By this stage, after the astounding impact of their breakthrough album How to Socialise & Make Friends, Camp Cope’s reputation precedes them: they are, to borrow a descriptor from the Melbourne punk trio’s soft-spoken bassist Kelly-Dawn Hellmrich, “those angry ladies”.

“There’s a perception that we’re hard, tough, loud people – which I can understand how you might pull that from the music,” laughs Hellmrich. “We have been, when it was warranted; sometimes when you are a female in this industry, you have to be that way. But in our everyday life, we aren’t that; we’re soft and hopeful.”

Charismatic frontwoman Georgia McDonald, better known as Georgia Maq, deadpans like she’s Aubrey Plaza. “We’re multifaceted humans! Like, who knew?”

We’re drinking coffees in Darling Harbour like retirees on holiday, but the cafe’s so dark and tight it could almost be a laneway bar in Melbourne. The band – Maq, 27; Hellmrich, 29; and drummer Sarah Thompson, 30 – have just walked off the ABC’s Ultimo lot after recording a Like a Version for Triple J, a rollicking cover of Sam Fender’s Seventeen Going Under, as well as their new single Running with the Hurricane, from their new album of the same name.

The line is a nod to Georgia’s late dad Hugh McDonald, who also recorded a song titled Running with the Hurricane as lead singer of classic Australian folk-rockers Redgum on their 1986 album, Midnight Sun. McDonald died in 2016, aged 62, just as Camp Cope began working on their breakthrough.

“I liked the name of his song but I didn’t like the song, so I just wanted to do it better,” Maq explains. “So I did. My song is better.”

What, you were expecting sentimentality from Camp Cope?

Released in 2018 in the midst of #MeToo’s wider societal shake-up, How to Socialise & Make Friends, bubbling with the band’s unbridled energy and Maq’s righteous songwriting, might yet earn Camp Cope a chapter in some Gen Z translation of the indie underground bible Our Band Could Be Your Life. At gigs, its anthem The Opener, a pointed rebuke of music industry sexism, instantly became a clarion call of sorts, a striking shot at the boys’ club mentality that’s undermined and impeded female artists’ careers.

Personal bloodletting at its most arresting, the album felt like an event. This was not music you just put on in the background while going about your day. “No. In fact, it would ruin your day,” Maq quips.

Alongside the band’s offstage activism, including their campaign #ItTakesOne, aimed at preventing sexual harassment at gigs and festivals, the album earned Camp Cope critical accolades across the globe and a devoted following, both at home and in the US and UK. Writing in The Guardian around the album’s release, music critic Andrew Stafford suggested “in 20 years, young women especially will approach [Maq] and thank Camp Cope for encouraging them to pick up a guitar and tell their own stories”.

So, how do you follow that up? One answer is, do something entirely different.

Running with the Hurricane is an unexpected development for the band. It’s gorgeously restrained, gentle even. For starters, Maq’s playing piano now. Hellmrich’s rich bass lines, the kind of melodic rumbling that could make Peter Hook weep, are infectiously propulsive. But this is not the fist-raising, ear-bleeding punk the band’s known for.

“Yeah, never really liked it,” Maq says. “I just listened to that ’cause I thought it was cool. I love pop music. All I listen to is Ariana Grande and Mac Miller, that’s it.”

But all those incendiary anthems that won the band countless admirers, that pent-up dissatisfaction boiling over into larynx-shredding release?

“I’m past it. I feel like I was always trying to recreate somebody else’s sound rather than finding my own. I think I wanted us to sound like a cool Melbourne band, but was in denial that I don’t actually like that kind of music,” laughs Maq.

“We just knew we wanted this album to sound a lot nicer. And it’s softer, because, I dunno, you don’t wanna be yelling over a guitar forever, you know?”

Running with the Hurricane has been in the works since 2019. With Maq and Thompson spread across Melbourne, and Hellmrich relocating to Penrith in western Sydney, COVID-19, and Melbourne’s infamously strict lockdown, put a pause to the project for almost nine months.

The trio reverted to their day jobs. Hellmrich worked in a merchandising plant; Thompson despaired over scrapped release dates and cancelled tours at Poison City, the band’s record label. Nine months into the pandemic, Maq put her TAFE nursing qualifications to use and signed up to work in a COVID-19 ward, where she swabbed patients and administered vaccinations. Even now, she’s still working at Footscray Hospital.

“It’s very important to me, because I like to help people and you can see the help that you’re doing right there,” she says. “Music’s just, like, a little treat.”

Being a frontline worker at the height of the pandemic, was it scary? “Meh. I was fine,” Maq says. “You wear so much PPE, you’re very protected. And then the vaccine came out and I was in the first one percent of Australians to get it.”

More discomfiting than COVID-19 were the fans who somehow realised they were getting swabbed by the lead singer of Camp Cope. “Yeah, I got recognised. It’s weird. They’re like, ‘You’re Georgia Maq.’ I’m like, ‘Yes. Hello. Open your mouth.’”

In lockdown, with nothing to do but while away the days alone (she also went through a quilting phase, and a vegan lasagne phase), Maq recorded a solo album of electronic pop music. “Stupid stuff, just silly things,” she says. “I kind of lost my mind a bit and made an album that no one’s ever going to hear.”

