“We have a habit of making things a little bit hard for ourselves,” says Body Type guitarist and vocalist Sophie McCormish. “For some reason, we always just cram so much into so little time.”

To illustrate, she nods to her bandmate Georgia Wilkinson-Derums, who is joining the Zoom call to do album promo between classes at university.

Cramming so much into so little time might be the Body Type mission statement, or at least the protracted subtitle of the Sydney four-piece’s future autobiography. Since forming a decade ago, the band has churned out a string of EPs and acclaimed studio albums (including the Australian Music Prize-nominated Expired Candy in 2023) at an impressive clip.

But their latest record Tally, their first in three years, is Body Type’s sharpest and most expansive take on their brand of jangly post-punk yet. Recorded in Los Angeles with Australian super-producer Stella Mozgawa, Tally is ambitious and richly textured but firmly concentrated.

“We had 12 days booked in the studio in LA with Stella with the intention of recording 12 songs,” McCormish explains. “And then on day six, we were like, ‘we’ve still got two more songs to record’ and Stella was like, ‘What? We’re doing more than 10?’”

It prompted the band to narrow their focus and pour more into perfecting a tight 10 songs instead of letting the tracklist blow out. What resulted was, according to Wilkinson-Derums, a “fast-paced, mercurial” experience with Mozgawa.

“We’re four hard-working women and she put us to shame,” she says with a smile. “She was there all hours and didn’t take a break. It was inspiring to see how she works, she’s a bit of a maverick.”

The care and craft ring true throughout Tally. Body Type have always had an enchanting knack for making ordinary experiences feel larger than life, and they’ve never done it so well. ‘Planet 8’ is a slice of crooning garage rock that turns a ride in the rickety elevator of a boyfriend’s apartment building into a treatise on commitment and vulnerability. ‘Gorgeous’ threads in brisk acoustic guitar and harmonised vocals, making a visit to a Tarot card reader sound life-affirming.

It’s a perfect contrast to the moments when Body Type chose to forego the banal and dive headfirst into big feelings. Album opener ‘And What Else?’ might be the best example: it’s catchy as hell and incredibly funny,1 but don’t be surprised if it pricks at strangely raw parts of your heart.

What starts as a boppy pump-up lover’s anthem reveals its sleight of hand when the call-and-response vocals converge on the gut-punching chorus in which they urge a lover to “Tell me things that I don’t believe about myself” and “Tell me things that are true only to you”.

That notion, that a partner’s affirmation can be in one light romantic and in another a sign your needs aren’t being meant, can slide over your head if you get wrapped up in the catchiness of the track. But not every punch on Tally sneaks up on you.

Album standout ‘Eye Is A Mouth Is A Face’ immediately asserts itself, toying with time signatures in ways that would thrill their label bosses King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard.

“‘Eye Is A Mouth Is A Face’ is the first complete song that we wrote together, and it just came from a session in the studio when we were just jamming,” McCormish says. “We’re all extremely busy, and the time we have together is limited, so usually when we’re writing, someone’s brought a demo and we’re building off an existing idea, but ‘Eye’ came together entirely in the studio.

“That’s something that, if we had more time and if money wasn’t an issue, we could be in the room together more often. I think that’s probably how we would write more.”

Neither McCormish or Wilkinson-Derums make a fuss about finances, but it’s implicit in any conversation you have with any Australian working in the arts. In the case of Body Type, their best statement on the subject comes on the chugging title track of Tally.

It starts dry and funny, asking about holidays and TABs, but the joy evaporates in place of anxiety and anger, culminating in a cathartic, loud shouting section.2

Wilkinson-Derums tells me a story about a 2024 show they played at Sydney’s Phoenix Central Park and how transformative it was to hear her band through in-ear monitors for the first time — something that, in a fair and supportive creative environment, an AMP-nominated band would get access to much earlier into their career.

“That performance actually was profound for the four of us, because we were hearing ourselves in a different, clear way,” she says. “For me, it was revolutionary … it’s like hearing for the first time. You work in pubs and whatever, you don’t really ever get a fantastic mix,” she says.

“We’re not in a financial position where we can take someone on tour with us. So, you learn to work with constraints and adapt in a different way. But having that clarity made me personally go, ‘Okay, I can sit back and maybe try something new’.”

McCormish offers an instant evaluation: “That came out when Georgia was doing her vocal takes on ‘Mulberry’ and I was just weeping in the control room because I’d never heard her sing so tenderly before.”

Tenderness is a new arrow in the quiver of Body Type. Although Expired Candy dialled back some of the scuzziness of Body Type’s debut, Tally feels like another step towards a band willing to bare its vulnerabilities in the full light of day.

Album closer ‘Everything In A Row’ cuts straight to the heart. The song sat in a demos folder for “like seven or eight years”, but was finally resurfaced at the urging of drummer Cecil Coleman.

“Annabel is also really good at sitting in the softer songs and being patient. When you’ve got a song that you started so long ago, you are recontextualising it to where you’re at in life now and where things are at with the band creatively now,” McCormish says.

“It feels like a real journey has transpired that you can measure, because there are some lyrics in that song I wrote a long, long time ago and then some that came through in the session.”

“It turns out to be a little bit like camp,” Wilkinson-Derums adds with a laugh. “I’m falling asleep next to Soph and watching her read a book and words stick out to her, or stick out to me, and I communicate that word to her, and she puts it in a song.”

Even in conversation, the women of Body Type make the mundane labour of putting together a song sound nothing short of magic. When Wilkinson-Derums tells me that the process of slowly finishing a song like ‘Everything In A Row’ is the best part of being in Body Type, I believe her.

“It’s the most special part of it all, it’s not even playing in a fucking band,” she laughs.

‘Tally’ is out now via Poision City Records/p(doom) records. Buy or stream here.

If you’re in a dimly lit bandroom anywhere in Australia and you listen closely enough, you’ll hear whispers of a band everyone seems to be getting hooked on: Swapmeet. The Adelaide four-piece have been playing together since 2021, but are picking up speed ahead of the release of their debut album Mount Zero (July 17).

It’s already been a big year for Swapmeet. In February, they became the first international act to sign with buzzy Los Angeles indie label Winspear (Wishy, Slow Pulp, Barrie) and immediately parlayed that into a sensational run of shows at SXSW Austin. Since then, pretty much every rock critic worth their salt has earmarked Swapmeet as a band on the rise1

Not that they seem too worried about it all. When Maxwell Elphick and Jack Medlyn — half the band, alongside Venus O’Broin and Joshua Doherty — join the Zoom call, they seem as relaxed talking about their debut album as they are discussing the weather. We’re speaking in May, and I ask whether the impending release of Mount Zero comes with any anxiety.

“We’ve never really been the nervous type,” Elphick says, before adding: “It tends to work in our favour.”

Sure enough, Swapmeet are abundant with assurance. Mount Zero is a spell-binding statement of intent, a debut that feels beyond its years. The record is beautifully textured and tightly composed. It has all the trappings of a familiar, phenomenal guitar record, but makes so many sharp creative choices over its nine tracks that it never runs the risk of feeling played out.

As Elphick tells it, the band’s confidence came from its beginning. While the four bandmates knew each other and played music together across bands in Adelaide’s small rock scene, it took one of O’Broin’s other bands pulling out of a gig at Hotel Metro for Swapmeet to formally play their first show.

“It was mainly our friends, which is really good for a first show,” Elphick said. “After that, it kind of just kept happening. Friends kept coming and brought more friends, and it just boosted our confidence a lot.”

There’s a touch of humility in the band’s retelling (or perhaps every one of Swapmeet’s 13.3K Instagram followers is a friend of a friend), but it explains why Swapmeet, playing for and among friends, have felt comfortable trying new things without fear of failure.

Those bets pay off on Mount Zero: ‘Seeds’ shreds hard, ‘I Know’ flares in such a weird and wonderful way, while ‘Bonny’ fills a gap in lyrics by simply singing “Malcolm in the Middle” in a line that shouldn’t work but absolutely does.

“There’s no one judging, which is awesome,” Medlyn says of the Adelaide scene. He compares the local culture to a school sports day: “Even if your team is losing, people would still cheer you on.”

Mount Zero is a different beast from the Swapmeet live experience. When the band plays together in-person, the guitars seem to swim around one another. On the record, everything feels deliberate and purposeful.

“We realised early on that recording our stuff how we play it live, you need the crazy expensive studio to do that,” Medlyn said. “It just doesn’t sound the same when we do it compared to an epic studio.”

Swapmeet’s workaround was enlisting the most powerful instrument of them all: the laptop. Medlyn self-identifies as the “Ableton legend” of the band and credits Elphick the “Logic legend”, giving Swapmeet a one-two punch in digital production that most bands would die for.

“I remember when we were doing ‘I Know’, there’s this Logic beat repeat plug-in and we put a guitar through it, and it really fit, but we were doing the song in Ableton,” Medlyn said.

“I can’t remember exactly how we ended up doing it, but we’d send it over to Logic and put it through the beat repeat plug-in on Maxwell’s laptop, then send it back … it was so messy, but we got there.”

Mount Zero is more than a technical marvel. There’s a beating heart that runs through the record. The band shares vocals almost as much as they swap around instruments (a lot), and it gives the record a beautiful sense of place and time. It’s not one person’s story so much as a collage of shared experiences from four people who exist in the same small world.

The epitome of this comes on the title track ‘Mount Zero’ — it’s a swirling, magnetic song that floats between voices, peaking with an outro which cross-threads the vocals. As Elphick and Medlyn tell it, they wrote the outro together while lying on the floor and working with a notepad.

“We’d write a line and be like, ‘Oh, this is awesome’ — jumping up, dancing for a little bit — then we’d go to the next one,” Elphick says. “It just got more and more exciting that I wanted to wake everyone up to show them that we’d done it.”

“We had a lot of time to finish that song, and it was really getting to the end of it,” Medlyn adds. “We had to work out this intro, and we were like, ‘We got it! We got it!’’”

There’s palpable excitement in the way Elphick and Medlyn talk about minutiae of making music: feeding your Ableton and Logic concoctions back into one another, writing the line that unlocks the sonic block you were stuck on and so forth.

Swapmeet may be unfazed by the attention gathering around them, but they light up when talking about the tiny decisions that make the songs work. That might be the clearest sign they’re ready for all of it.

'Mount Zero’ is out July 17 via Winspear. Pre-order or pre-save the album here.

Alien Nosejob’s ninth LP How a Mosquito Operates takes its name from a 1912 Winsor McCay animation. The six-minute film, hailed as ahead of its time, reportedly made audiences laugh so hard they cried. Watching it over a century later, it’s more eerie than amusing. An anthropomorphised mosquito breaks into a man’s apartment and feeds on him as he sleeps, gorging over and over until the insect becomes so swollen it bursts.

It feels like a fitting companion to the album. Alien Nosejob’s latest record is abrasive, claustrophobic and relentless enough to meet this particularly charged moment in history.

“Time is running out and I don’t even care,” Jake Robertson shrieks on the nihilistic ‘Nowhere to Go’, a song that sums up the album: it seems to revel in its own futility, accepting that things are fucked and all you can control is how loudly you broadcast your rage.

I put a version of this narrative to Robertson. The man behind Alien Nosejob, Robertson tells me he’s “kind of just walked out” of work to jump on the phone and entertain my fervent attempts to intellectualise his album. I ask him if any of the above sounds right.

“Absolutely not,” he laughs, telling me there’s no overall message the album is trying to thread. In fact, most of How a Mosquito Operates was conceived years ago — written about five years back and recorded sometime around 2023. Still, I insist, a song like ‘The Night Before the War’ doesn’t feel any less urgent in 2026.

“Well, I mean, honestly name a year that there wasn’t a war,” Robertson says, fairly enough.

This dance is part of the magic of the Alien Nosejob project. I throw questions at Robertson trying to extract details about the process, the vision, the long-term view, and he very politely explains to me that there isn’t really one.

A harsher sceptic might call bullshit — Alien Nosejob records are fun and messy in all the best ways, but they don’t feel off-handed or thrown together. There’s a lavish craft behind what Robertson does, from the way his guitar pinballs around the track on ‘Westside Story’ to the curious and charming stuttering start to ‘Neo’.

But I don’t get the sense anything about Robertson is a cultivated persona.1 When Alien Nosejob got the call to open for Wednesday’s Melbourne show in May, Robertson tells me he was mostly concerned with finding out from mutual friends whether the Asheville rockstars were good folks.

“We pretty much did that show based on the fact that they were really nice people,” he says, admitting he hadn’t really heard much Wednesday prior to the gig. “I wasn’t really expecting to love the show, but it was actually awesome.”

Alien Nosejob came to be in 2018 while Robertson was playing in Ausmuteants, the band he co-founded with Billy Gardner in Geelong. At the time, Ausmuteants were about a year away from scoring a nomination for the Australian Music Prize and were at the height of their powers. Alien Nosejob was an anonymous outlet for Robertson to dabble. Since then, it’s grown into a full live band and Robertson’s main project.

Its sound has shape-shifted on more or less every release. Picking up a random Alien Nosejob album is a lucky dip with no losing prizes: Paint It Clear is a sleek, synthy New Wave dream, Turns the Colour of Bad Shit is good old vintage rock and roll, Various Fads and Technological Advancements is a disarmingly unpredictable pop record.

“At the end of the day, I don’t really take what I do very seriously,” he tells me. “The end game of what I was trying to achieve was done pretty much the first time my high school band played a show. That’s the apex already, and I’m just happy continuing doing what I’m doing.”

So, no Grammys or Coachella on the horizon?

“Honestly, this is no disrespect to Coachella, but I feel like if we were asked to play and we did play, I’d probably go for the duration of the set that I played, and then fuck off somewhere else. It’s not something that’s ever interested me,” Robertson says.

