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All the right moves

Split Seconds. Picture: Supplied

Two years to the day after Sean Pollard uprooted his band Split Seconds from Perth for the comparative anonymity of Melbourne, he says the hard slog is finally paying off.

The five-piece indie pop songsmiths left behind a profile many of their peers would have envied; they headlined enough shows and scored plenty of supports and festival slots to ensure they were always busy.

But soon after making the move east, the band faced a new challenge. "At the start it was really hard for us to go from being at a pretty acceptable level in Perth to being at a point where everyone was asking 'When are we going back to Perth'," Pollard says.

"It was difficult but I think once we embraced Melbourne, regardless of what was going to happen to us, that's when it became more about the opportunities that we could take as a result of being here."

While Pollard has busied himself with co-writing assignments alongside the likes of Gossling, Alexander Gow of Oh Mercy and Dan Kelly, the band as a whole has been hard at work on recording projects.

With their curiously titled EP, Neil Young and Dumb, due out within months, the band recently dropped latest single Halfway There.

The final product is a far cry from what Pollard says started out as an "overblown song with lots of synths, acoustic guitar flourishes and harmony".

"We thought we were a pack of geniuses for doing it and we brought it into producer Steve Schram and he said 'That's a really bad demo; I hear a song in there but your radar is just way off'," the frontman says.

The band retooled the track and brought in hotly tipped Perth singer Kathryn Rollins.

"A lot of people have remarked that she sounds like Adalita on that song, which was very funny because the day that she recorded it, Adalita was rehearsing next door and popped in," Pollard says.

"We were going to tell her how much the song sounded like her but we didn't tell her that because that would have been really awkward and creepy."