2005-2019, 2022-Dougy MandagiVocals, rhythm guitar2005-2019, 2022-
Toby DundasDrums2005-2019, 2022-
Jonathon AherneBass2005-2019, 2022-
Joseph GreerKeyboards, lead guitar2008-2019, 2022-
Lorenzo SillittoLead guitar2005-2013
The Temper Trap are an Australian alt-rock band who launched into the spotlight when their atmospheric indie anthem "
Sweet Disposition," the lead single from their 2009 debut album,
Conditions, became a global hit. The band earned a raft of nominations at that year's ARIA Awards, including Album Of The Year, Best Rock Album, and Single Of The Year for "Sweet Disposition," but had to wait until the 2010 ceremony to win their first trophies for Best Group and Most Popular Australian Single for their debut song.
Lead singer Dougy Mandagi was born in Indonesia and spent parts of his childhood in Bali and Hawaii before relocating to Melbourne, Australia, in his teens. His plan of working his way through college went awry when he couldn't find a job, so he turned to busking to make money by drawing charcoal portraits of passersby on the city's bustling Swanston Street. Sometimes he'd trade his sketchbook for his acoustic six-string guitar, which is how he first met his future Temper Trap bandmate Jonathon Aherne. When Mandagi founded the group in 2005, he convinced Aherne to join on bass, with Toby Dundas - his coworker at a clothing store - on drums. Dundas brought in his old grammar schoolmate Lorenzo Sillitto on lead guitar.
Mandagi didn't enjoy the process of recording the band's debut album. He found the long studio hours to be boring and clashed with British producer Jim Abbiss (The Arctic Monkeys, Adele) over his "totalitarian" approach. To make matters worse, the already stressed-out band kept running into technical difficulties. "Two desks blew up," Dundas
recalled in a 2010 Hot Press interview. "And we were only five days into recording when the first one happened."
Mandagi has a biblical tattoo on his left arm of Hebrews 11:1, which reads, "Faith is the substance of all things hopeful and the evidence of things not seen."
The singer grew up in a strict home due to his grandparents' Christian faith, but he doesn't consider himself a particularly religious person. He says the quote is deeply meaningful to him for personal reasons.
The Temper Trap have become accustomed to fans showing off their tattoos of lyrics from their most famous song, but they got a kick out of learning that Harry Styles got his arm inked with incorrect lyrics from "Sweet Disposition." The former One Direction singer's tat reads, "Won't stop 'til we surrender," instead of the actual, "Won't stop to surrender."
When Taylor Swift, who dated Styles from 2012 to 2013, approached Mandagi backstage at the ARIA Awards and asked him to write out the lyrics as a birthday present for her pop star boyfriend, the request put him in an awkward position. "Do I write the right lyrics, or do I write the wrong lyrics?" Mandagi recalled in a 2025 TikTok video, "I can't remember which one I wrote."
Mandagi's great-uncle was Arie Frederik Lasut, who is regarded as a National Hero of Indonesia for his fight in the country's struggle for independence, which led to his assassination by Dutch colonists in 1946. The family went on to face further tragedy when Mandagi's father and two uncles were killed in a plane crash when the singer was 6 years old. Years later, another uncle died in a parachuting accident.
The Temper Trap released two more albums, The Temper Trap (2012) and Thick As Thieves (2016), before announcing their hiatus in 2019. Burned out from years on the road, the longtime bandmates went their separate ways to pursue other musical endeavors. Mandagi moved to Berlin and took inspiration from the city's electronic soundscape for his solo project Bloodmoon; Aherne went to the US and recorded indie-folk songs under the name Shacks & Palaces; Dundas started his own recording studio and began composing film scores; and Joseph Greer, who replaced Sillitto on lead guitar, became a teacher. They regrouped in 2022 to tour in support of Kings Of Leon, and in 2026, they released their first album in a decade: Sungazer.
They originally wanted to call themselves Temper Temper, inspired by a 1998 track from the British DJ Goldie, but it was already taken by a hardcore/emo band from the US who already had a much bigger following. According to Mandagi, they just opened the dictionary to the letter T and landed on the word trap.
When The Temper Trap were first starting out, the guys were still learning their instruments and figuring out their sound. When a girl at a gig told them they sounded like the Aussie garage-rock band Jet, it was a wake-up call. With bands like Radiohead and TV On The Radio as their guides, they started learning programming and brought in different instruments and guitar pedals to formulate the sonics of their debut album.
In
a 2026 interview with The Guardian, Mandagi cited 2007 as the best year for music so far in his lifetime, with prime examples being Radiohead's
In Rainbows, MGMT's
Oracular Spectacular, Arcade Fire's
Neon Bible, Jay Z's
American Gangster and Kanye West's
Graduation.