The experience found her experimenting with her voice, using it more like an instrument than “just a vessel to get things out”. Maq’s vocals, ever powerful but now more elastic and controlled, are a revelation on Running with the Hurricane.

“I think my voice, it’s very connected to my life and my emotions. I’m in a very different place now, and you can hear that,” Maq says. “I just don’t want to yell anymore. I don’t think it sounds good! I listen to the old Camp Cope records, and it’s like screwdrivers in my ears.”

If there’s a Morrissey-esque lilt in Maq’s vocals, there’s also an echo of his famous plea, that it “takes guts to be gentle and kind”, in the album’s spirit. It’s the band pushing beyond an expectation, or need, to live inside the trauma that defined How to Socialise.

“We’re past it,” Maq says. “I feel like people expect a lot of hardness from us, and I just want to be gentle.”

While Maq’s lyrics remain at times painfully candid, there’s also a romantic streak that feels new to her songwriting. There’s a yearning throughout the album, including on the flirtatious One Wink at a Time, where Maq sings about being “open to attention, open to affection”.

“It’s desperate,” Maq laughs. “Desperation. That’s my vibe now. That’s absolutely my vibe.”

Earlier this year she released a solo single, the viral Joe Rogan, a song inspired by a dud date with a guy who defended the controversial comedian-turned-podcaster and mansplained Rogan’s apparently misunderstood appeal. Is it hard now to be Georgia Maq and dating?

“What a funny question!” she laughs. “I mean, I am notorious.” Case in point: the cover of Joe Rogan was a text message sent to her from the guy in question, an endless scroll of cringey consent confusion.

“Because I’m me, I’m such a psycho, I went up to him at a New Year’s Eve party and was like, ‘Hello! Did you like the song?’ Because he knows it’s about him,” laughs Maq. “But he didn’t know I was using the text message on the cover. I showed him and he looked like he wanted to murder me. I was like, you can try to sue me but then you’ll have to admit to writing that text message.”

“She’s got the worst taste in guys,” laughs Hellmrich.

I mean, I was going to say. How to Socialise & Make Friends’ title was a reference to some dude’s horrible taste in literature, and now we’re dealing with Joe Rogan. So are prospective partners anxious about dating Maq, wary they’ll end up in a song?

“Oh, it’s like Taylor Swift!” says Hellmrich.

“Nooo! It’s not!” Maq interjects. “Aside from a few stupid ones, I don’t think my songwriting is too explicit these days. I feel like I’ve definitely grown away from being so literal, and into something a bit more, like, living in my own inner world.

”Like, I don’t even know what One Wink at a Time means. It’s a Replacements song. And I love the Replacements. So it’s just a little nod to the Replacements.”

Highlighting the standing they’ve cultivated among their peers, the album also features multiple favours from Melbourne’s indie royalty: Courtney Barnett shreds electric guitar on Caroline and Sing Your Heart Out, and Cable Ties’ Shauna Boyle plays trumpet on One Wink at a Time.

As someone who’s made the leap to international prestige, has Barnett offered the band any mentorly advice?

“We literally don’t talk about music, that’s why we have such a good friendship,” says Thompson. “I don’t think we’ve ever talked shop with Courtney. We talk about TV. We both love watching trash.”

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“You were on a TV show together,” Hellmrich notes.

“We’re not allowed to talk about it. I’ll get in trouble,” says Thompson.

Well, now I have to know.

“It’s been on TV already, but we signed NDAs saying we can’t discuss it,” laughs Thompson. “Let’s just say it’s me and Courtney’s favourite show and we got to be on it in the background, and we had the best day ever. If you can find it, good on you. It’s not a small show, and it’s Australian.”

Hmm, not a small show and Australian. Was Courtney Barnett an anonymous guest at a Married at First Sight wedding?

“Imagine if me and Courtney went on MAFS!” Thompson laughs. “I can say, on the record, it wasn’t MAFS. But you’re gonna get me in trouble. If you ever figure it out, let me know. My face is not covered, and it’s not reality TV.”

Internet detectives, do your thing.

For punk bands, prettying up one’s sound or, God forbid, maturing, can be divisive. But Camp Cope aren’t concerned that fans, many of whom first jumped on at How to Socialise, might reject Hurricane’s milder tones.

“The people who like it will like it, the people who don’t like it won’t like it. It doesn’t matter. It’s just art. It’s subjective. It’s not good or bad, it just is what it is,” says Maq.

She likes the idea of pop eras, she says, the way each new album from Lady Gaga or Taylor Swift or Madonna is different, an “evolution of sound”. “You look at, like, Green Day, and they’ll make albums that sound the same forever. Which is fine, Green Day are one of the best ever. But I don’t wanna be like that. I wanna explore genres, I wanna do everything.”

With Running with the Hurricane finally out, do they feel the stakes are higher after the massive success of How to Socialise?

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“No way!” Maq says. “That album sucked. This one’s so much better. And it’s, like, who cares? We’re not trying to win a competition, we’re just making art. But I still think everything we do is better than what we’ve done before.

“Also, I kinda love that,” she adds, “surprising people and people being taken aback a bit. I want people to not know what to expect from us. I want to keep them guessing.”

Running with the Hurricane is out now via Poison City Records.

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