Royel Otis: “It all leaves a mark — a little love bite on you”

The Australian duo is leaving their mark with their second album, 'hickey'.

September 16, 2025

After sitting down with Royel Otis, it’s safe to say that Otis Pavlovic is the face of the duo and Royel Maddell is the voice. It seems ironic given that Pavlovic is the singer of the Australian band and guitarist Maddell is known for hiding his face behind his distinctive pink locks, but in our interview Pavlovic lets his bright-haired counterpart take the lead. Maddell is quick to crack a joke and it only takes a minute or so to realise that the pair, as he puts it, “try not to take anything too seriously”. For anyone familiar with the band’s discography, that philosophy is already clear. Replete with self-deprecating Australian humour, idiosyncratic song titles like ‘Kool Aid’ and ‘Fried Rice’ (food seems to be a recurrent theme in the band’s catalogue) and a coming-of-age tone, Royel Otis’ music feels as relevant to our omnipresent internet culture as it can be. Their sound is honed for a Gen Z audience that will consistently choose sarcasm over earnestness, instead pouring their emotions into Letterboxd reviews and pithy memes.

It was by tapping into this obsession with anachronism that ultimately helped the band rise to fame. After releasing their debut EP, Sofa Kings, in 2023, Royel Otis were invited to perform on New-York-based radio SiriusXM the following year, where they played a cover of The Cranberry’s ‘Linger’. “It was spur of the moment, really,” Pavlovic breezes. “We had to [perform on] these radio stations and they kind of came [through] last minute. We just tried [the songs] out and
they worked.” ‘Worked’ is an understatement — the ‘Linger’ cover quickly went viral and led to the band’s first entry onto Australia’s Billboard Hot 100 chart. With almost two- hundred million streams on Spotify, ‘Linger’ is still amongst their most popular songs. Then came the band’s cover of Sophie Ellis- Bextor’s ‘Murder On The Dancefloor’, aired on Sydney-based triple j radio station. It was a well-timed move given the song’s resurgence off the back of Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, but it also brought a rawness to the 2001 classic. The bubblegum sparkle of the original is switched out for a shaggy indie-pop tenor — aloof, Aussie-tinged vocals set atop a rocky guitar line.

Royel wears jacket by ROA HIKING, t-shirt by UNDERCOVER and trousers by COLLINA STRADA. Otis wears jacket by BARACUTA, top by COMME DES GARÇONS and trousers by LEVI’S.

Since then, the band have won four ARIA awards, been named as one of the Grammy Awards’ Artists to Watch and topped that same Hot 100 chart with their song ‘moody’. From the outside, it might seem like Royel Otis’ ascent has been rapid, but to them, it’s been steady. “We might have gotten more popular with the covers we did pretty quickly, but the capacity of the venues that we played in were like stepping stones that just got higher,” Maddell says. “But also it just got busier and busier, so we got less and less days off. That was the main noticeable thing — less sleep.” As we speak, the band is completing a packed summer of festival slots, before heading out on their Meet Me In The Car tour, which will take them from the US to Canada before heading across Europe on a hefty four-month stint. Pavlovic and Maddell are actually on the road so much that the latter has, for now, cut ties with his native Bondi: “I don’t have any home back there anymore.” Maddell laughs. “I’m not gonna pay rent for a place I’m not gonna be at for two years, you know?”

Nevertheless, it was Bondi that brought Royel Otis together. When I ask how the band formed, Maddell’s sense of humour properly kicks in. He spins a yarn that includes a surprising amount of both skydiving and tickling — which, of course, ends with the words, “That is all a complete lie” — before leveling: “It’s a boring story. We just met at a bar”. But before they started jamming with each other outside of shifts, Pavlovic and Maddell had forged their own, decidedly different, paths into music. “When I was about ten, me and my friend would take a bus down to the beach and try and make money to buy surfboards and skateboards and stuff,” Pavlovic says. For his bandmate, however, music was more about discipline than leisure. “I used to get in a lot of trouble at school and got suspended seven times in one year,” Maddell recalls. “So to avoid getting expelled from the school I was at, I had to see a school counsellor every time I felt like being disruptive. The school counsellor was a music teacher who let me get my energy out by playing music in the school music rooms.”