“There’s obviously things that I haven’t done that would greatly interest me, like writing music specific for a show or a jingle or something … but from a very young age I told myself that music should not be a way of getting money. If there’s certain paid jobs, awesome, but I never want to be a careerist.”

That mindset imbues Alien Nosejob with a certain kind of creative freedom which comes through on How a Mosquito Operates. It is a hardcore record through and through, drawing from the well of bands like the skittering Canadian punks Neos and the immovably lethal Adrenalin O.D. 2

The album is an absolute blast: every note is shouted (or screamed, choked, anything other than sung, really) and the record feels like the Energizer Bunny doing a Swanton Bomb into a moshpit.

“Hardcore was the first music that I discovered by myself,” Robertson says, before allowing that his brother did put him onto Dead Kennedys. “The rest was either on Soulseek when I was 13 or 14 or finding compilations like the Killed by Death series or Back from the Grave.”

In particular, Robertson says the bands he was most drawn to — the aforementioned Neos and Adrenalin O.D., as well as MDC — “don’t really sound like other hardcore bands from the time and, more importantly, don’t really sound like any current hardcore bands”.

And in the spirit of that, How a Mosquito Operates sounds like no record before it. It is an album that leans into the desperate and disgusting to captivating effect, best surmised by a gnarly hurling sound at the end of ‘Prosecco’.

“I’m not actually vomiting,” Robertson tells me. “Okay, I am. I did stick my fingers down my throat to make myself dry-retch and then I poured water from a Tupperware container into a toilet bowl and recorded that.”3

Alien Nosejob’s album also doesn’t look like any hardcore record in shelves at the moment. Its cover, designed by New York cartoonist Max Burlingame, was made to resemble a comic book.

“I actually hit up a lot of comic book artists, especially ones from the 80s that are retired now, and some seemed interested. But it just got to a point where I was like, ‘if I actually want to get this done, I should probably get someone’,” he says.

“I’ve never met Max, I just sent him a message on Instagram and he got back to me and seemed… I don’t know if stoked is the right word, but at least on board enough.”

What results looks and sounds fresh, even if it is an album Robertson effectively made three years ago. It is one of my favourite hardcore records from this year and in a fair world it would be the breakthrough moment for one of Australia’s most consistently great DIY projects.

But I suspect Jake Robertson is entirely unbothered. He tells me at one point how he felt when Ausmuteants began, a perspective that never shifted.

“I remember when we started, all we would have liked to get to is just being able to put on our own shows and have them roughly attended,” Robertson says.

Fifteen years and an absurd number of records later, the crowds are still turning up. Everything else is just a bonus.

‘How a Mosquito Operates’ is out now on Anti Fade Records. Buy or stream it here.

“I’m so confused as to why you hit me up about this,” Timmy Lodhi says, grinning and looking off-screen from his Bay Area home. “We’ve never played Australia, we haven’t even been close. I mean, we left the West Coast for the first time in April.”1

Here’s the reason: Timmy Lodhi’s band fucking rips. Bad World, who first rose to prominence as Bite the Hand, have been blasting eardrum-rattling hardcore since the pandemic. As soon as I heard the title track of their new EP Maker of Rules (released last Friday), with its muscular riffs and frenetic pace, I went on the hunt for Lodhi’s email.

Maker of Rules is the first proper release the band has put out since changing their name about a year ago, something they were forced into when a band of the same name sent them a cease-and-desist (how very punk of them). While the then-newly minted Bad World put out a song around then, it felt like most of the oxygen got sucked up by the scandal and the music never had the chance to breathe.

Which is a shame. Bad World have been putting out bangers since Lodhi started the band during the pandemic, and they’ve steadily risen to be one of the must-hear bands on the West Coast. On Maker of Rules, Bad World sound fresh and energised — even if the songs have actually been on the shelf for a hot minute.

“These songs have been sitting around for like years, which is so sad. It’s so long, but it’ll all be worth it,” Lodhi tells me. “It’s frustrating from our perspective how long we’ve been sitting on these, but we’re just excited to get the music out.”

Maker of Rules follows the established process for Bad World: Lodhi brings the “bones” of songs to the table and the band iterates from there. The EP is a sprint — the title track, a song featuring Ben Cook of No Warning,2 and a cover of Only Living Witness’ ‘Nineveh’, which came at the behest of bassist Travis Pacheco.

“As soon as he suggested it, it was very much an immediate yes from everybody in the band. We all love that band, we all love that record, Prone Mortal Form, and that song in particular.”

The EP marks a new chapter in many ways for Bad World. Not only is it the first substance release under the Bad World name, it’s also their debut on the routinely brilliant Denver label Convulse Records, helmed by Adam Croft of Destiny Bond. Everything prior had been self-released on Lodhi’s Big Bite Records.

“When you run a record label, but you’re also in a band, and you’re putting your own band’s music out, it sort of doesn’t feel like an official label release,” he says. “Working with Convulse is really exciting, because I don’t have to worry about the ordering of records or any of the backend stuff or the distro. We send in the songs, we send in the artwork, and Adam from Convulse has been handling it.”

That’s a change of pace for Lodhi, who has been doing this hardcore thing for well over a decade. He has been hands-on with everything from the music to the media to the music videos to the flyers to booking shows to social media to designing merch, just about everything in the scaffolding of being a band.

That experience gave Lodhi the skill set to launch his own label, the aforementioned Big Bite Records, but it has also left him with a workload that leaves him stretched thin. I ask Lodhi how he manages to keep tabs on as many bands as he does, despite the workload.

“It’s hard, for sure, I wouldn’t say it’s easy. I’m always trying to keep tabs. I find myself on Reddit a little too much the last couple of weeks in particular, it’s been a bit of a nightmare, so I am trying to stay away, but I do try to keep up,” he says.

And, well, since Lodhi brought up Reddit, I take the chance to ask about a post that picked up traction on r/hardcore — a Bad World Instagram Story that mocked Balmora’s limp response to allegations that their guitarist groomed a minor.

Lodhi observes that conversation-starting shitposts like that, which received a slew of amused responses, seem to be the real needle-movers for bands in today’s algorithm economy.

“I’m very cognisant of those moments because I’ve seen it happen to us as a band in very small ways, and I think it was a very big lesson for me,” Lodhi says. He’s speaking indirectly of the name change, which he “doesn’t want to get into too much”, but admits the online chatter following that saga helped the band “grow exponentially”.

“I’ve been doing music for many, many years … right now, it’s really, really hard to break through and have people care about what you’re actually sincerely doing if you’re not backed by some sort of label or have some support,” he says.

“There’s this very big thick line that separates bands that are able to break through and bands who are stuck under the blanket of the algorithm that are just not getting their music heard … Even with our band, I’m very grateful because things are going well for the most part, but if we had a ‘banana suit moment’ our shit would be exploding right now.”

The ‘banana suit moment’ in question, for those mercifully unaware, refers to End It frontman Akil Godsey, friend of Bad Scene, siccing a crowd on an audience member who inexplicably showed up to their show in a banana suit.

Some thought it was amusing and moved on, some adhered to the doctrine of ‘fuck around and find out’, and some — the loudest — thought it was the most abhorrent, awful thing they’d ever seen.3

“It’s this weird dichotomy of internet hardcore versus real life hardcore. They’re very different, I think sometimes people forget that. You see all this discourse right now about the banana suit or whatever, and people are getting so uptight and serious, and this isn’t really a thing in the real world,” Lodhi says.

“If you go to hardcore shows, this isn’t a problem, it’s never been a problem. It’s just one moment that got taken out of context and has turned into a joke for a lot of people, then a lot of people are taking it very seriously.”

Forgive the internet digression. It’s not very hardcore, I know. But Lodhi, who is in his mid-thirties, has been around the block for just the right amount of time: he knows how things used to be, but is also well-versed in the digital world. I posit that gaming the algorithm wasn’t something that, say, Terror had to ever reckon with.

“No, no, dude, they were just rough, putting fucking solid albums out that people were like stoked on,” he says. “Whether people want to admit it or not, since the pandemic hardcore has changed and the internet has played a huge role in its change and its growth.”

“There’s a lot of people who are like, ‘Well, back in my day it didn’t used to be like this’ and it’s like, yeah, back in your day Monster wasn’t sponsoring the Drain tour. Things are different now and we can’t go back, you either learn to grow or you sink with it.”

Lodhi’s entry into hardcore came at a much simpler time. He was, as he tells me, a studded jacket-clad punk with a full mohawk whose early loves include The Casualties, The Unseen and The Exploited. That affinity extended to hardcore when he saw local legends Sabertooth Zombie play the lobby at The Phoenix Theater in Petaluma.4

“It was the most violent thing I’ve ever seen in a room that was maybe 20 feet by 10 feet and I was so blown away,” Lodhi says, awestruck two decades on. “At the time, I was confused — I didn’t know if I liked it or not — but over time I started listening to more hardcore bands.”

That led to Lodhi starting Strike To Survive, which furthered his ravenous exploration of hardcore. He name-checks Blacklisted, Have Heart, Verse and Australia’s own Miles Away for shifting his perspective, scratching an itch he’d looked for in punk but “harder and faster and more melodic and heavier”.

“It was just everything I thought I wanted punk to be, but it was actualised,” he beams.

I ask Lodhi, who is of Pakistani heritage, how his parents took to his punk phase. Based on personal experience, South Asian families aren’t always the biggest fans of punk rock (or, in my case, a very aggressive Wu-Tang phase at age 13).

“Well, my question for you is, do you have siblings, or are you the oldest?” Lodhi asks. I’m the oldest.

“That’s why you were fucked,” he laughs. “I have two older sisters, so I had to bear less of the brunt from my parents.”

Lodhi’s introduction to music was “2Pac, Nas, all the 90s R&B stuff” and Bollywood music, down to choreographed dancing at his cousins’ weddings.

“When I was old enough to become my own thing, I very much quickly became the black sheep of the family,” he says, attributing the change to his friends at the time — “young white pimply stoner kids from Northern California”.

Falling in with that crowd also translated to actual trouble, a “dark period” in which Lodhi was arrested for graffiti. When he started showing an interest in learning guitar, his parents threw their support behind the venture. Lodhi speculates they were particularly stoked to see him pursue something that might keep him away from mischief.

“My mum actually dyed a blonde skunk strip down the middle of my hair, and my dad bought me my first guitar and an amp. He was driving me to go play my very first punk shows at music shops in Northern California, so they were always supportive.”

As our conversation winds up, I ask Lodhi about a roadmap he laid out on a podcast over a year ago: an EP, then a full-length. Lodhi grins at the mention of it.

“Oh my god, yes, it’s on the way,” he says. “I want to start off by saying writing a full-length is a very daunting task. It is a challenging task to write that many songs that can fit together so well, that play off of each other so well, that feels overall cohesive, but it is a big important step for a hardcore band.”

Bad World has over 12 songs written and is in the process of fine-tuning before potentially recording in the next few months. As Lodhi tells me, they won’t rush the process.

“I’m a control freak about everything I do. The reason that I started this band was because I needed to have a project that I can have creative control over, because so many of the bands that I was a part of broke up or became confused about what we wanted to do because everybody had input,” he says. “By trying to satisfy everybody’s creative ideas, it just became a weird hodgepodge of something that didn’t make any sense.”5

Those tendencies make the hard task of navigating this fractured, too-online world of making, releasing and promoting music even harder. But Timmy Lodhi shows, both in conversation and with guitar in hand, that he’s up to the challenge — now someone please send this interview as viral as that banana suit clip, please.

‘Maker of Rules’ is out now via Convulse Records. Buy or stream it here.

The subject line of the email says “goths at the pub”. Of course, I have to click on that. This may not be what you expected from Pond’s eleventh album Terrestrials (out June 19), given the two decades the band have spent carving out their niche as Australia’s finest psychedelic rock band.

But Pond bandleader Nick Allbrook begs to differ. As he tells me over Zoom from his home in Perth, gothic energy has been “a constant vein” dating back to his early years touring with good mate Kevin Parker’s band Tame Impala.

“If you look up a certain phase in Tame Impala’s history, you’ll see an emaciated, sallow Nick Allbrook with black hair and little skulls around his wrist,” he says. “We’ll always be a psychedelic band … but I think it’s all in the same family. A lot of my love of psychedelia is laced with violence and darkness.”

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What is without a doubt a change of pace is the way Pond recorded Terrestrials. The band outlawed the fuzz pedal, a staple on previous releases, pushing themselves outside of their comfort zone.

“On tour, [Shiny] Joe [Ryan] kept playing this chord progression that inspired GUM [Jay Watson] to sing over it, like Ian Curtis or Bauhaus — you know, the deep goth voice,” Allbrook says. “When Joe and GUM started doing that, it was a bit of a eureka moment.”

The band also made a two-step test each song had to satisfy to make it onto the album: Would goths like it? Could you have a beer to this?

As a rule of thumb I try not to speak on behalf of goths or beer drinkers,1 but I’d say mission accomplished. Terrestrials doesn’t feel out of step with previous Pond albums, but it gives the band a new complexion.

Allbrook’s vocals, disentangled from the fuzziness, are the biggest beneficiary. Digging from the well of classic Australian pub rock, he channels anyone from Peter Garrett’s relentlessness on ‘Tourmaline’ to shades of the great Chrissy Amphlett’s flair on the sensationally campy ‘Personal Hell’. Album highlight ‘Roebuck Plains’ is the sort of song that we need to ensure reaches Jimmy Barnes at all costs.

The band seems to be having fun, too. Allbrook tells me that, at the core, the album is by Pond and for Pond — “sensitive blokes who love the pub”. One of the joys of a new Pond record is poring over each track and hearing the way the team switches instruments and styles at will. The well-oiled machine isn’t slowing down.

