On the Verge: It's 'bombs away' for Sheppard

On the Verge: Paste BN's spotlight on breakthrough artists this week checks in with the Australian band Sheppard.

Coming up from down under. Throughout 2014, Australian acts from Iggy Azalea to 5 Seconds of Summer to Vance Joy have found a foothold in the U.S. market. Six-piece Australian pop-rock band Sheppard could be next with its international smash Geronimo. The band, fronted by siblings George, Amy and Emma Sheppard, was named best group at Australia's ARIA Awards in November, and Geronimo was, at one point, the year's top-selling single in Australia. It has been one of Spotify's most-streamed songs globally for months. The group, whose members range in age from 21 to 27, got a boost in the U.S. in October when a marriage-proposal lip-dub video using Geronimo went viral, thanks to promotion from NBC sitcom Marry Me. Geronimo is currently at No. 39 on Paste BN's hot adult contemporary airplay chart.

Can you feel it? Guitarist Jason Bovino came up with Geronimo's pulsing, rhythmic hook minutes before a show in Melbourne when he found a booth with a wood floor that had good acoustics. "When he stomped his boot on the floor, it made this reverberant, booming sound," says George, 27. "He called Amy and me, the other songwriters, into the room and started playing that opening guitar strum. I started singing the 'Can you feel it?' melody. We got literally 20 seconds into it and had to go onstage, so we recorded it quickly on our iPhones" and later finished the song in Brisbane, where the group is based.

A touch of the tropics. Though their family's from Australia, the Sheppard siblings grew up in Papua, New Guinea. That culture may have influenced the group's vocal sound, which some critics have called "Pacific" harmonies. "We've got lots of three-part harmonies," says Amy, 24, "but something about them makes them sound tropical and islander. We've got some way-ohs in our songs."

Putting the band together. Sheppard began when Amy enlisted George to add harmonies for a school music project. They met Bovino soon afterward, and "that dynamic created this sound we hadn't heard before," Amy says. "It's what the Sheppard sound is today." Amy and George offered younger sister Emma the bassist's spot if she'd take a class with their music teacher, Baruka Tau-Matuga of acclaimed aboriginal Australia group Yothu Yindi. "She did, like, a three-week bass boot camp with him and came out of that knowing how to play the bass," George says. Guitarist Michael Butler and drummer Dean Gordon round out the group's lineup.

Tangled up in blue. Not only does Sheppard have a distinctive sound thanks to the group's sibling harmonies, Amy, who shares lead vocals with George, gives them a distinctive look with her accidentally blue hair. "I naturally have dark hair, but I ended up going blonde for a while," she says. But one treatment turned her hair too yellow. "So I put all this purple shampoo in, which was supposed to take the yellow-ness away, and my hair turned purple, and it wouldn't wash out." To cover the purple before an important meeting, she bought some blue hair dye. "I actually liked it," she says, "so I've been rocking it for about a year and a half now."

All about that tour — and the album. Sheppard released debut album Bombs Away in Australia in July. A four-song digital EP called Geronimo came out in the USA in August. The band plans to follow with a full-length U.S. album in the first quarter of 2015, perhaps around the time they hit the road with Meghan Trainor on her That Bass North American tour in February. "We're pretty proud of the album we've got back home," George says. "But if there's a song that we write in the meantime that turns out to be another super-smash hit, I guess we'll include that."