Pain Gain have shared new single ‘Prizefighter’, the centrepiece of their self-titled debut album, due 10th July via Play It Again Sam.
The trio, Chloe Kaul of Kllo, Hamish Lefevre of SWIM and Samuel Cooke of CRUSH3d, formed the project in 2023 as a deliberate departure from their established electronic identities. They loaded a car with guitars, modular synths and a tape recorder and retreated to the beachside forests of southern Australia for a week. What began as an escape became something more permanent: a new way of working, built on trust, instinct and the discovery of a shared language none of them had found in their solo work.
The resulting album trades velocity for gravity, moving between indie rock melodrama and expansive pop balladry with a looseness that none of the three artists had previously made their primary mode. Kaul has built a global fanbase and Pitchfork praise through Kllo; Lefevre has topped the ARIA Dance and Vinyl charts as SWIM and sold out venues from Melbourne’s Forum to KOKO in London; Cooke has become a defining voice in Australian club music as CRUSH3d. Together, none of that is quite what Pain Gain sounds like.
‘Prizefighter’ is the album’s conceptual and sonic centrepiece. An alt-pop track about being drawn repeatedly into a cycle that never resolves, the band have described it as being about the difficulty of breaking patterns that feel inevitable. “It’s always the same fight,” they have said. The track follows debut single ‘Turning Point’ as the second preview of an album the trio describe as “a record that looks for beauty in friction, and finding a new start in the wreckage of something past.”
Pain Gain is out 10th July via Play It Again Sam.
