Written by Siena Robb

With Pursuit of Anything, Vacations find themselves somewhere between looking back and figuring out what comes next. Frontman Campbell Burns speaks to MAESI about entering his thirties, the fear of falling behind, growing alongside his bandmates and finally making the Vacations record they’ve wanted to hear for years.

There is a particular kind of uncertainty that comes with getting what you wanted.

For Vacations, the last decade has brought many of the milestones a young band might once have imagined as distant measures of success: billions of streams, double-platinum certified hits, sold-out shows around the world and an audience stretching considerably further than their beginnings in Newcastle, Australia. Most recently, their Holy Grail Tour took them through Asia and Australia and across sold-out rooms in Los Angeles, Austin, Dallas, Chicago, Toronto and New York.

Yet on their forthcoming album, Pursuit of Anything, arriving October 2 via Nettwerk, Vacations aren’t particularly interested in arrival. Instead, they are looking at what happens when life keeps moving after the milestones. Frontman Campbell Burns describes the record as “the coming-of-age that is going into your 30s while thinking about your younger self.” Across the album, time seems to hover in the background: in changing relationships, friends building families, memories of home and the quiet pressure to determine whether your own life is progressing at the speed it should.

On “Last Call,” the album’s most recent single, that pressure moves firmly into the foreground.

Bright and deliberately concise, the track grew from Burns’ love of “short and snappy pop songs” and his desire to give the record a moment of that immediacy. Beneath it, however, sits a considerably heavier question.“‘Last Call’ is based around the idea of feeling like you’re running out of time to achieve certain milestones,” Burns explains. “Maybe it’ll be okay, maybe it won’t, maybe your version of success is something else entirely, and that’s okay too.” Using the final call at a bar as a metaphor for time slipping away, the song captures an anxiety familiar to anyone who has looked sideways at the lives unfolding around them and wondered whether they somehow missed an instruction.

“Am I not going to catch up?” Burns asks of the feeling behind the track. “Am I just stuck wasting away doing things that are more trivial?”

It is an interesting question coming from the frontman of a band whose conventional markers of professional success are difficult to dispute. Vacations have accumulated more than 3.5 billion streams and spent years building an international audience. By plenty of measures, they have already made it.

“Pursuit of Anything is such an evocative album title. It feels both hopeful and uncertain at the same time.”

“I appreciate you saying this because we were a day before our record label deadline before we delivered on the title! I was struggling to think of anything, to the point of paralysis. Joey looked through the lyrics and found ‘Pursuit of Anything’ and it stuck, we all agreed it was the most fitting name for the album. Ever since, the title has only grown on me more and more.“ Burns responds to MAESI.

In retrospect, it is difficult to imagine a title better suited to this stage of Vacations. “Our lives are all moving in different directions, as a band, as friends, and as individuals,” Burns says.

“There’s still so much to do! Every-time we achieve a certain milestone, it almost feels like we could stop to rest on our laurels, but there’s this nagging curiosity to see how far we can go.”

There is the contradiction at the centre of the record: the pursuit doesn’t necessarily end when you reach the thing you were pursuing. Burns has described the title in terms of “happiness as a feedback loop” the tendency to achieve something, experience its rush and almost immediately begin looking towards whatever might come next. That feeling takes on another dimension as the lives surrounding you begin moving in increasingly different directions.

“Turning 30 and seeing myself and my friends go through so much change was incredibly inspiring,” Burns says. “I knew early on that I’d be focusing on aging and time, but that also seems to be a reoccurring theme throughout our music since the very beginning.”

Pursuit of Anything captures Vacations at precisely that point. Burns’ own life has taken him from Newcastle to Los Angeles and New York, while the lives back home that once ran alongside his have continued changing too. Across the album are revolving questions about what adulthood is supposed to look like when there are suddenly countless versions of it playing out around you. The record doesn’t offer a single correct answer. Instead, everyone is caught in a pursuit of their own. What are we actually chasing? That question of pursuit was already beginning to reveal itself through “Holy Grail,” one of the first glimpses into this new chapter of Vacations.

If “Last Call” catches the anxiety of potentially running out of time, “Holy Grail” sits comfortably within the record’s broader fixation on the things we assign meaning to reaching the destination that is supposed to make the pursuit worthwhile. It is a tension that becomes particularly compelling when placed against where Vacations are now. A band that began making music together in their teenage years has spent the decade since accumulating precisely the kinds of achievements that once might have represented a finish line. But adulthood has a habit of exposing finish lines as temporary. There is always another version of success. Another place to go and perhaps another person to become. That idea doesn’t make Pursuit of Anything a cynical record. If anything, there is something hopeful in its willingness to question the timeline altogether. The pursuit may be endless, but it doesn’t have to look the same for everybody. And for a group who have spent ten years growing up together, those differences are increasingly impossible to ignore.