The music the pair consumed around that time also compounded Royel Otis’ sonic identity. “Whatever our older siblings listened to or our parents listened to, that bled into the way we write our songs or choose the parts that we like,” the guitarist says. Amongst those artists were Sinead O’Connor, The Cure and Prince, each of whom have impacted the band’s senescent tone. “That might hit the same way for other people — a sort of nostalgic feel,” Maddell continues. “It just reminds you of a time that you can’t place.” It is the lyrics, then, that firmly situate Royel Otis’ music in 2025. “We try not to overthink the lyrics much,” Maddell tells me. “Sometimes it’s, like, experiences, but sometimes it’s just whatever fucking rhymes.” Despite the laid-back approach, though, the band’s songs include what the guitarist calls “Easter eggs”. “I like cultural references in songs,” he continues. “Talking about shit that wouldn’t necessarily be in, say, a love song. Like, you know, calling it ‘jazz burger’ — which has absolutely fucking nothing to do with [anything]. It’s just seeing what we can get away with, really.”

Royel wears jacket by SUPREME, top by BURBERRY, jeans by AWAKE NY and shoes by DR. MARTENS. Otis wears jacket by BARACUTA, trousers by GEORDIE CAMPBELL and shoes by CONVERSE X BRAIN DEAD.

‘jazz burger’ (the latest addition to the band’s menu of food-related titles) is one of the songs from their new album, hickey. With ambiguous origins but a general theme of an ex wanting you back when it’s too late, communicated through downbeat vocals and a dreamy instrumental, ‘jazz burger’ is Pavlovic’s favourite song on the album. “That one feels like it comes from the heart”, he says. “They all do, but that one more so.” Characterised by a more polished sound and influences beyond their usual sun-soaked indie-pop world, hickey differs a little from the artists’ previous discography. “We kind of thought about how it would translate in a live environment, rather than just how it is on the recording,” Pavlovic says. “And we put a little bit more trust in the producers we were working with rather than taking the reins wholly ourselves.” Including singles like ‘shut up’ and ‘say something’, the album retains the ’90s grunge feel of the band’s earlier work, while adding a more catchy pop element, as heard in the infectious hook and earworm lyrics of ‘moody’. The name is also something that, quite literally, lingers. “We were throwing around a couple of names and ‘hickey’ ironically just stuck,” Maddell says. “A lot of the songs were about missing someone or something you loved, like home or friends or someone you were dating, stuff like that. So it’s like, it all leaves a mark — a little love bite on you.”

Maddell adds in mock anguish: “But it fades. All love fades…” It’s one of the final quips Maddell makes during our interview, his sense of humour having revealed itself to be in equal parts dark — he at one point tells me how he’d theoretically dispose of a body in the deserts of Arizona — and satirical. It’s only natural, then, that humour forms an integral part of Royel Otis’ personality. “[Humour] does translate into the music a fair bit,” Maddell says. “We’re really sarcastic,
we take the piss out of ourselves a lot — try not to take anything too seriously.” But rather than forming an emotional block between the performers and their audience, it’s something that renders Royel Otis increasingly attractive to a generation that’s as petrified of cringeworthiness as it is obsessed with irony. So, when I finally ask where the band situates itself in modern culture, there’s only one response that could possibly make sense: “In the arsehole of it.”

Royel wears jacket by BARACUTA, top by ENDLESS JOY, trousers by GEORDIE CAMPBELL and shoes by CONVERSE X BRAIN DEAD. Otis wears jacket by SUPREME, t-shirt by SATISFY, long sleeve top by UNDERCOVER, shorts by BURBERRY and shoes by PUMA.

Royel Otis will be touring in the UK in November — find tickets here.