The bulk of Terrestrials came together in Seabird, an “end of the earth-style town”, where Pond rented a plasterboard shack next to a limestone block pub. It forms a mental image that feels in step with the tone of the album: dusty, reeking of beer on sticky carpet, and baked in a sort of heat so hot your grip on reality starts to wobble.

It invites an atmosphere that makes me think of Wake in Fright, the 1961 psychological thriller written by Kenneth Cook and adapted for film by Ted Kotcheff a decade later. I have a distinct memory of seeing the film for the first time in an empty cinema, deeply unsettled by the way it got under the skin of a hard-to-pin-down distinctly Australian ugliness. I ask Allbrook if that link is something I’m pulling from thin air.

“[Wake in Fright] sums up so much of this album,” he says. “The horror and awe, the desperate, desperate, desperate camaraderie, and a silence in the face of a deep, deep trauma, a collective trauma that we can’t overcome.”

“Facing it with silence and getting pissed, it seems to be one of the few ways that we’ve figured out we could try. It’s funny. Australia is funny, it’s hot, it’s scary, it’s beautiful, and it has a massive mystery and cultural beauty to it that we just don’t fucking want to open ourselves up to, to our detriment.”

Allbrook has a kinetic understanding of a certain type of Australia. He sees the contradictions on which a coloniser country was constructed, and he has a good intuitive sense of how it fucks with the national conscience. No populace is a monolith, but there are intergenerationally raw nerves that Allbrook is happy to press down on.

Terrestrials is in turn an intensely political album, but it rarely goes for the throat — a Gina Rinehart dig on ‘Casuarina’ aside. That doesn’t mean it’s defanged.

Album opener ‘Skyworks’ is written to both beautiful and grotesque, zooming between the intimacy of an ambiguously defined relationship and the spectacle of Western Australia’s January 26 fireworks.

“There’s a genuine outpouring of happiness and togetherness across families but it’s tied into the really, really horrible, cruel heartlessness of colonisation and genocide,” Allbrook says of the song’s setting.

He paints a picture for me: the aesthetic beauty of big, glittering fireworks over the Derbarl Yerrigan River, illuminating the “fucking maggotted” drunks on a day with an ingrained dark history.

“We try our best to really just be happy on these days,” Allbrook says of the people he observes. “It does come out with a kind of explosiveness that’s really charged. That day feels pregnant with the possibility of violence.”

Allbrook isn’t immune to the seduction of violence. Lead single ‘Two Hands’ imagines the bloodlust that might follow if Rio Tinto had destroyed a site of significance to the Anglosphere such as, say, St Paul’s Cathedral instead of Juukan Gorge. But he ultimately lands somewhere more nuanced: personal empathy, structural condemnation.

“You just never know what someone’s going through,” Allbrook says wistfully at one point. He touches on this on ‘Personal Hell’, a song borne from an experience he had working as a gardener with a client he “just really loved to fucking hate”.

“Super privileged, English, posh, the whole bit,” he says. “We were bitching about this person behind their back and, long story short, the phone speaker was still on. They heard everything.”

The client rushed inside crying, confessing to feelings of inadequacy and loneliness, and it triggered a realisation from Allbrook:

“Suddenly it was just like, oh my god, of course. You’re alone in this house, you’re a stranger in this country, like we all are. Your money isolates you from people. You are so good looking that you’ve never been able to relate on the same level to someone. You’ve got no social skills, so you just annoy everybody … that was one of those moments where the veil drops and you see behind the curtain.”

I try to get Nick Allbrook to drop his veil by asking him a question: what would he think of himself if he met himself at a party?2

“At this point, I’d have a pretty benign view of myself, I’d think, ‘there’s a nice young man’. I reckon in the past it might have been a bit more, maybe I would have thought something more extreme,” he says, before pinpointing a moment in time.

“I remember looking at myself in the mirror when I had taken a heroic dose of mushrooms, and I think for the first time in my life just seeing Nick and being like, ‘Hey, he’s a pretty cool guy. Just doing his thing, making music. He looks a little bit disheveled, probably carrying a bit of baggage but, you know, friendly enough.”

I’ve spent a lot of time since my conversation with Allbrook trying to wrestle with what Terrestrials is, exactly. It’s a great album, but beyond that I’m not sure. There’s one angle that sees it as a deeply urgent, searing treatise on Australian identity. Or maybe it’s just a really fun album that goths can listen to over some frothies.

After agonising on it for a while, I think Allbrook himself gave me the answer:

“Hey, that’s sort of what the album’s about, which is nothing,” he says. “It’s just people being messy and this constantly morphing reflection of yourself.”

The official position of Bad Scene: mushrooms, optional.3

‘Terrestrials’ is out June 19 via Mangovision/Secretly Distribution. Pre-save or pre-order the album here.

There’s something in the way Grace Robinson sings. Her debut single ‘harder than you think’ wears its influences proudly: guitars that could’ve been tuned by fellow Melbourne songwriters Julia Jacklin and Angie McMahon, a Victorian College of the Arts-trained voice that has definitely smashed some Sharon Van Etten at karaoke.

But Robinson works in her own lane. She’s precise but never short on personality. When she lingers and lilts over the verses, it’s lovely on the ears, and when Robinson decides to rock it’s a thrilling little hit of sugar. Pair all that with a chorus that feels made for festival crowds to shriek back and you’ve got one hell of an introduction.

Grace Robinson is, at once, a rookie and a veteran. She’s worn many hats in Australian music for nearly a decade, as the youngest female booking agent in the country and in Empress, a Melbourne electro-soul outfit that found its way onto festival stages like Strawberry Fields and Dark Mofo.

But ‘harder than you think’ is the beginning of Robinson’s newest, most vulnerable chapter — releasing raw rock music under her own name. When we speak, a day before its release, Robinson is excited and panicked.

“I think the panic in this comes down to the fact that this is probably the first time ever that I’m putting something out that feels like I’m just handing people me on a platter,” she says. “And the panic is that someone could shove that back in my face, and that this time, compared to all the other times, I don’t get to then just go, ‘Oh, well, doesn’t matter anyway, wasn’t really me’.”

Putting your art out to the world under your own name is scary enough,1 but especially when your first release is a song as candid as ‘harder than you think’.

“I did a really good job of being like, ‘I’m fucking sorted, guys’ … but it was actually all just a distraction so I could play this character. In reality, I had no fucking idea how to be me,” she says.

Robinson explains a feeling pretty resonant to anyone trying to overachieve: doing too much, taking on tasks beyond your capacity, and saying yes too much. Amplify that with Robinson’s two lives in booking and performing and it all mounted to what she calls “rock bottom”.

“I ended up hitting this crazy anxiety panic disorder thing, where then I just could not function without panic attacks. They were really weird panic attacks, too. Because I’m neuro non-typical as fuck, my brain doesn’t go ‘you’re anxious’, my brain goes ‘your shoulder’s dislocated, what’s up with that?’. Or I’d be like driving, and my brain would be like ‘Your legs are not attached anymore’.”

The crisis forced Robinson to do something she’d never thought herself capable of: stopping. Hitting pause and going to therapy caused Robinson to reflect on her relationship with music.

That process led her back to the guitar. The instrument had gathered dust for five years while Robinson focused on Empress, a group that found a use for basically every instrument other than a six-string.

“I picked up that guitar and it was crazy. It was the first time, probably in six years, that writing music was just easy,” she says. “I just vomited out all these songs, and it was so easy, and so clear that that was the direction to go in, that then everything just from that point just aligned.”

‘harder than you think’ is the first taste of a bigger project recorded during this period, around 18 months ago. The record is unified by a theme of heartbreak, but Robinson — who has a “beautiful eight-year-long relationship” — had to mine beyond the romantic realm for inspiration.

“I don’t write happy songs, I never have and I fucking never will,” Robinson laughs. “But heartbreak’s everywhere and it’s not always in love.”

“A lot of my songs are about heartbreak in other ways, and they all stem from this one moment where I’ll have this feeling and be like, ‘that’s disgusting’, or I’ve just fucked up, or I’ve just over-shared, and I’ll write it down and it just goes from there.”

Robinson reveals the genesis of ‘harder than you think’ came from a therapy session in which she received some tough love.

“My therapist said to me, ‘You are so controlling that I feel like you’re trying to control this session, that you’re trying to show me that you’re really good at this’ … I was like, ‘Damn, man. Shit, it’s probably true … she just fucking called it out deadpan to me, and it was like, ‘Oh shit, the hoax is up’. So, that’s when I started to think about what I actually was going to have to do to get better.”

Cue the ‘getting better’ montage: Robinson wrote new songs, got the band together, and laid some tracks down. Now she’s reaching the point of putting music out, Robinson is simultaneously feeling her experience in music and her newness as a solo artist.

“I feel like I’m constantly feeling like ‘I’ve got my hands on it, and I know what to do’ and then being like, ‘Fuck, I have no idea what I’m doing’. It’s this constant back and forth,” Robinson says.

I tell her that, from where I sit, it seems like her decorated CV has helped her prepare for this moment. Robinson admits that, for her, the feeling’s a bit more complicated.

“It was hard not to have resentment towards that CV and not see it as things that built me, but as things that distracted me,” she says.

“I thought about that a lot, and sometimes I still feel like that, but then I have another moment where I’ll make a call and I know it’s the right call because I’ve managed artists and I’ve booked shows and I’ve worked with people in the industry and you’re so certain that this is the right thing to do.”

What results is something that carries the best of both worlds: an artist whose first release arrives ready for the big time, with all the joy, excitement and panic that comes with starting fresh.

For example: I close our conversation asking Robinson for any dream collaborators, coffee dates or touring partners and the names come thick and fast: Angie McMahon (“I have a horrible tendency of embarrassing myself every time I meet her), Julia Jacklin (“would be amazing to tour with”), Amyl and the Sniffers (“I can’t rock as hard, but incredible people”). Shoutout also to boygenius — “if I could just look at them or sniff them or just know their coffee orders” — and Sharon Van Etten, whose 2019 Hamer Hall show was the “best thing to ever happen” to her.

These are fun details to know, and I will one hundred percent resurface it if/when Robinson joins any of her idols on stage. With a debut song this good, it certainly feels like we’ll be seeing some of the manifestation pay off sooner rather than later.

‘harder than you think’ is out now. Stream it here.

“You know, we can just put out a record next week and say it’s available, and then it’s done,” Mikey Young tells me. We’re talking on May 8th, 2026 via Zoom, and it’s been 2,338 days since his band Eddy Current Suppression Ring has released a studio album.

In this attention economy, a band with that kind of absence should be forgotten. Especially one that has not played a conventional tour since July 2010, is barely present on social media, and actively shirks the limelight.

But Eddy Current Suppression Ring is, and always has been, an aberration.

Their rise was rapid and unlikely, going from mates working at a record plant in suburban Melbourne to Australian Music Prize winners in about five years. They disappeared nearly as fast as they arrived, leaving a trail of acolytes in their wake who tried and failed to replicate Brendan Huntley’s tightly wound intensity and the band’s skilled, fast and loose brand of garage exuberance.

That reverence affords exceptions to normal rules. When Eddy Current Suppression Ring decided to end their first hiatus in 2016, they walked into a headline slot at Golden Plains and played Dark Mofo. Nearly a decade later, they returned again to a sprawling crowd at Melbourne’s Federation Square.

Now, the next era of Eddy Current Suppression Ring is in full swing: they will play their first full Sydney show in over 15 years at Vivid Sydney, headlining a free show at Tumbalong Park. And, about two weeks after Young and I spoke, the band surprised the world by releasing their fifth studio album In Light of Recent Events.1

It has been widely known that Eddy Current Suppression Ring has been recording, and they’ve played new songs live wherever they decide to pop up (Frankston, Hobart, Barwon Heads some of the recent sites blessed), but no one had a new ECSR album on their May 2026 bingo card.

During our conversation, Young told me it would be a “big relief” to release music at some point in 2026 but said broadly they had “no plans” firmed up. I wouldn’t begrudge him for a white lie, but it’s entirely plausible that he was telling the truth — as Young explained, the band is a DIY operation: they organise their own vinyl pressing, his best mate runs a distribution company, and all of the mixing, mastering and production is done in-house. Things can move fast.

Spontaneity is also a core tenet of Eddy Current Suppression Ring’s entire existence. Ever since they started as a few mates jamming at a boozy Corduroy Records employee Christmas party in 2003, Eddy Current Suppression Ring’s history is full of stories now etched into folklore: three albums in just over three years, each recorded on the cheap and fast (the longest they spent in studio was one day, for 2008’s Primary Colours). Stepping away at the height of their popularity, content and calm. Coming back whenever the urge strikes. It’s cultivated, mostly unintentionally, a kind of gravitas most bands would die to have.

Mikey Young admits that it’s all still very strange for him. When Eddy Current Suppression Ring first left, it came shortly after launching 2010’s Rush to Relax to a hometown crowd of about 1800. Reflecting a decade later, Young said he was “humbled, but a bit weirded out” to see so many people turning up for his band.

Speaking to me, Young says: “I just questioned at the time whether that was the way I would like to see my band and if I wasn’t sure of that, then that’s probably a good reason to stop it or change it in some way.”

“I do feel different this time around, I’ve really been enjoying making music at our own pace,” he adds.

“We’ve been doing it for a couple of years, before we even did the Fed Square, just to hang out and create. But Fed Square was really weird, but I’m really trying to enjoy it all and realise that not every band gets to experience that kind of feedback and love from people, and just cherish that.”

That’s part of the mindset that led to the band taking on Vivid Sydney, one of the country’s preeminent arts festivals, as the site for their first full show in the city in over 15 years.

Originally, the band were in talks for something even more ambitious, but negotiations stalled as they couldn’t find a way to cover costs without charging more than they felt comfortable for tickets.

