The epic beauty of The Apartments’ ‘That’s What The Music Is For’ is an elegant beacon of shimmering hope. – Backseat Mafia

The Apartments‘ magnificent album ‘In And Out Of The Light’ was one of the brief rays of light of the grim 2020 – one of my favourite albums of that year. With one of Brisbane’s greatest singer/songwriters, Peter Milton Walsh (briefly an early Go-Between), The Apartments are possibly one of the most underrated bands coming out of Australia, leaving an indelible impression on indie music in the southern hemisphere and beyond.

The band has just released ‘That’s What The Music is For’ via Riley Records/MGM and in Europe, UK and USA by Talitres and it is another example of Walsh’s heartbreakingly beautiful delicate songwriting filled with luscious imagery and haunting melodies. It is worth quoting Walsh in detail when he talks about the album:

I’m superstitious. I like to start writing for a new album once the last one’s out and moving around the world, all the time wondering if a song will ever turn up again. After touring Europe with In and Out of the Light, I began writing what evolved into That’s What the Music is For. Each morning, between recording and writing, I would do a little Swedish death cleaning – throwing out old diaries, scraps of paper and notebooks filled with handwriting, address books, photos.

Out of this kaleidoscope of images and lines in which the boundaries of the present and the past were blurred, the songs began to appear. Casino Life came first. I write to find out what I’m thinking and my songs know more than I do. Sometimes it takes me a while to work out what they’re telling me. My mind began to fill with people from the past and they would come back, just like happiness does, at unexpected moments. I would see them in the fallen leaves.

Why, when walking by the river, did I once again hear “They were my Venice years”? Playing cards at night, how was it that I remembered someone saying, “it’s a casino life…”? As the songs began to accumulate, they carried me in a certain direction. I wanted to write, in part, about people who’ve mattered to me. Some were still around, some were not. Songs are cinema by other means. They can summon up worlds that are lost to us, amplify the colours of the vanished years. Scenes, lives, conversations. Scraps of memory, faces and voices from out of the past. People whose names no one says anymore.

I have a mind that inclines steeply towards hopelessness so I’ve always been drawn to people who are the opposite. I looked for the sun in others, with a different kind of energy, who were full of light and hope. The ones who think – if winter comes, can spring be far behind? I understood the gift I’d been given as people like this had moved in and out of my life. I wanted to honour and celebrate them, while there was still time. Sometimes, to let them do in song what they could not do in life – to live. I knew what the world had missed out on. What I missed out on. Whether three or twenty three, as they move through the smoke of memory, they will remain who they were – at that age, in that time and place. Ghosts in the evening of my mind. Sometimes I wanted to call up a world that had disappeared, bring back the years that had these people in them and then I understood: that’s what the music is for.

Opening track ‘Casino Life’ is a gentle one, coasting over delicate tendrils of piano and acoustic guitars with Walsh’s acute, poetic personal lyrics and delicious harmonies as he sings despairingly he’s lost account of all the drugs you’re on.

‘Afternoons’ is a paean to those we have lost – People whose names no one says anymore. The delicate backing singing adds a delicate poignancy to the gentle reflection: utterly beautiful.

‘A Handful of Tomorrow’ is business as usual: a delicate, dreamy reverie carried on gently sparkling guitars and piano with haunting horns. Milton Walsh’s vocals are achingly beautiful – almost cracked with emotion, deep and sonorous.

The lyrics are reflective and poignant:

Still don’t know who runs the game
I loved you while the music played
I loved you through the Autumn days
I loved you while the music played

The beauty too, of what remains
I’ll hold onto…with all that’s gone away

Please is there something I could borrow?
I’ll have a handful of tomorrow

The accompanying video, beautifully directed, shot and edited by Nick Langley, conveys the sense of reflection – black and white scenes of Milton Walsh performing in the dappled sunshine against an urban backdrop, imbued with light and dark contrasts, contemplative and statuesque:

‘Another Sun Gone Down’ charts the progress of time and loss, framed by distant horns and a deep sense of yearning – I’ll see you in the falling leaves. The song builds up to a crescendo -anthemic and statuesque, imperious and glorious.

The following title track ‘That’s What the Music is For (When the Fair is Over) serves as a response to the darkness epitomised by the previous track (and elements of the album): music as a panacea for hurt, a refuge for Walsh from the memories and loss. The reflective tones, augmented by the delicate harmonies, illustrates a sort of artistic resilience expressed by Walsh and becomes a central point of reference for the entire album.

Ironically, the very title of the next track, ‘Death Would be My Best Career Move’, suggests that even music’s role as a saviour has its limitations, adding a little humour to the mix.

What we had we’ll always have
We’ll always have Paris
What we had, we’ll always have it
I’m a man with no illusions
Death would be my best career move

‘American Resistance’ is world weary observation of the current state of the world with the hope of redemption:

America has fallen now
Resistance risin’ in every town
People put to the test
People who’ll do their best

Final track ‘You know we’re not supposed to feel this way’ injects a little more spine into the music as a farewell note: a beautiful elegy to the power of art in the personal:

I thought we had time
I just don’t understand
Why you ran out of years
Are you there in the songs that i’ll leave behind?
Well that’s where you live

Walsh encapsulates the recurrent themes in this album: the preservation of the precious throughout loss, the powerful role of music (and indeed the creative arts) as a panacea and a ray of hope, the fading of the light and the the fight against the inevitable darkness.

This album is some respects is a concept one – songs about beauty, loss and the need to leave something behind: to preserve what has been lost for all time through art. It is in some aspects a reflection on the end of a process, the end of a period, the end of a life and a breathtakingly beautiful work of art in itself. This is what the music is for.

‘That’s What the Music is For’ was recorded in Sydney with producer Tim Kevin who worked with Peter Milton Walsh for the much-lauded 2021 album ‘In and Out of the Light’.

Working closely with Tim Kevin – in between shows which took him from Marseilles to Mexico City, Sydney to San Francisco, London to Lisbon and more – Walsh began recording in 2023 and the album includes contributions from Australian and French musicians. As with previous albums by The Apartments, ‘That’s What the Music is For’ is a cycle of eight songs that speak to one another to tell the album’s story.

Talking about ‘That’s What the Music is For’, Walsh said :

Since I didn’t go into the studio with an album ready set of songs, but instead took pieces in to record as soon as they were written and worked on the music in the studio whenever it was available, it wasn’t clear that I’d get to that rainbow’s end – a world of songs that feel like they belong together: an album. Yet, over the course of recording and as the songs gathered with one another, they began to reveal a story about time – of how past and present so often trade places and that in music and in memory, the people who have gone keep moving in and out of our lives—where can they live now, except in song? We will be saying goodbye to them in bits and pieces for the rest of our lives.

To support That’s What the Music is For, The Apartments will tour Australia Sydney, Brisbane & Melbourne in October and November 2025 followed by France, Belgium, Spain, Portugal from March 2026.

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