Sometimes, one single decision can have a huge impact on your life. It doesn’t even have to be one you make yourself – it can be made for you. That’s something Dale Tanner learned early on in life. Having been raised in what he calls “sort of a rough neighborhood” in Melbourne, the Ocean Grove frontman got the opportunity to join a private high school. Even though he didn’t know anybody there, he took the chance. Not only was one of the first friends he made Luke Holmes, with whom he started Ocean Grove in 2010, but the whole experience shaped the kind of person that Dale would become.
“Coming from a slum-ish area,” he begins, “and then having that contrast of going to a private high school that was in sort of a rich area – even as a young boy that was already sort of an angle where I was like, ‘Okay, I’m like this outcast.’ And by the time Year 12 came around, I was school captain. That was such a pivotal example for me of how you can take something that would seemingly throw you off-track, and shift from being like, ‘I don’t know anyone, the next six years are going to suck, I can’t wait to get out of here,’ to, ‘Hang on! What impact can I actually make? How much can I grow from this experience?’”
All these years later, it’s an attitude that remains at the forefront of Dale’s approach to both life and all things Ocean Grove; he and his band constantly seek to go against the grain, while also trying to make the best of any obstacles that may spring up along the way. One such instance was when Luke, who had been Ocean Grove’s lead singer, left the band in 2019, some two years after the release of debut album The Rhapsody Tapes. And so, for its follow-up, 2020’s Flip Phone Fantasy, Dale took the reins and stepped up as frontman. As a result, their sound shifted, from nu-metal / metalcore-inspired blasts of noise to something a bit more out of the box.