ones are just very, like the two of us, or Colin is very much me, you know.

SB: Yeah, wow, that makes a lot of sense. So it’s like a bunch of different pieces that came together.

OL: Yeah, and we, you know, we helped that narrative along with this French persona that comes up through the album, which is a friend of ours, a close friend of ours, and we just sort of got drunk and put a microphone in front of her and asked her about her relationship, and that became… she became like the mascot for us, you know, helping the story along through the album.

SB: Wow. What an honor. It was interesting to hear you talk about the songwriting process, because I read that you guys started writing this album in a cabin in Kangaroo Valley. And that’s just such a cool setting. Do you usually try to write songs in an isolated environment, or do you need a bit of chaos around you? Is your process always the same?

OL: It’s different, you know, sometimes we’re right on the tour bus on the road. But yeah, it is nice to change it up. You know, different instruments give you different songs.
I mean, it wasn’t in Kangaroo Valley, it was actually at our farm, which is like five hours north of Sydney. And Louis and I haven’t had this farm for very long, but it’s in an area that we’ve been going to our whole lives, and we’ve always thought of this space as the only place where we really feel relaxed. So it’s very special to us, and we’ve recorded most of the album in the living room of the farmhouse. So yeah, we did a lot of writing with our producer Dave as well through that process, because a lot of these songs we just took from the very beginning and all the way to the end of recording. So he was there through the whole process. Some of them were a bit more personable. Louis had a little attic connected to his bedroom when we were in a shared house. It was this weird little room that he had his studio in. It’s kind of this dark, you know, dark space and you could potentially get pretty weird or depressed or like whatever in that space. So, you know, that’s a very intimate space for him. You know, nowadays we actually have a little studio in an industrial area, Louis and myself, so we can have all of our instruments in one spot together and be writing together a lot more. I think through this process, there was a lot of writing separately and bringing it together once we got a demo down. So that initial emotion was quite like intimately our own. And now, yeah, this next phase is very much, yeah, writing together.

SB: Something I love about your music is how it’s fun and bright, but also, like, the lyrics can be really sharp. “Pedestal” is a great example of this — it’s groovy, but it also calls someone out really hard. When you’re writing, do you ever think, “Should I soften this?” or are you like, “Nah, let’s just go for it.”?

OL: Nah, we tend to go for it. We’re pretty critical on society and people. And I think it’s an opportunity to not hold back in songs, for sure, just go for it. For sure. We have songs about friends, and they don’t know the songs about them, and it’s just ripping them to shreds.

SB: That’s awesome. I mean, that’s what art is. You’ve played almost 500 shows now, which is crazy — like, 500 official concerts, so probably way more than that with little house gigs and stuff. Do you have one standout, bizarre, unforgettable live moment?

OL: In New Zealand a couple of months ago, this little kid got up on stage with us. That was really cool. He was like eight years old, and I’ve never seen someone like, know every single lyric in one of our songs. That was really cool. We got him up on stage—I thought he was just gonna dance. We sang the whole song on stage. That was like a super cute moment. I don’t know, there’s been… it depends on what we’re talking about, you know? We’ve played shows to like no one before. Yeah, I remember we played in like Reno, probably one of the hesitant moments. We were like, “Do we go back to Reno?” because we played, it was like 10 years ago or whatever, but we played to only the security guard. And that was like, it was so weird. Like, do we keep playing? Like, what the heck is the point?

SB: I mean, was he vibing?

OL: He was vibing. Luckily, he bought an album at the end. Okay, one new fan. Yeah, you know, there’s a lot of interesting moments like that.

SB: For sure. I’m sure you guys come up with a lot of weird inside jokes on the road. Do you have any inside jokes or traditions that have come out of touring?

OL: Every tour has a bunch of little tiny ones. Our keyboard player was flirting with someone at the airport as we were stopped over in San Francisco. And now he’s got this little texting, little flirty affair going on just from meeting this lady in the airport. And I’m like, mate, she’s like double your age. It’s very funny. When we were all saying goodbye, because we had all had a chat with her, and when we were all saying goodbye, I shook her hand and then when he went, he goes, “Ooh, so formal!” And gave her like this smoochy little cuddle, and I was like, “Oh my gosh, so weird.” So now, “So formal” has become a little in-joke for us.

SB: “So formal,” I love that.

OL: Ooh, so formal. Ooh, so formal. Lil’ flirt.

SB: That’s awesome. If your sound had to be… Well, I know visual aesthetic is such a big part of your guys’ identity, but like with Louis’ fine arts background and stuff, so if your sound had to be translated to a different medium like a painting or a film, what would it be? What would it look like?

OL: That’s an interesting question. Louis does all of the artwork for our band, so it’s kind of interesting seeing that art progress with the music. He gets embarrassed about his old stuff. You can kind of look back on our, even just our Spotify discography, and you can sort of see the change in his art. I really like that. You know, I’m glad we haven’t just got photos of ourselves on the covers of these things. I’m glad it’s his art. I mean, so that’s kind of the obvious one, yeah. But, you know, I like the idea of it being like a weird art house film. That’s cool.

