WHITLAMS

'Little Cloud' Deluxe Limited Edition is packaged in a digipack.

If you were looking for Tim Freedman in the early months of 2004 you might have found him doing a few strange things. He was in New York City in the freezing months of winter casting shadows in the steam rising from the subways. He was watching an American eagle hitch a ride on an ice drift down the Hudson River.

The result is The Whitlams' new double album Little Cloud, the Sydney band's sixth studio album after Love this City (1999) and Torch the Moon (2002), the two platinum follow ups to the huge independent hit Eternal Nightcap which won them three ARIAs in 1998. It's a return to the piano and voice, story-telling style Freedman and The Whitlams fans love.

The album is broken into two discs. The first, "Little Cloud", is about returning to Sydney with mixed feelings of love and disillusion in an election year. The second, "Apple's Eye", is set in New York, and is about slowly getting strong and well "under a tapestry of stone hung from the sky".

"I Was Alive" is the first single, it's trouble with girls. It's a barroom stomp with honky tonk piano, real old-fashioned Whitlams. We were a bar band for the first seven years. "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" popped into my head one night walking home arguing with this gorgeous girl. When she goes to the newsagent "she don't know which one to buy, Australian Shooter or Australian Bride".

The album was produced by boutique pop maestro J. Walker of Machine Translations, who made it his job to put immediacy and intimacy back into the songs. The result is classic Whitlams. Recorded at the new Electric Avenue in the inner Sydney suburb of Camperdown, Little Cloud features the same personnel as the last two Whitlams albums: piano-playing frontman Tim Freedman, Terepai Richmond on drums, Warwick Hornby on bass and the scene-stealing Jak Housden on guitar.

Estimated despatch 5-10 days after ordering.