“And then this came along where it was like, ‘Well, will you play this free show and we’ll still pay?’,” Young says. “That’s perfect for us. We can put on a show that everyone can go to, no matter if they’ve got cash or not.”

Vivid Sydney will be Eddy Current Suppression Ring’s first live performance since the release In Light of Recent Events.2 When we talk, Young is ringing in from his recording studio and talks me through the band’s process behind what, unbeknownst to me at the time, would soon become the fifth ECSR album.

“The process feels pretty much the same, we just get in a room to jam, and the way we write songs is exactly the same. Possibly it’s a little less chaotic than in the past, just because we’re older and slowing down,” he says.

“When we used to record the other albums, we used to practice every week in a rehearsal studio, and then we just book somewhere, be it a rehearsal room or wherever for a day and just quickly bang out the album and whatever the takes were, they were the takes. With the new stuff, I’ve got this mastering room and it turned out to be a really nice sounding jam space.”

Young admits it’s a much more professional set-up than the early days of ECSR — winding back a bit of the chaos for some fidelity.

“I’m trying not to make them too good,” he grins. “They’re still pretty loose and alive, it’s still Brendan singing in the same room, so it’s leaking into everything else. Nothing’s changed too much.”

The proof is in the record. In Light of Recent Events is a natural progression from 2019’s All in Good Time, consolidating Eddy Current Suppression Ring’s second act as a recording band. Across their first three albums, the records were electric with their unpredictability. It felt like Huntley was veering all over the song while the tight ensemble behind him sprinted to keep everything on the rails. It was utterly captivating, a delightful symphony that always felt one beat away from crashing over the barricade.

On the new record, there’s less friction. Huntley feels in step with the band, buoyed and backed to wander into weird pockets — ‘Swimming Hole’ is a rollicking song about the climate emergency in which Huntley’s voice flicks between a strained weariness, an enticing growl and an off-kilter falsetto, as if he’s channel surfing vocal styles.

It’s perhaps the prettiest that an Eddy Current Suppression Ring album has ever sounded. Sure, ECSR have always had gorgeous sounding riffs, but the songs ran so fast that you could never luxuriate in it for too long before the next drum fill or jagged turn.

All in Good Time, in 2019, was the first time Eddy Current Suppression Ring really applied the handbrake, but the fruits of that labour are more fully realised this time out. Points that somewhat laboured on the last record absolutely soar on this one. The aptly titled ‘Bop’ has some Beach Boys in its DNA, while ‘Turtle’ uses all of its clear air to produce a song that will sit in the pantheon with ‘Which Way to Go’ as among the most moving ECSR tracks.

If Mikey Young ever reads the above paragraphs, he’ll probably hate it. There is a long and public record of Young shying away from praise for his band and trying very hard not to dwell on its success, a task that only gets harder as its legacy fortifies.

That much came through in 2010, when Young told Andrew McMillen he didn’t want to think about why people like Eddy Current Suppression Ring out of fear it’d compromise how they made music, and it rears its head when I touch on the impending 20th anniversary of their self-titled debut in October.

““I just want to look forward to making music and not dwell on our classic album from 20 years ago,” he says politely, before adding: “But I am really grateful that people care.”

He continues: “When we were making our first record, I was more interested in making a record that someone would want to reissue in 25 years than one that was going to sell a lot. I just wanted to make something that sounded as fresh in the future, so hopefully we succeeded in doing that to some degree.”

It’s about as much acknowledgement of influence as you’ll get from one of the scene’s most humble pioneers. Eddy Current Suppression Ring are beyond the point of needing to prove anything to anyone — for them, it happened the day they formed — but I’m sure the coming calendar year is about to show that their past and present music is as fresh and enrapturing as it ever has been.

Eddy Current Suppression Ring are playing a free show at Vivid Sydney on June 12 at Tumbalong Park with Chikchika (event details). Their new album ‘In Light of Recent Events’ is out now.

To those who weren’t watching closely, DC Maxwell might seemingly have appeared out of nowhere. For me, that moment came around June last year. A writer had mentioned him in passing,1 and a week later I was walking down Smith Street when I was met by a steady stream of achromatic posters plastered on graffiti-kissed walls.

It was simple but striking — “WHO IS JESUS’ SON?” with DC Maxwell’s name printed small at the bottom. I was taken by its ubiquity, the sheer hustle to monopolise the street poster space in Collingwood, which boasts more posters than people per square metre.2

If you followed the white rabbit, you’d wind up on YouTube watching the music video for ‘Jesus’ Son’, the lead single off DC Maxwell’s second album The Singer (releasing May 22).

The song is a gem. It lulls you in with a few dainty ‘Wonderwall’-esque strums before detonating into a crunchy guitar and crashing drums. In the clip, you get eyes on Maxwell stalking the grimy, empty underground of Flinders Street Station late at night, writhing and twitching like a man possessed. The scant few commuters around steer clear and away, averting their gaze as Maxwell spins and kicks, his shirt, jacket and tie shooting off in different directions.

It’s a hell of an introduction.

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Even for those who who had been following DC Maxwell, ever since he was leading Auckland punk project Roidz, this iteration felt like something brand new. The artist we hear on ‘Jesus’ Son’ feels carnal, born and raised in those train station catacombs.

“When I released ‘Jesus’ Son’ as a single, because I hadn’t released music for a long time, they’re like, ‘Oh my god, has DC Maxwell gone Christian rock?’” DC Maxwell laughs over Zoom. “I’d be like, ‘No! ‘Jesus’ Son’ is a Lou Reed lyric that was then picked up by Dennis Johnson to talk about the holy synergy of heroin addiction!”3

The song itself works the space between euphoria and agony. “I’ve seen heaven in a broken glass,” Maxwell yelps on the chorus. He sings of ‘twist[ing] the fruit until it bleeds like just a wound’, one of a few bloody images across The Singer. It’s a record that fixates on the final stanza: fading light, death itself, and the unknowns of what comes afterwards.

“I’m not explicitly a religious person myself, but I’m very interested in the language of religion. It’s kind of this language that is ready-made for end times,” he tells me.

“In the music scene, religious people are in the minority these days, and people really struggle to talk about that feeling of, ‘Oh my god, it feels like the fucking world is ending. It feels like love is not enough, it feels like God has forsaken us’. Even then, I couldn’t express that feeling without reaching for God, that metaphor.”

Maxwell acknowledges he’s far from the first to do it — he points to Nick Cave and, more recently, Cameron Winter (although, he notes, Heavy Metal came out after he’d written The Singer). But even within the well-trodden grass of literary men singing about God, Maxwell finds his own garden. There’s more pomp than Winter and he’s more grounded than Cave. DC Maxwell doesn’t feel like a deity in disguise, but he doesn’t wilt under the singe of the spotlight.

It’s the sort of gravity that Maxwell has spent 15 years developing. With Roidz, Maxwell learned the art of being a rock frontman — loud, abrasive, and fully committed, even when perhaps you shouldn’t be (i.e. stage diving to concrete to a disapproving crowd, three times, until concussion defeats teenage ego). Roidz found a nice lane of indie success, but the project ended in 2020 with the death of Reuben Winter, Maxwell’s close friend and the band’s guitarist.

“I was very sad and depressed, so much so that I didn’t realise it,” Maxwell says of that period. After living and breathing music for nearly a decade, he stepped away entirely for nearly three years. When he came back to making music, he found catharsis in writing from the perspectives of different characters.

Unlocked, it resulted in what became his first album as DC Maxwell: 2023’s Lone Rider. It’s a touching record that achieves a deft type of emotional sleight of hand: through dressing its songs as stories with a cast of characters, Maxwell works through raw nerves in a way that never feels too confronting or loaded. The Singer refuses to make the same compromises.

“This album is a lot more direct and a lot more from the heart. It’s been scary at times, but it feels really awesome that it’s coming out,” Maxwell says.

The Singer splits the middle. It’s not exactly autobiographical, but the character work doesn’t feel so much like a costume this time around.

I point out that it’s been a period of immense change for Maxwell since releasing Lone Rider — not only has he moved to Melbourne, but he’s gotten married.

“Getting married changed my perception of what a love song could be,” he says. “I realised that being married is not all roses, soft lighting and strings playing. There’s a lot of fear in declaring to the world that you love this person and you want to spend your life with them.”

Maxwell quotes a character from the Bill Callahan song ‘Pigeons’ — “When you are dating you only see each other and the rest of us can go to hell, but when you are married, you are married to the whole world.”

“I think that’s been my experience, marriage has really sharpened my fear and my love for the world in general,” Maxwell says, leaning back in his chair. “God, I feel like I should be speaking at youth groups.”

There’s a run of three songs, specifically, that strike me as the most loved up. ‘Golden Light’ and ‘Funeral Suit’, both of which feature Hatchie on backing vocals, are odes to fear and vulnerability. The track that follows — ‘Half Real’ — takes on all that weight and more.

‘Half Real’ is a magical song both in the way it sounds and the story behind it. It’s a collaboration with Will Oldham, one of Maxwell’s idols in music and a titan of American songwriter. It started with Maxwell planning a trip to Los Angeles and cold emailing Oldham asking if he could open while in town.

“He sent back a really nice reply, ‘Hey, we’ve already got an opener sorted but thank you for reaching out, I really appreciate it’. So I just fully switched it and was like, ‘Oh okay, if I can’t open for your show, how about you come into the studio and we do a duet together? This is the song.’”

Maxwell hastily uploaded a “really bad recording” of ‘Half Real’ as a work-in-progress, which Oldham loved. Then, fate did its thing: Oldham was staying a short walk away from the studio Maxwell was recording at in Los Angeles and could swing by to record with him.4

“I saw Will Oldham skip across the road and he was sparkling in the sun, because he still had all the glitter on his face from the show he had played the night before. It was just an amazing moment.”

It’s the sort of story that feels a little unreal, but it typifies the power of DC Maxwell — he’s can take over every wall in Collingwood, or conjure a vacant Flinders Street Station underpass, or manifest a sparkling Bonnie “Prince” Billy. He can write a record wall-to-wall in death, doom and gloom, and have you leaving the listen feeling lighter than you entered. Just, whatever you do, don’t call it Christian rock.

‘The Singer’ is out May 22. Pre-save here. DC Maxwell is touring Sydney, Newcastle and Melbourne from August 28 (tickets). You can also find him on Substack at DC Dispatches.

Avalon Emerson has already lived plenty of lives. A decade ago, she was a web developer coding in San Francisco. In the time since, she’s conquered the Berlin club scene en route to becoming a headlining DJ in rooms around the world, before settling back down in the quiet countryside of upstate New York with her wife.

Somewhere, amid the move from Germany to the United States and a packed calendar of DJ bookings, Emerson has settled down to record and release her second album under her indie rock project Avalon Emerson & the Charm.

When she joins me to discuss Written into Changes, she’s at a friend’s house. Her dog, a Havanese-poodle mix named Elmo, jumps on her lap.1

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“I’ve been a DJ for like 10 years professionally, but writing lyrics I don’t have a ton of experience with,” she says early into our conversation. “I am a huge nerd about music, and I have always been obsessively listening to and collecting stuff, and I feel like I have a pretty specific taste, but it’s also another thing to create it.”

Although Emerson is no stranger to making and releasing music, making music with the Charm forced her to confront a new sensation: vulnerability. And while the first record pushed Emerson outside of her comfort zone — singing across songs, putting her lyrics out to the world — the new record amplifies it, telling stories of rocky relationships, candid confessions of love, and wider existential concerns about aging, relocation and finding balance.

“The thing that I found this time around that has led me down a good path is, whenever I’m writing something and feel a twinge of vulnerability, and maybe a hair of embarrassment, that’s the direction I should follow,” she says.

“Dance music can also be very emotional and a conduit for connection, of course, but it’s also very functional and utilitarian. You spend so much time on the kick and the bass, which needs to fucking work together so they hit the speaker and so it does the thing for the dancefloor.

“With this, you can’t look at a YouTube video of how to put an Ableton plug-in chain together to create a resonant song. It has to come from more abstract ways of learning how to do it.”

I ask Emerson about how she bridges her many worlds and whether she’s felt any connection to her life as a coder or DJ in making an album under the Charm moniker. She begins to answer before pausing, pursing her lips and restarting.

“I’m interested in that code comment,” she mulls. “Honestly, I think [making music] is like learning how to code in 2010 or whenever, because it’s very different now, but you have to relearn how to think in a very block-by-block way of structuring and flowing logic. You’re communicating with a computer to give it code so it knows what to do.”

Emerson rattles off the ways it informs her music-adjacent work: building a live rig for touring, the skill of troubleshooting, ways of cataloguing music when digging for DJ sets. Then she considers the way all that translates into her music.

“When I’m making music, I try to apply my taste to a song. I think the biggest thing that you have to hone is your taste and attention, noticing tiny details, and what these do to you as a listener,” she says. “I apply my self-teaching in the same way that I learned how to make dance music, or I learned how to write Ruby code or learned how to write lyrics.”

“It does all feel the same, and it’s the same kind of hubris that’s within me that thinks I can do it. I think anybody can do it. If you love it, then you will try again and again. Even if you make a crappy dance track, or a broken app, or a shitty poem. It’s like, ‘Well, you have to make a shitty one before you make a good one’.”

I’m not sure when Emerson wrote her shitty songs, but she definitely got them out the way before Written into Changes. The album works off a strong foundation of Emerson’s airy vocals and a luscious, cloud production, spearheaded by Bullion (with a timely cameo from Rostam Batmanglij), but it separates itself from the pack with a slate of unexpected, delightful subversions.

There are too many of those, as Emerson would put it, tiny details to list. I love the jangly bursts of guitar that echo across ‘Jupiter and Mars’, the way the brass instruments poke through the smog on ‘Wooden Star’ or just about everything in the wonderfully off-kilter ‘How Dare This Beer’.