SB: Yeah, I like that. And if Lime Cordiale had to do like a total genre pivot under a secret alias, what kind of music would you make?

OL: Oh, you know, I think about this a lot because we often write songs that just don’t feel like the right genre. And I love, you know, Gorillaz. I would love to do something like that, which is maybe hip-hop, and then a lot of Gorillaz that isn’t hip-hop. It spans a wide genre. So maybe it would be like Gorillaz or maybe it would be something like Bonobo.

SB: Mmm, okay. I like that. I see that. And I have to ask about Cordi Elba. Like, working with Idris Elba is such a wild and unexpected collab. What’s something about him that would surprise people?

OL: I think the most surprising thing is that he’s so big. He’s this big dude and people know that. So when he first meets you, you’re like holy shit this guy’s got a presence! But then bringing him into the studio, he was out of his comfort zone, you know? His comfort zone is being on set, but he’d never really taken on a musical project from the very start to the end. A lot of the time, he’s featuring on a track or he’s DJing something, doing a remix. So he was like… I’ve never seen… Well we’d only really met him but it was a surprise for us to see him out of his comfort zone like that. And when he first got in, he was like, “oh, I don’t know if I should, should I sing in a vocal booth or should I sit down with the microphone or maybe I’ll I don’t know, yeah should I stand I’m not really sure” and we had to give him a lot of encouragement and be like, man, you are a vocalist, you know? You do so much vocal training on films, close your eyes and just get into the character, pretend that you’re a character and just go for it. And we would loop these sections and sometimes we’d just leave it recording and all this crazy stuff would come out. So we learned a lot from him in that way. Like, now I feel like when I do a vocal tape, I just I don’t worry about necessarily singing in tune or the tone, I just fully relax and try and get into a character. So we learned a lot from each other through that whole process. Yeah, for sure. But he’s also just the nicest dude that you’d ever meet. Like it’s almost, you know, sometimes when people are so nice, you think it’s fake… like at some point, this person’s gonna crack and yell at me. But he’s not like that. He doesn’t have a bad bone in his body. It’s incredible.

SB: Wow, that’s so sweet that you guys were able to guide him so much and see him in an uncomfortable place. Did the project really transform from demo and what you guys originally had in mind to its final version?

OL: He was just gonna come in on a feature for a song. Oh wow. It was never gonna be that many tracks. Someone sent him our music and he just came into the studio to lay down something which just took a couple hours. And then he got out another demo. He’s like, “Bro, if you want to do… do you want to try something else?” We’re like, “Yeah, I mean, dude, if you want it, okay.” And then it turned into like six weeks that he was in Australia. He was in the studio every moment he had off from a film, so like he really neglected that film and just concentrated on being in the studio with us. He was so into it.

SB: Well, that explains why your music sounds so organic because it is… like that just organically happened.

OL: Yeah, that was the most organic process ever, for sure.

SB: Beautiful. Cool. Well, thank you so much for your time. This has been so awesome. Like, if I told myself a few years ago that I’d be talking to you, I’d be screaming, so I really appreciate it. Before we wrap, what’s next for you guys? Any dream collaborations or crazy ideas in the works?

OL: Yeah, I mean, I’m just really keen to put out new music but concentrating on overseas touring a lot. So we’re back over here in June. We’re doing a big support… it’s not really announced but I’ll tell you anyway… It’s with Tash Sultana.

SB: Amazing, oh my gosh, I love Tash! That’s awesome.

OL: I don’t know if we’re coming to Boston but it’ll be like West Coast and I think we go as east as like Denver or something, so that’ll be rad. Yeah, I’d love to do more collaborations.

SB: Well, hopefully we’ll get some more unexpected, weird collabs soon that follow the Idris Elba legacy, but yeah, everything is awesome. Cool. I can’t wait to see you guys tomorrow night. Good luck, break a leg on your show in Philly tonight and I really appreciate your time. Thank you!

OL: Yeah, thank you! See you tomorrow! Cheers.

SB: Cheers!

SB: And I do wonder if you and your brother have had disagreements on tour? What is it like to work creatively with your sibling?

OL: Yeah, I mean we’ve had many disagreements on tour—

Louis Leimbach (LL): Is that mum? 

OL: No, this is Sophia from Boston…Yeah we have disagreements all the time but I think the thing about being brothers is that we’re well trained at our disagreements. So from a young age we’ve been very practiced at fighting and getting over it. So it’s kind of… yeah, we’re good at it. So yeah, we fight all the time. Often it’s just a five minute little thing, never really like a big blow up that lasts two days or anything. 

SB: Yeah I mean your band’s not going to break up because you guys have to stay in each other’s lives.

OL: Exactly. And if it breaks up then it’s like a formal break up. Huge one. Maybe it’s yet to come.

SB: No, no. We’re not gonna manifest that. 

OL: Thanks so much, great questions, good fun.