The Cat's Miaow Return After 30 Years With Debut Album

Nearly 30 years after their last recordings, Melbourne's the Cat's Miaow have released their full-length debut, When You Smiled and Turned Away — an album they never managed during their original 1990s run.

The band formed in Melbourne in 1992 around songwriters Bart Cummings and Andrew Withycombe, with singer Kerrie Bolton and drummer Cameron Smith joining soon after. They were an anomaly of their era: as indie pop grew glossier and more fully produced through the nineties, few bands held onto the genre's minimal, melancholy origins as stubbornly as this quartet.

What did the band actually do in the nineties?

Mostly, they avoided the stage. Concentrating on the recording studio rather than live gigs, they churned out tunes like a hardcore band — a litany of cassettes and singles stuffed with lo-fi, delicate pop songs that rarely ran longer than two minutes. The formula was consistent: quietly chiming guitars, brush-smacked drums, and Bolton's crystalline singing that always seemed on the cusp of shattering, recounting tales of youthful heartbreak and longing.

The band petered out by the end of the decade. After Smith's departure, the remaining members explored a more trip-hop and ambient sound under the name Hydroplane, and the Cat's Miaow seemed destined for obscurity.

What brought them back?

The revival started with reissues. In 2022, the label World of Echo issued compilations of the band's catalogue, giving them overdue attention. That led to a reunion in 2023 — and, apparently, some ambition. Encouraged by the response, the four musicians attempted something they had never done during their initial run: record an album.

How does the debut sound?

The answer, per the record itself: shockingly little has changed. The band has slipped back into its old style effortlessly, possibly because the style was casual to begin with.

One new dimension stands out. The clean, digital production has usurped their customary four-track (the analogue home-recording format of their early years), giving these songs a crisp sheen and pulling them away from the bedroom-esque intimacy the originals contained.

Bolton's voice has roughened slightly in the intervening decades — less angelic now, more knowingly wry. The shift shows in the material. A song like "Have You Done This Before?" would have carried a pleading, delicate tone in the band's original incarnation; here, it's sung earnestly rather than bashfully at the ground.

Whether a second album follows remains unannounced. But a band that reunited off the back of reissues and then delivered a debut at roughly the three-decade mark has already beaten the odds of the nostalgia economy — quietly, of course, the way they always did things.