The first Charm record, written during the pandemic, felt like an impressive flex from a world-class DJ: proof that she could make music that was the polemic opposite to her day job and still make it great, Written into Changes feels like an incongruous extension of her life in dance music. That lineage is most felt in the propulsive funk that lines most of the album: from the teaspoon of post-punk in ‘Country Mouse’. the glitchy bass of ‘God Damn (Finito)’ or the bounce of lead single ‘Eden’.2

“I do have a very strong affinity for dance music, and I have heard a lot of dance music, so it comes out naturally. But I think when I’m making stuff for the club, it’s much more utilitarian,” Emerson says. “It’s a lot quicker, for sure. Sometimes I’ll be flying into a DJ gig, and I’ll have an idea for an edit and I make it on the plane, and then I finish it in the hotel room, and then I play the first version in the DJ booth. And then I’ll be like, ‘Okay, well, I need to change this and this’, and it’s like this kind of live iterative process.”

Written into Changes is a different kind of beast: Emerson says she worked on it for over a year, working with a much wider range of collaborators than any of her dance projects. She glows when talking about her producers Bullion (“so many beautiful and refined soft skills”), Rostam (“so lovely and pleasant and so funny”), and gushes with excitement over getting to tour Avalon Emerson & the Charm with a band that includes long-time friend Keivon Mehdi Hobeheidar (who plays bass and cello across the record) and her wife Hunter Lombard, an established artist in her own right, who plays guitar.

“I feel good about touring. I feel better than the first time around, for sure. At the beginning of the first one, there was so much that I didn’t know that I didn’t know. Now I feel like I at least understand the corners of scare3 and what the things that can go wrong are, so I feel a bit more confident,” Emerson says.

“The best part is just being able to do all this with people that I love. I think that’s gonna be great. And I’m excited to play all the new songs. The first time we only had 10 songs plus a cover, so it was trying to get all the juice out of that one album’s worth of songs. I’m glad we have more latitude this time around.”

As a rule of thumb, I avoid asking artists about what’s next. At best, it’s a bit lazy and at worst it’s a disrespectful use of precious interview time that overlooks the substantive work of art they’ve shown up to talk about. But I find myself breaking that rule with Emerson, being the polymath she is, to ask whether she could envision herself producing an album for someone else in the future.

Emerson parries the question to praise Bullion, who is so good at the art of ‘shepherding the track’ that it has shown her how hard it is to manage. But then that glint comes back — she called it hubris earlier in the interview, I see it more kindly — and she leaves me with the thought that one day someone else will put out another very, very good album produced by Avalon Emerson.

“Maybe I could do it,” she smiles. “But it seems like something I would have to work up to.”

‘Written Into Changes’ is out now via Dead Oceans. Buy or stream it here.

The first words you hear on Cry Club’s High Voltage Anxiety are an immediate agenda-setter for the Melbourne duo’s third album: “Right now everyone’s comfortable in their discomfort,” the speaker, a friend of the band, says. “Everybody needs to realise that our conditions can change if we force them to change.”1

If anyone understands how to control their destiny, it’s Cry Club. Since forming in 2018, Riley and guitarist Jono Tooke have fought and succeeded against rolling waves of adversity, so much so that their fanbase has coined the “Cry Club curse” to describe every time something bad happens to the band.

But when they meet me in a beer garden on a warm February evening to chat about their third album High Voltage Anxiety, Tooke and Riley are sanguine, even about their purported misfortune.

“There’s a flipside of the Cry Club curse,” Riley tells me. “We have the worst luck ever, but our songs are evergreen.”

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The latest round of those evergreen songs on High Voltage Anxiety were written and recorded over a period starting in January 2023, but its bloodlust for fascists, oligarchs and bigots feels more resonant than ever in 2026.

“We’re like, ‘This won’t be relevant by the time it releases’ but unfortunately…” Riley trails off, as Tooke picks up the thread, comparing the world to a viral Community GIF of Donald Glover’s character picking up pizza and returning to an apartment on fire.2

High Voltage Anxiety is Cry Club at their most assertive and ambitious. It delights in subverting expectations. The breezy sheen from their 2020 debut God I’m Such a Mess has been sanded raw, and the vampy glam-rock that powered its 2023 follow-up Spite Will Save Me has been tossed into a wood chipper.

What has been spat out is an industrial-tinged record that wears its influences (Nine Inch Nails, The Prodigy) proudly without losing its identity as a Cry Club album.

“Balancing grit and camp is very hard,” Riley admits. “You just have to commit to it and leave no room for interpreting.”

Tooke adds: “For a long time when we tried working with other artists and producers co-writing, often we’d walk away from a session feeling like, ‘This isn’t a Cry Club song’. And over time I started thinking, it’s because nothing went wrong.”

That vision didn’t crystallise overnight. It took time and, like most critical Cry Club moments, a hefty dose of bad luck. In late 2019, Riley and Tooke moved from their home state of New South Wales to Melbourne. When they landed, they had a debut album on the way and bookings with a handful of major Australian festivals in hand.

“We thought that was going to be the year everything happened for us, we got booked for Splendour, Falls Festival, Lost Paradise, and we thought, ‘How fucking cool is that?’,” Tooke says. “And then it all got nixed.”

The pandemic brought everything to a halt. With a career-making run of touring dates on ice and their debut album delayed (it released six months later that November), Cry Club bunkered down and began making music like it was their full-time job.

“It was this weird trade, to have the time to develop creatively versus having this momentum,” Tooke says. “I think we’re better off having had the time to develop, rather than land at this thing not necessarily being the version of it that we wanted it to be.”

Riley adds: “We get full control over the vision and direction, because we spent so long figuring it out.”

Before the pandemic’s intervention, Cry Club were primed to push out a highly anticipated debut album and be anointed one of the country’s hottest young bands on the rise. In Tooke’s view, that often funnels artists to a boom-or-bust situation:

“You either hit it big quickly and then you go, ‘Cool! Yahoo!’, and if you don’t get that there’s an endless graveyard of major label signed acts or independent acts that didn’t achieve success within five years, and then they have since called it quits quietly, and then we never hear from that act again.

“But then there’s a version of this which can be sustainable, that can go for 10+ years and then crack it at some point, and that’s a better place to crack it because you will have learned how to handle everything.”

That final camp is where Tooke and Riley hope Cry Club will land. In their view, High Voltage Anxiety is an amalgam of the experiences, lessons and confidence in themselves acquired through taking the long road to stardom.

“I don’t think we get to be that convincing about what we’re doing if we had stayed the same versions of ourselves,” Tooke says.

“You fall short on the conviction without following whatever your truest path is. I always think about people who hit a version of success that they were destined for because they were the most ‘them’ they could be. That’s the thing that an audience secretly wants: for you to be the most ‘you’ version of you.”

That may as well serve as Cry Club’s credo. They’ve ascended to become one of the country’s most beloved grassroots bands with a must-see live show. On stage, Riley and Tooke are an electric storm, stirring up a raucous crowd energy that never tips into being unsafe for the band’s proudly diverse fanbase of queer folks and allies.

“A lot of the time with our visuals, a big goal was saying, ‘If this is too turbo to look at, it’s not for you’ … I think that’s part of what’s helped refine the community aspect,” Tooke says.

“There have been acts that go like, ‘This is for everybody!’ and then people who suck go like ‘This is for me!’ and suddenly all the shows become full of assholes. It’s not necessarily about kicking people out and being exclusive, but about being more selective and deliberate about who you’re bringing in.”

“Sometimes it’s not for you!” Riley adds. “The most precious thing to me is when people who are trans tell us they dressed in a gender-affirming way for the first time at one of our shows. That’s so important to me to prioritise and protect.”

Awareness of their impact seems to help fuel the fire for Riley and Tooke, along with an insatiable creative streak. They’re certainly not in music for the payday (“I think anyone who invested in crypto would be in a better position,” Riley laughs).

But even the most committed artists have their mettle tested as time passes, costs mount, and industry support siphons off. In a spoken word break on High Voltage Anxiety single ‘This, Forever’, Tooke alludes to the toll each album takes, saying: “The amount of effort that goes into doing this stuff, like each time… not saying it’s the last time but treating it as if it’s that.”

“Those acts we don’t hear from anymore, they’ve quietly stopped because they exhausted themselves into nothing,” Tooke says to me during our conversation. “One of the blessings of doing this is, the worst day for Cry Club is still a day with my best friend.”

He affectionately nudges Riley, sitting next to him in the beer garden, who responds as any true best friend would: “I told you not to fucking touch me.”

‘High Voltage Anxiety’ is out now. Stream it here and buy it here.

Two days into recording Gladie’s third album No Need To Be Lonely, there was a problem: their rental house stunk. Like, literally.

“When we got back from the studio, it just smelled like sewage,” frontwoman Augusta Koch tells me over Zoom from her home in Philadelphia. “We couldn’t figure it out.”

The band were in the midst of a whirlwind week, decamping to Oakland to record with producer Jeff Rosenstock and engineer Jack Shirley. It was the first time Gladie had entrusted an outside collaborator behind the boards, meaning the band were making an album far from home and on a tight schedule.

They’d paid up for a proper short-term rental: a nice three-bedroom home with high white walls and big windows overlooking a main road. It bills itself as an “oasis”. What they were living through was not.

“We’d be trying to cook dinner, and we were like, ‘Oh no, the house smells like sewage’, and we couldn’t get in touch with the hosts. So we just would come home and open all the windows and use fans,” Koch says. “But it added to the charm. We spent a lot of time on the porch.”1

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For those familiar with Gladie, Koch’s re-telling of the story, down to the silver lining, is on-brand. Much of Gladie’s oeuvre is taking unfortunate situations and drawing something galvanising out of it. When Gladie first began in 2018 as a collaborator between Koch and her partner Matt Schimfelig (formerly of Three Man Cannon), it came in the twilight of Koch’s first major band Cayetana. For Koch, beginning in the afterglow of a band that broke out into relative stardom meant re-discovering herself with the eyes of her community trained upon her.

“There was a long time where I was like, ‘Oh my God, is my grave gonna say ‘ex-member of Cayetana’?’” she admits. “It’s hard because, constantly, people resonate with Cayetana. And I love that. It’s such a big part of my life, but that was also so long ago, and I have to believe that my best days are ahead of me, or my best song isn’t written, otherwise what’s the point?”

No Need To Be Lonely has some of the best songs Koch has ever written (so far, at least). The album concentrates and clarifies Gladie’s trademark power punk. It is a record with sharp turns of phrase that stick to your brain: “You said you like my hair long/I cut it off” Koch says dryly on ‘Talk Past Each Other’, or “Complaining about the traffic when I’m part of it/Looking for the problem when I’m the one who started it” on the rollicking hook of lead single ‘Car Alarm’.

If Gladie’s sophomore effort Don’t Know What You’re In Until You’re Out was propelled by the sheer eruption of emotions that followed Koch’s journey to sobriety, No Need To Be Lonely is an album that shines in its emotional balance. As Koch tells me, part of getting sober meant being less of a people-pleaser, and learning how to deal with people who didn’t like that while managing with her own mental health.

“I think ultimately all of my records, anything I work on, will always be about survival, as well as being a person that has suicidal thoughts and has always struggled with that,” she says. “I want to understand why that happens and know that it happens to other people.

“I feel like, if there was going to be a synopsis of a lot of the songs I write, it’s staying alive in a world where that can be really hard. But I also don’t want to get too heavy, because it’s also like, we’re just having fun.”

That dual notion presents itself best on ‘Car Alarm’, one of my favourite songs Gladie have ever released. It coalesces all of the band’s biggest strengths into one compact song: Koch’s songwriting drops you straight on the scene (“Among the buzz of this strip mall hell/Blue hum of the liquor store, it’s hard to envision more”) into a vivid picture of backsliding mental health, all wrapped up in a ridiculously fun hook and some guitar riffs that absolutely shred. In essence, it’s a song that was destined to be produced by Jeff Rosenstock.

“Jeff and I have known each other for a really long time, but definitely became really close in the past few years,” Koch says (she sometimes sells merch for Death Rosenstock when they tour her part of town). “We share demos with each other, like a lot of people do, and he just called me and Matt one day and was like, ‘I want to do this with you guys’.”

I ask Koch whether all the new faces made the album more challenging to record. In less than a decade, Gladie has gone from the intimate project of Koch and Schimfelig to a five-piece with Rosenstock and his long-time engineer Jack Shirley in the mix. But Koch lavishes praise all round: incoming bassist Evan Demianczyk is the band’s “missing piece”, longtime collaborator Liz Parsons is “a big part of the record”, Rosenstock is a “really good friend” and Shirley is “so sweet”.

Friendship is central to Gladie. After over 15 years in music, Koch has a strong sense of what success means to her. Gladie is a DIY indie band whose members have jobs like teaching and running a vegan doughnut store (Dottie’s Donuts, if anyone’s passing through Philly). In a capitalist creative environment that feels more hostile to artists than ever, most in Koch’s position would be well served to think about goals beyond going platinum or headlining Coachella.

“Joe Strummer has that line where he says, ‘Without people, you’re nothing’ and I really believe that,” she says. “Being in a band is like the ultimate relationship, like, there’s nothing like it, because you’re creatively vulnerable, you’re sharing your lives with people. You’re sacrificing together. You’re experiencing super highs and super lows and you’re learning how to have difficult conversations. I think of that as irreplaceable.”

“I talk about what I’ll do when I don’t do music in the way that I am now, and it’s sometimes scary because I haven’t invested in a career that would lead to financial stability. But I also didn’t have a job I hated for most of my life. I’ve been able to do beautiful things and having a creative life has always been my dream, and I feel so lucky that I’ve been able to do it, and that I still get to it.”

