Recorded well over a year ago, prior to the release of their Australian Music Prize-winning Wait Long By the River and the Bodies of Your Enemies will Float By, the Drones’ third album Gala Mill finds them slowing the pace, and stretching out the songs.

Only “I Don’t Ever Want to Change” and the cover of “Are You Leaving For the Country” come close to the immediacy of the Drones’ previous album. Where Wait Long By the River... was raw and ragged, but relatively immediate with songs like “Shark Fin Blues” coming complete with instant hooks, Gala Mill is comparatively elegiac. It stretches and unfurls itself over time, loosening up on the likes of opener “Jezebel” to reveal the inner workings of the group. For the most part recorded live and in two or three takes, Gala Mill also features frontman Gareth Liddiard’s most poetic lyrics to date.

Nothing is better than the album’s epic closer, “Sixteen Straws”. The opening stanza is taken from the traditional convict song “Moreton Bay”, but from there Liddiard makes it his own – he spins a tale detailing how, to avoid damnation through suicide, Catholic convicts drew straws to decide who would be murdered, and who by, with the killer to be hanged. In Liddiard’s tale it’s a Jew and Irish O’Brien, who draw the short and the long respectively, and how Commandant Logan influences the proceedings and outcomes.

It’s brilliantly constructed, and awesomely told, and is like much of Gala Mill in that it relates stories of desperate men and their lives. The instrumentation is richer here than on anything the band have done in the past – xylophone, slide guitars, and violins dot the songs, and there’s a depth to the sound on offer here. The pace of Gala Mill may be slower than anything the band have done in the past, but what’s so exciting about the Drones is that they have songs with depth in both lyrical content and sound.