#1 Dads

A side door out of Big Scary

#1 Dads began in late 2010 in Melbourne under the blunter name Dads, as somewhere to put songs that did not suit the band Iansek already had. Big Scary, the duo he formed with Joanna Syme in 2006, worked on rhythm and dynamics; the new project was more acoustic than electronic, built around piano, guitar and a voice recorded close. Man of Leisure arrived in May 2011 through Pieater and Fly The Light Records, and set a pattern that has held since: small arrangements, plain production, very little volume used for its own sake.

The first song to travel much further than that was Life, Oh Life in July 2012, which opens on the sound of rain before the piano enters and was praised at the time for how little it needed in order to work. The name had picked up its hash by then and never lost it, which has left a catalogue of fairly serious records filed under a gag about dads.

Two albums, an ARIA chart and a touring band

About Face, the second album, came in August 2014 and reached number 80 on the ARIA albums chart, drawing an ARIA nomination and marking the point at which #1 Dads stopped being a bedroom concern. In 2015 the project won the AIR Award for Breakthrough Independent Artist, and Iansek took the record out with a band rather than alone: Gus Rigby on saxophone, Tom Snowdon of Lowlakes, and Ainslie Wills. Nominations for the Australian Music Prize and the J Award followed the same body of work.

Golden Repair, the third album, was released in March 2020 and climbed considerably higher, peaking at number 33 on the ARIA albums chart. It was also the last #1 Dads album for six years. Across that gap the name stayed dormant while Iansek's other commitments — his bands, the Pieater label and studio in Collingwood, and a steady stream of production work for other artists — took up the time.

The day job: Big Scary, No Mono and other people's records

Iansek's main band remains the longer story. Big Scary's first official release, The Apple Song, went up on Triple J Unearthed in October 2008; four studio albums followed — Vacation in 2011, Not Art in 2013, Animal in 2016 and Daisy in 2021. In 2017 he started No Mono with Tom Snowdon, a two-man project that released Islands Part 1 in 2018 and Islands Part 2 in 2019.

Alongside that he has built a production list that includes co-producing The Paper Kites' On the Train Ride Home in 2018, plus work with Emma Louise, Airling, Lanks, Slum Sociable, Maple Glider and Kate Miller-Heidke. He was nominated for ARIA Producer of the Year in 2017, has been up for AIR Awards in 2024 and 2025, and has appeared repeatedly in the Music Victoria Awards. The practical effect on #1 Dads is audible: the records are made by someone who spends most of his working week deciding what to leave out of other people's mixes.

London, two children and a record made in the gaps

The six-year gap was not idleness. Iansek moved his family from Melbourne to the United Kingdom, became a father to two young children, and started again in London. He has described the stretch as an insane, wonderful, chaotic, intense and joyful period of his life, and the album that came out of it was written into whatever space that left.

Every Little Fire was released on Friday 16 October 2026 through Pieater. It runs to twelve tracks, from the opener Evaluation Period to the closing Prophetic, taking in Already Something, Hard Questions, Every Time, Love No Light, More Than Fish, Excuses, Tonight, Alive, Nothing Less, On A Winter's Day and Post Card. Iansek produced it with Chris Hyson, with Lloyd Haines on drums, bass from Antoine Katz and Hyson, Gus Rigby returning on saxophone, flute from Luis Almau, backing vocals from Georgia Potter and Jordan White, and strings arranged and played by Isaac Barter and Robert Thomas with violinist Kimberley Kai Cao. The cover art is by Myka Wallace.

His own summary of the result is that while the songs were born of fire, the album over time became a tranquil place for him — which is roughly how it plays: piano-led, string-cushioned, with the guitars kept well back.

What the album sounds like, and how it landed

The writing was deliberately unpoliced. On the second single, Nothing Less, Iansek said part of the project was following the thread of fun and not self-censoring, and that the song simply wanted to inhabit an eighties idiom; many of the sounds on it come straight from the original demo, which he said he could not unhear and could not improve upon. Already Something, with Rigby's saxophone, went out first. Jordan White of BrailleFace co-wrote Every Time, and Georgia Potter sings on On A Winter's Day.

Early reviewing has been warm rather than breathless. The AU Review gave it four stars out of five, reading it as a set of songs about the anxieties and quiet triumphs of adulthood that moves between indie rock, neo-soul, piano balladry and electronic detail; it picked Already Something as one of the album's finest moments while noting that the middle of the record lacks the immediacy of its opening. Its verdict was that this is a record remarkably comfortable in its own skin — soulful, adventurous, occasionally eccentric and consistently sincere.

Seventeen dates, no band

The tour attached to the record is the biggest piece of #1 Dads news in years, and the most unusual. Tickets went on sale at 10am on Thursday 6 August 2026 for a seventeen-date Australian run — the first #1 Dads shows in the country in six years — opening at the Mapleton Pub on the Sunshine Coast on 22 October and closing at Mojo's in Fremantle on 28 November, via Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, the ACT, South Australia and Western Australia.

Iansek is playing it alone. He has said the solo format is fairly new to him and certainly new to #1 Dads, and that it is what makes the regional half of the itinerary possible: The Citadel in Murwillumbah, Elm House at Mt Glorious, Bellingen Golf Club, the Grand Junction Hotel in Maitland, The Servo at Port Kembla, Old Stone Hall in Beechworth. The capital-city dates are correspondingly modest — the Lansdowne Hotel in Sydney on 5 November, Altar in Hobart on 12 November, Brunswick Ballroom in Melbourne on 21 November, Gang Gang in Canberra on 26 November, Grace Emily in Adelaide on 27 November. His stated reasons for coming back were the pre-show nerves, talking to people afterwards, the Hume, coffee and car tunes, and finding somewhere decent to eat.

Demand has outrun the room sizes. At least seven of the shows had sold out before the album was even released, including both Mapleton nights, the Junk Bar in Brisbane, Murwillumbah, Mt Glorious, The Eltham and Beechworth, and extra dates have been added on top of the original seventeen — Season Three in Woolloongabba on 28 October and the Young Street Tavern in Frankston on 15 November among them.