It’s a beautiful sentiment that Koch has been able to translate into beautiful music. Love, platonic and romantic, has been a tenet of Gladie since 2020’s Safe Sins (‘When You Leave the Sun’, ‘Soda’, ‘For a Friend’).2 No Need To Be Lonely is awash with affection, even from the record’s title.

However, amid the bold declarations to cherish and love, perhaps the most moving moment of No Need To Be Lonely is buried as an Easter Egg of sorts, on the song ‘Future Spring’. The song credits nine additional vocalists, but there’s no obviously loud section of gang vocals. Koch nods towards one brief refrain about a minute into the song in which a swathe of voices repeat the line “Hey, you’re invited and we’re glad you’re here”.

“Have you ever heard the band Dismemberment Plan?” she asks. “They have this song called ‘You Are Invited’, and it’s about inclusion and the like. When Evan and I started hanging out a lot through Gladie, we talked a lot about how much we love Dismemberment Plan and the concept of that song. And when I started touring with Jeff, that line from the song was one of his first tattoos,” she says.

“Kelly and Allegra from Cayetana are in it, and some of the sidekicks, the people who have meant a lot to us. My good friend Ava [Fitzpatrick] and my friend’s kid are on it. There’s actually a baby on the song. There’s a really cute clip that we filmed from recording where it’s like, ‘turn up the baby!’.”

Gladie is a band whose heart is interwoven into the music they make, too gritty to never lose its authenticity but tight enough to always sound pleasant on the ears. Hearing Koch speak of what drives her only adds to the weight of the music on No Need To Be Lonely, especially if you’re like me and trying not to drown amid news that makes you feel very bleak about the state of the world.

Expanding on the one line gang vocal on ‘Future Spring’, Koch says:

“It’s one of those little things for us, because especially with music, it’s hard to do this. It’s a huge sacrifice that financially fucking ruins you. And everybody works so hard. But the gift that I think I’ve taken away from it is like the people I’ve met, I have friends that are all over, and to have all these people on that song is just very subtly being like, ‘You’re a part of this thing’. Music is a community for the fans and the artists.”

‘No Need To Be Lonely’ is out March 20 via Get Better Records. Pre-order on Bandcamp or Qobuz, or pre-save on Apple Music.

It took ten years for Parker Corey and RiTchie to become stars. As two-thirds of Injury Reserve, the producer and rapper from Arizona were finally seeing the fruits of their labour while working on the band’s much-anticipated second album By The Time I Get To Phoenix around the start of the pandemic. Then, their childhood friend and bandmate Stepa J. Groggs — the ultra-charismatic lyrical leader of Injury Reserve — died at age 32.

In the six years that have passed, Corey and RiTchie have done (and I suspect continue to) do their mourning. They have politely shut down many probing questions from strangers in interviews, and rebuffed well-intentioned fan theories about songs that may or may not be dedicated to Groggs.1 They have also tried to strike an immensely challenging balance between moving on from the immense shadow of their friend’s death without leaving behind his legacy.

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That’s where By Storm comes in. Taking its name from Injury Reserve’s final song, By Storm is the new moniker for RiTchie and Parker Corey’s joint musical project. First announced in August 2023, the pair have taken the long road to their just-released debut project My Ghosts Go Ghost.

“Trust me, we’ve been wanting to do this, but you want to do it right,” Parker Corey tells me over Zoom from his home in Phoenix.

One of the central concerns, Corey and RiTchie explained, was that no one knew who they were outside of Injury Reserve, a band they spent a decade trying to establish.

“We would be playing shows and leaving venues, and people would see us and be like, ‘Oh, are you the guys from Injury Reserve?’, and we’d be like, ‘We just played your show here a couple hours ago’,” Corey said.

In the three years between By Storm’s unveiling and the arrival of My Ghosts Go Ghost, Corey and RiTchie worked relentlessly to grow their world and shepherd fans from Injury Reserve to the band’s next iteration. RiTchie released a solo album (2024’s Triple Digits [112]) while Corey shot music videos (caroline, Jane Remover) and a full-length film (yet to be released). In the background, By Storm started taking shape.

“It was definitely worth it, because it did take some people quite a while to even realise what was happening in regards to this band being a real thing and a record coming,” Corey said. “It was really cool to feel like we had to earn being a real band. We weren’t entitled to just drop a record right away and be like, ‘Okay, take us seriously now’.”

The art is better for the wait, as well. Corey’s production has always been a richly textured melee of sounds, but this record is his strongest display of control, restraint and release. My Ghosts Go Ghost has more soft edges than any Injury Reserve project, which only makes the glitchy breakdowns and synth blasts hit that much harder.

“This album could have had so many crazy transitions between the songs and stupid shit like that,” Corey says. “But I was really trying to force clarity upon what we were doing, which is way more difficult. It took a lot longer.

“Now, are there things that maybe would bore people coming to it, even from just off of Phoenix, where it’s more immediately shocking?” he asks rhetorically. “I’m very proud of that stuff, but I don’t want to make that album again.”

Lyrically, RiTchie is more direct and personal than he’s ever been. He opens the record on the cusp of becoming a father, writing to his partner about his fears, excitement and anxieties. Elsewhere, RiTchie is scribbling lines down between doing food deliveries to make ends meet. It’s raw, human, and an unglamorous candour we rarely see from artists.

It’s the third dimension to the rapper who described his role in Injury Reserve as that of the “world-builder”. Next to Groggs, he was like the leadoff hitter who could set the table for his partner in crime. On his solo project, RiTchie showed range: he grew comfortable as the frontman, even stepping up to the plate to rap against veteran lyricist Quelle Chris. The RiTchie we see in By Storm feels like a natural fusion of his prior versions, an ethereal presence who can float over or fight through the production as needed.

“I don’t think that I would have been able to jump back into it if I didn’t take on my true challenge of doing the solo record, because that was a big thing that I really wanted and needed to do,” RiTchie says, joining the Zoom from his sofa. “I think that, if I hadn’t put myself in that mindset, I wouldn’t be able to do something like ‘Double Trio 2’.

‘Double Trio 2’ is the emotional epicentre of My Ghosts Go Ghost. The song refurbishes two lines from Injury Reserve’s Groggs tribute ‘Bye Storm’, turning it into an anthemic hook. The first time we heard RiTchie rap the lines, “We was caught by storm and we ain’t even know it/To you, this shit knee-high” in 2021 he sounded despondent and shrunk into the lines.

Here, on ‘Double Trio 2’, it’s euphoric. It’s flanked by some of the best rapping of RiTchie’s career. He’s commanding with a deceptively slippery flow, delivering an enrapturing verse that always feels on the verge of hitting breathlessness.

“Sometimes these beats just deserve as good of rapping as possible,” RiTchie says.

“The original version of ‘Grapefruit’ was a lot more like [Injury Reserve album] Phoenix, but actually in a bad way, where the song would have been way significantly worse. And I had to take a step back and be like, ‘If there was a guest feature on this, how would this be approached?’”

RiTchie adds that he thinks ‘Grapefruit’ isn’t as good as it probably could have been, which mirrors something I’ve noticed over my two conversations with him. RiTchie is a meticulously harsh self-marker. A few minutes prior, RiTchie caveats a comment about his solo record by saying it was “far from perfect”, and when we spoke in 2024 he mentions his fondness for one of his songs over another despite the latter being “a better song”.

There’s a synergy between RiTchie’s relentless self-evaluation and the tenacity with which Parker Corey approaches art. When I ask Corey about an essay he wrote on the French filmmaker Maurice Pialat, in which he professes to admire Pialat’s “bitterness”, Corey offers a measured but sharp dig at “some of [his] peers”.

“I’m not perfect by any means, but there are certain things that are just such bullshit,” he says, pointing to ‘songs that take 20 minutes to blend together’.

“You sell it. It just sells to people. It sells to people who want to feel smarter than other people and like they have better tastes and you know how to push their buttons and fill their ego. There’s just a lot of bullshit, but it’s fine.”

Corey admits it requires some dissonance to say all of this and then trumpet his own work, but there’s something charming about By Storm’s unapologetic belief in their vision. Of course, if you’re going to talk your shit, you need to back it up, and on My Ghosts Go Ghost, By Storm do. To paraphrase a great man — with their backs against the wall, they came out swinging.

‘My Ghosts Go Ghost’ is out now via Dead Oceans. Purchase on Bandcamp or stream here.

If your introduction to Atlanta punks Upchuck is their most recent studio album I’m Nice Now, you may naturally ask the question: ‘Well, what were they before?’

If you go back as far as 2020, the answer might be resilient: c.f. frontperson KT taking a hit from a shopping trolley and continuing to perform with a steady flow of blood cascading down her face (an image immortalised on their debut album cover).

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Or, if you jump in at their breakout second album released in 2023, Bite the Hand That Feeds, you could say Upchuck were dynamic. The record is sharp and statement-making: guitarists Mikey Durham and Hoff rumble like supercharged engines, drummer Chris Salado manipulates the pace with ease, and bassist Ausar Ward gives Upchuck another layer beyond its straight-line fury.

Or, perhaps, you can just start with I’m Nice Now, released last October. Named in part to describe the exhaustion KT felt at seeing nothing come about from her anger, it’s a tight and nuanced project that sees Upchuck tap into new territory and turn the other cheek — at least, temporarily.

“I don’t know, I know I’m not nice anymore,” KT says over a Zoom call, grinning from a desolate room at the concert venue she works at.

“I definitely am not nice, but I’m calm, I’ll say that much. I’m more centred, but I don’t know about nice. You can’t be nice all the time, that’s what I’ve realised. That’s why I said I’m nice now, but that shit don’t last long.”

It is, after all, hard to be nice if you live in the United States right now. KT and I are speaking just days after Alex Pretti’s murder at the hands of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agents, the latest in a long line of state-sanctioned atrocities.

“It’s literally all fucked, it’s been fucked for so long. The economy’s shit, it’s really just going to shit. There is a tiny bit of hope whenever I’m kicking it with likeminds and shit, but I don’t know,” KT says.

“There are points when I’m like, ‘Damn, can we even fucking do shit about this?’ Like, we’re protesting but it’s getting scary over here. Fuck ICE, fuck Trump.”

It’s little wonder KT is looking forward to escaping the US to play with Upchuck on their debut run of dates in Australia. Although they’ve never visited, Upchuck seems well-prepared to acclimatise fast: they’ve toured alongside Australian rock royalty in Amyl and the Sniffers, C.O.F.F.I.N. and Gut Health.

“I feel like, touring with them, we immediately clicked and synced up, and were all good people,” KT says. “It’s like, damn, every Australian we meet we just ride with each other immediately. I feel like we get each other … I’m excited because I haven’t met an Australian I don’t fuck with.”

The feeling should be mutual. The centrepiece of Upchuck’s visit will be Golden Plains, the iconic regional Victorian camping festival. Upchuck will grace the same stage as the likes of electronic legends Basement Jaxx and New Zealand singer Marlon Williams on an eclectic lineup that will put the band in front of plenty of new faces, something that KT relishes.

“It makes it even more fun to just wild out and be ourselves, and have people just walking past,” she says. “We play festivals and see people walking, stop, and then just walk into the tent and be like, ‘Oh shit, what the fuck is this?’”

I’m Nice Now gives Upchuck their strongest sell yet to any wandering newcomers. It retains the grit and nitrous of Upchuck’s earlier work, but there’s a captivating run of more gentle turns throughout the album. ‘New Case’ is a fun low-stakes listen built around a groovy bassline, while ‘Forgotten Token’ dials down the noise to clear space for KT’s most personal and nuanced songwriting yet.

The album was produced by prolific prog-rock maverick and fellow Golden Plains performer Ty Segall, who took Upchuck to Texas’ Sonic Range, a 1,700-acre orchard and residential recording studio complex. It was the band’s second time working with Segall, who stepped in after the band’s original pick — the legendary Steve Albini — passed away.

“Ty’s a really chill, weird guy, you know? I think regardless we would have clicked. We definitely were more casual with interactions, and also being at Sonic Ranch was also just an interesting experience, the man who runs it is a character,” KT says.

“Ty always does strange, different things. We were supposed to work with Albini before he passed.1 So I think this time, Ty was doing certain weird, quirky things that Albini would have done to honour him.”

An unconventional working style is nothing new for KT, whose pathway to punk is as unusual as anyone’s. Unlike her band, punk lifers who bonded through skateboarding, KT cut her teeth playing cello in all-state orchestra.

“My mom and dad threw me in that shit off rip because they literally heard it on NPR. They were like, ‘Your kid will be smarter if you put them in orchestra!’ and they just threw me in there,” she says.

KT fell into Atlanta’s DIY scene after high school, which she recalls was full of “mostly white boys”. She says seeing the now-defunct Trashcan, a prominently Black local hardcore band play live was a “pivotal moment” for her journey into music.

“The crowd there was so diverse. I was like, ‘Oh, this is a safe space’. Before, I would go to a show and literally point to one other person of colour there. We were welcome there, but I hated how gatekept it was,” she says.

“I was like, ‘Oh shit, if I wanted to do that I could’. And then a year later, I was in a band.”

Whether or not that band’s nice is immaterial. Upchuck have very quickly stacked up a discography that punches with the absolute best in punk and hardcore, and it feels like they’re only just getting started.

Upchuck are touring Australia and New Zealand from March 4. TIckets are available here.

Joyce Manor frontman Barry Johnson is a wreck on the band’s seventh LP I Used To Go To This Bar. He’s broke, parsing through the shrapnel in his drug-addled brain, and at one point flatly says that he wishes he “would fucking die”.

“I relate to that partially,” Johnson tells me over a Zoom call, grinning. “But not entirely. It’s definitely zhuzhed up a little bit.”

Would you expect anything less from a band who almost named an album The Nora Jonestown Massacre? Out January 30, I Used To Go To This Bar is wrapped in pervasive dark humour — one song depicts a robbery at a cannabis store, another involves smoking hash with an opossum fresh out of prison — but it doesn’t come at the expense of earnestness.

