Website: http://www.royalchord.com/

Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/royalchordroyalchord

Formed in 2001 by Tammy Haider and Eliza Hiscox, Royalchord started out playing a dusty brand of alt-country with a crew that, at one point, included as many as eight members. These days, Tammy and Eliza play mostly as a duo, swapping their guitars for keyboards and their band members for cut up drum breaks and sequenced bass lines.

After a long period of wandering, Royalchord returned to Melbourne in 2009 to release their latest record, The Good Fight, which sees them drop more of their country trappings for greater helpings of electronica, without losing the melancholic and every so slightly neurotic sensibility that has endeared them to so many. The resulting record, which the girls mostly recorded themselves, ranges in tone from summer pop to funereal folk. It is, the duo says, 'dance music for the down and out.'

The duo's return to Melbourne marks the end of a relentless spate of overseas adventuring that saw them living, at various points, in frozen Berlin, sun-drenched Guatemala and rural France. It was in a small village of 97 people in France that Royalchord holed themselves up with a pile of keyboards and pawn shop instruments to record what would become The Good Fight, redefining their sound and making their most personal record yet.