Notorious for its recording method, “12 Bar Bruise” is the title track to the band’s debut album with reverb-drenched guitar and rowdy lyrics about sex and booze. Its title is a play on the phrase “12 bar blues” — a common chord progression heard in blues and rock music.

“12 Bar Bruise” was recorded entirely using four or five iPhones spread around a room according to a Mess+Noise article. In an interview for FBI Radio Stu said, “I think iPhones are absolutely unbelievable. The stuff you can do with them, just crazy. We used about five for that song all at the same time and mixed them together like that, so it kinda was better than one.”

In a Mixdown Magazine article, he elaborated that the band used the voice memo app, that it was mixed in Pro Tools with no processing, and that the vocals were recorded directly into one of the phones. The band found the experiment interesting, but there was some hesitancy to actually use it. As Eric explained to Upstart, “We basically recorded the song as an experiment and thought it sounded really cool, then for ages we were like ‘we can’t put this on the record, it’s absurd.’ Once we mixed it properly and got it mastered it didn’t actually sound that different sonically to the others, so we added it on. Now it’s the song people talk about the most.”

At the time of release, the idea that the band had used iPhones in the recording process was both novel and nearly unheard of, leading to it becoming a feature touted in many articles and reviews of 12 Bar Bruise. The band would continue to use this technique on future albums with Stu noting how it allows instruments to cut through the mix. A DIY shirt from the band with the song’s name painted on it would be sold in late 2012, with the song being included on 12 Bar Bruise on September 7th of that year. It would later be used in promotional material for the 2018 reissues.

Little info is known about the band’s setlists from this era. The only reported performance of the song was on 2012-10-07 at The Tote Hotel in Naarm (Melbourne) with a Tone Deaf article noting it as the opener.