“Some of the lines remind me of The Vandals or something, where it’s funny but it’s about something,” bassist Matt Ebert says. “It’s not comedy rock1 but the jokes are pretty brutal. They make me laugh.”

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In many ways, I Used To Go To This Bar is a classic Joyce Manor: it spans just 15 minutes over nine tracks and, as guitarist Chase Knobbe explains, “for the most part, it’s stuff we’ve touched upon before, just a little bit more refined”.

But the band feels revitalised working with some fresh collaborators. The album features three session drummers, and is the first project with producer Bad Religion co-founder Brett Gurewitz, who has been the band’s boss and biggest champion for a decade as owner of Epitaph Records.

“He had a huge influence on the way the record came out,” Johnson says of Gurewitz. Ebert adds: “Brett’s recording style makes it feel more intentional and confident.”

There’s an immediacy on the record that sounds like signature Gurewitz. ‘The Opossum’ takes the urgency of the band’s punkier earlier days, tries on some rockabilly, and thunders at speed under the guidance of session drummer Joey Waronker, punched in sometime before he hit the road with Oasis.

“Brett would have ideas for specific drummers that he wanted to bring in for specific songs and his ideas, to me, seem so lofty,” Ebert says. “He’s like, ‘Oh, I’m gonna get this guy, Joey Waronker, who’s an absolute legend and incredible drummer’, and then Brett would hit him up, and he would be available and there the following week.”

Having drummers rotate through the album is a natural place for Joyce Manor to land. After turning over three drummers in a decade, the band brought in Motion City Soundtrack’s Tony Thaxton to record on 2022’s 40 oz. to Fresno (“We’ve had so many goddamn drummers over the years”, Johnson said at the time, presumably exasperated). Widening the net made sense though, as Knobbe says, it came with trade-offs.

“It’s really probably, all in, three or four hours you spend playing music with somebody, and then they just go … so I don’t think we necessarily hit a flow,” he says. “But that keeps things exciting and spontaneous, because you’re showing somebody a song they’ve never heard before, and they are playing it with coaching through headphones from Brett in the other room.”

The journey to getting Gurewitz overseeing the record began at a landmark moment for Joyce Manor: a sold-out January 2023 show to 13,500 at their hometown Long Beach Arena with PUP and Jeff Rosenstock. At the show, Gurewitz became “excited and inspired” for Joyce Manor to record a “radio song” after a conversation with Los Angeles rock radio heavyweight Miles Anzaldo of the station KROQ.

“I was like, ‘I don’t really know it means to make a radio song’ and I was not interested,” Johnson says. He put the idea to the side, only revisiting it after finishing a draft of the song which became lead single ‘All My Friends Are So Depressed’.

“I threw together a demo and sent it to Brett and was like, ‘Do you want to go in and record this?’”

One song became another, and suddenly Joyce Manor had the first full-length produced by Gurewitz since Rancid’s Tomorrow Never Comes in 2023. And ‘All My Friends Are So Depressed’ made it to radio.2

I Used To Go To This Bar arrives at a curious time for Joyce Manor. Between albums, their seminal third album Never Hungover Again celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2024 and received a well-deserved victory lap in the press. A few years prior, their startling, scuzzy self-titled debut reached the same milestone and was similarly feted. For many bands, a juncture like this would be when questions of ageing out start to creep up on them.

“I try not to dwell on it. I think it’s a conversation ender,” Johnson says. “Like, when I hang out with some of my friends and certain friends are just fixated on the fact that they’re old, which I think I’m guilty of doing sometimes, but I’m really trying to not lean into that, because it gets really dull.

“But the kids are wrong about a lot of shit. The kids wear JNCOs and like the Deftones, and they’re never gonna convince me that that’s fucking cool.3 That makes me feel old.”

Still, there’s a distinct lack of self-consciousness permeating I Used To Go To This Bar. Since the rapid-fire success of Joyce Manor’s first few albums, the band has often worked in the shadow of their own greatness — 2016’s Cody was (I’d say unfairly) dragged as “cynical” and commercially-minded, while 2018’s Million Dollars to Kill Me and 2022’s 40 oz. to Fresno feel caught between two eras of a young punk band and maturing rock act. On their latest effort, Joyce Manor are simply having fun.

That’s epitomised on ‘Well, Whatever It Was’, a song that Johnson describes as a “Shrek-esque soundtrack jam”. It’s jaunty, poppy, and its touchstones are a roll call of Californian rock icons: Beach Boys, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Weezer.

Sealing the deal is the music video — a send-up of the Great British Bake Off directed by Californian legend Lance Bangs, whose filmography spans Jackass, George Harrison, Nirvana and Björk. As Ebert explains, the connection came through Epitaph Records.

“We had a really exciting text thread going for a while where everyone was just like, ‘Yeah, that’s awesome, let’s do that. That’s fucking cool, let’s do that.’ And then it just snowballed, and Lance made it happen, because he’s such a pro,” he says.

As is the case in many conversations with Barry Johnson, we go on a detour to further discuss Weezer. An ardent admirer of frontman Rivers Cuomo, Johnson is in many ways an heir apparent: they write songs in a similar way, stockpiling and reconstructing sharp turns of phrase until it forms a cohesive patchwork of music, and they’ve both forged an unlikely career on their own terms.

“In the beginning, I was like, ‘Man, is this irresponsible to be starting touring at 24? I should get some hirable skills instead of just partying my ass off in a pop-punk band’,” Johnson says. “But I’m glad I did. It’s worked out.”

‘I Used To Go To This Bar’ by Joyce Manor is out January 30 via Epitaph Records. Pre-save the album here.

Last time Sleepazoid were set to release an EP, nobody knew they existed. Not in a mean way, like they had no fans, but in a very literal sense: Sleepazoid formed, then spent a year writing and recording, before revealing themselves to the world or playing a show.

“It was just the five of us,” Nette France (vocals/guitar) tells me. “You get a bit of a reward when you’re playing shows. You write songs, rehearse, play the show, and be like, ‘Wow, that was so fun’. We didn’t have that. We were just grinding away.”

That release, running with the dogs, was an eye-catching debut EP that put them on the industry’s radar. It was potent, genre-warping guitar music, making rotation on Triple J and earning Sleepazoid a run of dates opening for Faye Webster at the Enmore and Forum.

Sleepazoid’s second EP, New Age, will not slip by in anonymity. After January support slots with Fcukers and DZ Deathrays, the band will release New Age and celebrate by playing Laneway Festival. Then, after a national headline tour with Beryl in March, Sleepazoid will take the EP abroad for their first international shows in the United Kingdom.

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For now, it’s the calm before the storm. When I meet Sleepazoid, they’re seated in a small courtyard at the back of a cafe in Brunswick in Melbourne’s inner north. It’s a warm, windy morning, and our conversation is backed by the steady clattering of a nearby construction site. I ask the band how it feels to be releasing an EP now, with more attention, after the covert launch of their debut.

“I’m more confident, but also less confident,” Josef Pabis (bass) says with a laugh.

Jim Duong (guitar) grapples with the question: “It’s been affirming for sure, but it also makes you question…” he thinks for a second and glances at George Inglis (guitar). Sleepazoid’s fifth member Luca Soprano (drums) isn’t present to assist, but I should mention that he’s also in the band.

“We’ve kind of just got to do it now,” Inglis says with a smile. Duong nods: “We’ve gotten this for just being like, this is the music and this is how it should feel. Let’s just continue doing that.”

If that’s the working process that yielded New Age, it’s hard to argue with the results. The EP is a sonic leap forward for one of Australia’s most promising new bands. Across five songs, Sleepazoid home in on a sound that’s distinctly theirs: an ephemeral, shape-shifting twist on alt-rock that is both urgent and impressive. France, a dynamic vocalist, finds a deeper well of candour. It’s a huge step up from a band who already hit the ground running.

“Have you seen that movie Limitless?” France deadpans. “We got the pill.”

Inglis offers an alternative explanation to Sleepazoid’s level up: “We wrote this EP in the studio that we did our first EP, and we’d written all our music before we played our first show. That first EP, we were finding our sound. But the fidelity we were going for, we were always going to get here.”

It’s that c-word again — confidence. Not just in their abilities as musicians, but in one another.

“We’ve been through some shit,” Duong says with an exhale and a laugh, to nods and a murmur of agreement.

We parse through the band’s complicated web of concurrent and prior musical connections: Nette and Josef came from Canberra, where they played in Sputnik Sweetheart. George toured briefly with Sputnik, and is high school friends with Luca. Together, George and Luca make music as Sapphire Street and play in Fairtrade Narcotics. Luca also performs in r.em.edy’s live band, alongside Jim, who is part of Public Leisure.

“We became friends through music, first and foremost,” France says. This became particularly important as she navigated a ‘life imploding’ breakup, which became the fuel for the EP’s title track ‘New Age’.

“I was able to be probably the most vulnerable I’ve ever been in my songwriting on this second EP, because I had the trust and love of the band,” she says.

During our interview, Duong and Pabis identified France’s songwriting as the strongest point of difference in Sleepazoid’s music. As Duong puts it, France is the “emotional vessel” that the rest of the band is “trying to augment”.

There were flashes of this across running with the dogs: On ‘Chomp’, France’s snappy hook “You must cross tram tracks with confidence” is very fun and factually accurate, and ‘Alice’ is a magical, alluring song written in the vein of Alex G. But ‘New Age’ opens the floodgates to unleash a more direct, piercing Nette France. When she tells an ex-lover on ‘New Age’, “I really loved you, I know you know that”, it’s lacerating both in delivery and scripture. On ‘Fig Tree’, she’s haunted, wracked with insomnia, and incredibly tender.

“I’ve been writing songs for 1,000 years but, for some reason it took me a while to feel comfortable to really write from my own perspective,” France says. “It’s vulnerable to share and it also requires you to really sit with the emotions and get them out.

“They’re little time capsules of things that I’ve been through, and I also like that. They’re not always, sometimes they’re just personal because they talk to a feeling, but that feeling comes up again, and you can cast new experiences onto those songs and that brings up similar feelings.”

As France developed comfort confronting honesty in her songwriting, Sleepazoid were wrestling with the nuances of New Age’s finer points. I ask the band to break down the making of ‘New Age’ for me, a song that sounds like three songs masterfully coalesced into one.

Jim Duong sets the scene, a “normal morning” at Perfect Squeak Studios, a space run by Soprano and Inglis: “Nette was like, ‘I have this idea’. And then she put her guitar in Drop D and just started playing the riff. But not as it is, it was a lot slower, more groovy. It bounced around a bit more. As soon as I heard that, I was like, ‘No, that needs to be fucking this.’”

“We were stewing on that riff for a while, just always playing it and being like, ‘Wow, yeah, it’s something’,” Inglis says. “Then I remember one of our ‘aha moments’ was, when we were playing the verse groove and we tried to go into the chorus groove, and we tried Luca slowing us down. The first time we did that, and it worked, we were like, ‘that’s it!’”

It’s the most animated the four get during our conversation, reminiscing over creative frustrations and breakthroughs. The band are unapologetically enamoured with the craft of making music. Pabis speaks about music as his social gateway to a world outside of his childhood hometown of Bathurst. Inglis tells me music is his “entire world” and Duong says he never wants to stop being a part of the Melbourne music scene.

It’s a romantic way to speak about creating art, in an industry that often punishes those who love it the most. But don’t be deceived into thinking Sleepazoid don’t understand that — this is, after all, five artists who have more or less done it all across the Melbourne DIY scene. And as France summarises, the band know the trials and tribulations that await them in their pursuit of glory.

“We all try really hard. Caring is cool. Gone are the days of, like, ‘I’m too cool to care’. It’s a fucking slog, so you have to care.”

‘New Age’ is out February 5 via Surreal Sound. Pre-order on Qobuz here. Sleepazoid are touring Australia from March 6 with Beryl and local supports (tickets).

Tor Sjödén seems gentle. He has a perpetual half-smile and glassy gaze, speaking slowly and deliberately as he tells me about his holiday plans: eating ham, skiing, and celebrating Christmas with his young family. As we speak, he’s in his kitchen at home in Sweden, around 9am local time.

“It’s very early, but I have kids so I have to be up early anyway,” he says.

In this setting, you could mistake Sjödén for my accountant. But we’re on Zoom to talk about his actual day job as founding member and drummer of Viagra Boys, the Swedish punk iconoclasts whose fourth album viagr aboys is currently being celebrated on many ‘best of 2025’ lists.

The self-titled (ish) record is the most polished dance-punk Viagra Boys have done yet. It’s the sort of record that David Byrne might have made if he were born decades later, listened to Cum Town, and ditched art school to play a lot of Counter-Strike. It’s a 37-minute fever dream that features endoscopes, preserved corpses, “flappy giblets”, and a beguiling song from the perspective of frontman Sebastian Murphy’s dog, Uno II.

Sjödén’s drumming is the first thing you hear on viagr aboys, quickly joined by Murphy moaning and groaning. It’s still somehow perhaps the most restrained Viagra Boys record, eschewing the unfettered lunacy of older songs like ‘Ain’t Nice’ and ‘Troglodyte’ for a steadier tone that feels richer, more off-kilter, and engrossing. The band’s ever-present satire has also been sharpened: there is a non-sequitur about Chandler Bing in a hot tub that feels lifted from a Connor O’Malley video, plenty of shrimp talk, and a quote about raisins I’m sure Viagra Boys will have yelled at them in the street for decades to come.

But most striking is the tenderness that peers through the cracks of the chaos. Album closer ‘River King’ pairs an unguarded and direct Murphy with Elias Jungqvist’s piano, while ‘Medicine for Horses’ sees Sjödén patiently drum his way through a haunting show-stopper that feels disembodied and dislocated from time and place.