“We’re more emotionally aware and understanding of each other…there’s no ego or tension, you have to learn how as a band and especially when you’ve been navigating it for ten years.”

“We simply want to bring out the best in each other so we have the most realised versions of our songs.”

The members of Vacations may now be living increasingly distinct lives, but those experiences feed back into the same creative space. Burns has drawn inspiration from his bandmates’ lives and perspectives throughout the album, different pursuits converging inside one record. Growing together, it turns out, doesn’t require growing in the same direction.

If “Last Call” looks nervously at the clock, “I See Myself In You” approaches time from somewhere more intimate. The song grew from a conversation between Burns and his father, although it wasn’t written as a deliberate retelling of that exchange.

“I guess it spilled out of me one day,” Burns says. “I wasn’t intentionally trying to write about that specific conversation, but more what it meant to me and knowing how much my relationship with my parents has changed overtime for the better, and wondering if one day I’d be in the same position as my Mum and Dad talking to my own child.”

It captures one of adulthood’s stranger shifts: realising that your parents are not fixed in time, and neither are you. The possibility of one day occupying their position collapses past and future into the same thought. Burns is looking back at his relationship with his parents while simultaneously imagining a version of himself that doesn’t exist yet. For an album so concerned with growing older, “I See Myself In You” feels particularly revealing. Time here isn’t simply something being lost. It is something connecting people.

Still, Burns has little interest in explaining away every ambiguity in the song.

“I feel like it’s the same as a magician revealing their tricks, it takes any mystery and interpretation out of it.”

Instead, he prefers songs to accumulate meanings beyond their original intention.

“I enjoy having my own meaning with a song, and then a version that the band relates to, and finally, a version that the listener can have for themselves.”The accompanying video follows that instinct, adding another layer without dictating precisely how the song should be understood.

That space for interpretation feels particularly appropriate for a band whose music has already become intertwined with other people’s lives. Vacations’ songs have existed in bedrooms, relationships, road trips, break-ups and memories far removed from the circumstances in which they were written.

For Burns, some of the most meaningful evidence of that connection isn’t found in streaming figures.

“I get a lot of joy out of hearing fans say they learnt an instrument or started a band because of our music,” he says, “because I know I’ve been in the exact same position before.”

While much of Pursuit of Anything examines personal change, Burns can hear the band’s musical growth just as clearly. Written by Vacations, produced by Burns and mixed by Beatriz Artola, the album finds the group increasingly capable of translating what they imagine into what eventually comes through the speakers. Asked where that evolution feels most obvious, Burns points to “I See Myself In You” and the album track “Lucky, Forever.” “When I was listening back to early mixes with Beatriz Artola, I knew it was a moment where you could hear how much we’ve matured as artists,” he says.

“I finally felt like I was conveying what I wanted to hear from Vacations for years now.”

After a decade together, that statement carries more weight than simply declaring the new record bigger or more polished than the last. It suggests the distance between intention and execution has finally narrowed. That clarity also meant recognising what didn’t belong.

“There were some demos and ideas that didn’t fit with the record sonically,” Burns says, “but that was either because of a natural progression of the records sound or I just didn’t enjoy what was there vs. what we had on the record by comparison.” There is no great mourning for those discarded ideas.“Maybe it’ll inform the next record.”

For all its preoccupation with ageing, Pursuit of Anything doesn’t sound like a record frightened of getting older. There is the closing-time panic of “Last Call,” the shifting definition of success running through “Holy Grail,” and the generational reflection of “I See Myself In You.” But Burns doesn’t seem interested in treating introspection as inherently painful.

“I don’t think I ever felt uncomfortable,” he says of confronting parts of himself through the album. “I find writing therapeutic.”

“To the point where I’ll get stubborn and want to desperately figure out what I’m trying to say, and what the most meaningful way to convey that is. Songwriting really is like solving a puzzle, I think that takes some of the pressure off as well.”

Perhaps Pursuit of Anything isn’t attempting to solve the larger puzzle at all. There is something inherently strange about reaching an age where your younger self might consider you wildly successful and still wondering whether you’re doing life correctly. Maybe the pursuit is exhausting. Maybe it’s the thing that keeps everything moving. Pursuit of Anything seems willing to allow both ideas to coexist. 

So, once the record finally belongs to everybody else, what does Burns hope listeners are still thinking or feeling after they’ve had time to live with it?

“I have no idea! I’m excited to find out and hear about it…I’m kind of lost thinking about the next record already.”