Sjödén, who cut his teeth drumming in doom metal band New Keepers of the Water Towers, doesn’t see the shifting sonic palette as any inhibitor of his drumming.

“I actually enjoy playing every song because, for me, it’s always about making the groove feel good,” he says. “It’s a cliche, but music is a universal language. We can make people dance in Finland and we can make people dance in the middle of the US.”

This is something well-established: since forming a decade ago, Viagra Boys have been a must-see live act, with the tattooed and always topless Murphy holding court like a degenerate pastor in the world’s sleaziest church. Murphy is a comet: he will slither around the stage, or bounce around, or — as he’s taken to doing recently — switch out lyrics to make light of, say, Charlie Kirk. Such energy makes the band what it is, but it only works so well because Viagra Boys are an experienced unit that knows how to work around one another.

“We’ve played so much together, so I think we have a beautiful mutual understanding,” Sjödén says.

“It’s so important for me that parts are not exactly the same every night — Sebastian might be in a different mood and we can make a little change, the intro is long or the outro is longer, depending on what he’s talking about, stuff like that.”

Sjödén sees it as not just important for the band’s functionality, but its humanity. Later, when we talk about doing pre-recorded performances for late night television (as they did recently on The Daily Show), Sjödén mulls over whether he’d prefer the pressure of performing live on air.

“That would be fun, but then you could really fuck up. But I think it’s important nowadays to fuck up because AI and computers are taking over,” he says. “That’s why I’m really not nervous when we’re playing live too, because it’s more important than ever to show you’re human. Perfection is boring.”

The Daily Show spot came during the band’s long run of dates across the United States a few months back. For a band outspoken about its Palestinian advocacy and fervent disdain for fascism, I was curious to know how the country looked through the eyes of Viagra Boys.

“You know, the US has a lot of really nice, smart people there, too,” Sjödén says when I broach the question, with the rehearsed patience of someone who has been asked many times by friends and family since returning home from tour.

“I mean, obviously where we play, there’s a lot of people who don’t vote for Mr. Pigface, so it feels perfectly normal. I mean, Sebastian gets a little political when he’s on stage and maybe three or four people per show walk out—”

I can’t help but interrupt: people are getting upset with anti-Trump rhetoric at a Viagra Boys show? In 2025?

“But, you know, 99.9% stay,” Sjödén smirks.

Viagra Boys will likely achieve an even better strike rate when they grace Australian shores in January 2026. Joined nationally by Private Function, it marks the band’s third visit and biggest shows yet. The blow-up has happened fast and furious — after debuting at The Tote in 2019, Viagra Boys returned in 2024 to play the Enmore, The Tivoli and Forum (twice), and now they’re back barely 12 months later, sizing up again.

“I think we really, really connect with you guys down there. We have a great energy, and it’s really easy to tour in Australia,” Sjödén says. “It’s weird to travel halfway across the whole world and recognise everything. It’s a mixture between Europe and the US, it feels a lot like home.”

As to whether there’s anything particular synergistic about Australia? “I don’t know, there’s a lot of guys with mullets.”

Those eager for a taste of the tour can now get it in the form of Shrimp Sessions IV, a proto-live recording of viagr aboys. Following in the footsteps of Shrimp Sessions and Shrimp Sessions II, the band filmed themselves playing live. This iteration saw Viagra Boys bring in an audience to participate in the feeling.

“We just wanted to do something different than the others, to bring in an actual crowd and show people what it’s like when we play,” Sjödén explains. “I think it’s the best one yet that really captures our energy live, I feel really proud of it.”

I ask about the fate of Shrimp Sessions III, from which a few songs were released but never the full project. Sjödén is coy.

“Yeah, there are some videos from that, but I don’t know what’s happened,” he says. “I think it’s Viagra Boys-esque to have I, II and IV. But maybe someday you’ll dig it up from some archive and put it up on eBay for $6,000 or something.”

Sjödén is unbothered by its fate, as he seems to be about most things he can’t control. He’s happy for the band’s imperfections to show. They’ve done enough to earn their status on top and their success has only emboldened them (he promises the next Viagra Boys album will be “even simpler and stupider”).

And who can blame them? When you’ve gone from cult idol to headliner halfway across the world, why would you feel the need to slow down or compromise?

“You have to pinch yourself sometimes,” Sjödén laughs. “Like, okay, this is my job. But it’s fun.”

Viagra Boys are touring Australia and New Zealand from January 14 with Mini Skirt, Private Function and The Gnomes (tickets).

‘viagr aboys’ is out now via Shrimptech Enterprises. Listen now on Soundcloud, Apple Music or Quboz.

As These New South Whales were putting the finishing touches on their last record, 2022’s TNSW, frontman Jamie Timony was in the midst of a personal crisis. After nine years in an Alcoholics Anonymous program, he was getting out.

“I had to speak to every significant person in my life about my decision because, over the years, I had telegraphed to them the importance of being in a program like that for me,” Timony tells me over Zoom. “Then all of a sudden, it’s like, ‘Actually, now I’m telling you the opposite, which is that I don’t need to be in this and that it’s all bullshit.’”

Traces of Timony’s experience bleed into TNSW if you squint, but it’s shrouded in cryptic lyrics and metaphor. On GODSPEED, the band’s just-released fourth album, there’s no ambiguity.

“It takes a little while to unplug from all that and really process and come back to yourself,” he says. “I guess I had a bit more talking to do about it on this record.”

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The album opens and closes with the same powerful call to action: “The choice is yours, godspeed.” On the title track, Timony issues a searing rebuke of the “unhealthy control and power dynamics” he experienced during his time in Alcoholics Anonymous.

“The basis of these things is that you are ‘diseased’, that you are ‘sick’, that you are permanently powerless,” he explains. “The truth is, you’re not and you’ve got the ability to change if you can see a better way forward.”

GODSPEED is the artistic actualisation of Timony’s better way forward. It’s a polished odyssey of guitar music that nods to everyone from Ceremony to The Replacements. GODSPEED is a milestone record in the 13-year journey which has seen These New South Whales rise from being best known for their mockumentary to one of Australia’s finest punk bands.

It is an impressive evolution from TNSW, the band’s first committed foray into making music completely detached from their comedic identity. That was a great album, but it hummed and growled without ever really baring its teeth. That’s not an issue on GODSPEED, which unleashes Frank Sweet to punish the drums, challenges Todd Andrews’ versatility on guitar, and leans hard on Will Shepherd to keep pace on bass.

If TNSW was the reset for a band looking to shed its reputation for comedy, GODSPEED is the cohesive record that cements their arrival. The album pulsates with snark, rage, and defiance, an energy that a New South Whales album hasn’t captured before. Timony pins that partly on his experience in AA, which he said conditioned him to feel “defective” if he experienced anger or resentment.

“There’s basically no place for it in these sorts of spiritual programs, and I say spiritual loosely. They regard themselves as spiritual, but there’s very little room for emotion like that,” he says.

“Coming outside of that, it was really nice to be like, ‘Oh, I am allowed to be outwardly angry, there’s nothing wrong with that.’ It is a poison if you want to stay in that state, sure, but you’re allowed to express that emotion, and you’re allowed to feel resentful about things, and you’re allowed to feel unforgiving towards things as well.”

That anger was shaped in part by the world that Timony and the band were looking out at.

“There’s been a genocide taking place in Palestine that’s been live streamed across all of our phones, and we’ve got a government who do nothing. In fact, they do worse than nothing, which is, they aid and abet it,” he says. “It’s felt, for everyone, like a really awful time on a global scale, when there’s all this horror going on and seemingly, no one wants to stop it.”

GODSPEED has an uncompromising message, but it’s never a miserable listen. The band is writing its catchiest, most anthemic music, and their humour persists (cf. ‘BIG MACHINE’, TV on the Radio’s ‘Happy Idiot’ for a new generation). The record was born out of fun, on a four-day writing retreat at an isolated house in the rainforests of Victoria’s Otways, which was “50-50” work and play.

“We love each other’s company, we love a few beers together and having a laugh,” Timony says. “We were playing, like eight hours a day or something like that, in bursts. And we were never like, ‘Oh, I guess we better get back to it’. We’d have, like, a three hour break and then be bored and start playing again.”

After 13 years in a band, it’s unusual to find such persistent and enduring camaraderie. I ask Timony what the secret to longevity is.

“We’re all actually very respectful of each other in the band, and we’re all very polite to each other, majority of the time anyway,” he says. “We obviously have little tiffs and shit now and then, but generally speaking, we’re all just very nice to each other.”

Sonically, the album runs the gamut from hardcore to stadium rock to traditional punk to Britpop, and a whole lot else in between. It’s a record overflowing with ambition, kept on the rails by the steady hand of producer Ben Greenberg (also known as the guitarist of New York noise-punks Uniform).

“He brought a lot of good suggestions to the table that really helped and pushed us along musically. To me, it’s my favorite sounding record of all of them,” he says.

Greenberg’s fingerprints are all over the record, which Timony says brought “a lot of life and personality” to GODSPEED — he rearranged rhythms on the post-punk ‘R.I.P. ME’, the propulsive bassline and chunky guitars on the stadium rock lead single ‘INSTINCT’, and won a hard-fought battle to overhaul the bopping punk anti-cop anthem ‘PIG’:

“It was a lot slower, then Ben upped it by 38 BPM (beats per minute). It turned super fast. So, that song changed completely. It became very difficult to sing because it was so fast,” Timony says.

“We actually fought him for a while on it, and he wouldn’t back down. So, we just ended up going his way.”

Uncompromising voices work well with Timony and the band, who enlisted rising director Passive Kneeling (aka Tom Vanderzeil) to shoot four music videos in two days.

“He’s a very confident director, he knows what he likes and doesn’t like and is not afraid to tell you. He told me my head looked like an egg, because I was wearing a hood, and that I needed to pull my hair forward a bit. I really appreciated that,” Timony says, sincerely.

“Tom came fully prepared with four different visual treatments for each of the songs, which I thought was pretty awesome. He had a plan to shoot each of them differently, light each of them differently, grade each of them differently, edit each of them differently. So he was organised and had a vision.”

Between Timony’s praise for Vanderzeil and Greenberg, I think back to the mockumentary These New South Whales made over a decade ago.1

The series, a cross between This Is Spinal Tap and The Office, portrays a fictionalised version of the band in which they are dysfunctional and beholden to Timony’s egomania. In their series, their director dresses them in diapers and their producer leaves his nephew in charge.

The reality was, I’m sure, never this way. But it’s a long way from the These New South Whales we see on GODSPEED: a band with a real producer, a real director, and a real sense of purpose, finally playing like they know exactly who they are.

Most groups don’t get this far and fewer still get better at this stage. But These New South Whales are levelling up and finding their voice, defiant and unrelenting, and it feels like the precursor to an even bigger blow-up.

‘GODSPEED’ is out now. Listen now on Bandcamp or Apple Music.

“I have this kid’s tooth. I do not know this young man. I’m in possession of his DNA. I have his actual tooth on my nightstand right now.”

Akil Godsey is the frontperson of Baltimore’s End It, one of hardcore’s most exciting bands. He’s calling me from Texas, and over a generous hour1 imparts wisdom on paying it forward, gatekeeping, and how to not be a scumbag. And, yes, he’s also telling me why he has this kid’s tooth.

It went down at End It’s LP launch release show at the Baltimore Soundstage. The band was capping off their first run of US headline shows, touring their debut album Wrong Side of Heaven. Just one month prior, they played two arena shows in support of Blink-182 and Alkaline Trio.

Now, in their hometown, the tour was going out with a bang: local legends Torn Apart warmed the stage with their first show in 20 years, a bespectacled Godsey patrolled the stage in a Bracewar tee, and somewhere in the crowd a child is about to get his shit rocked.

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Akil Godsey, a narrator too good to paraphrase: “He’s a taller kid. Old boy is, like, 13 years old, he’s a middle schooler going into high school. He got smoked in the pit. Both of his two front teeth came out.”

“Someone came up to me at the end of the shows. I’m dapping everybody up and they gave me one of his teeth. The security came to ask for it back and give it to him. He comes back in … I got this kid’s fucking tooth in my possession now, and I took a picture with him. Two bloody, fucking gaping holes in his face, stoked as hell that he got knocked the fuck out at the hardcore gig. That’s what I came home to.”2

It’s a fitting introduction to End It, whose music will smack you square in the face and leave you thrilled for the experience. The band’s muscular, propulsive music is proudly indebted to frenetic New York hardcore bands of the 90s, such as District 9 and Neglect, and has an instinctive brilliance to it.

Godsey was drafted into the band around 2017 by friend and Flatspot Records owner Che Figueroa. Since then, he’s commandeered End It through a handful of standout EPs, line-up changes, and their first album. Wrong Side of Heaven has propelled the band to new heights, including their first Australian tour alongside Scowl and Secret World, starting November 28.

“This does not feel real, but it doesn’t feel like we shouldn’t be here,” Godsey says. “You don’t start a hardcore band thinking, ‘One day I’m gonna open for Blink-182.’ You start a hardcore band because you got fucking chip on your shoulder. You’re just angry.

“Now we’re in our 30s, we play hardcore stuff, nothing’s changed. We’ve not been told to tone down our message or change anything. We’re just right place, right time.”

Godsey is half-right, half-humble. It’s true that the latest explosion of hardcore is pushing the scene to heights previously unimaginable (SPEED’s Jem Siow told me something similar in 2024), but End It have stood out from the pack for good reason: their drumming slaps, their riffs sound phenomenal, drawing on guitarist Ray Lee’s diverse listening habits, and Godsey’s vocals are magnetic, molten, and wasting no words.

As a songwriter, he’s as sharp and matter-of-fact as he is in conversation, such as when reflecting on the “freeing” experience of playing to arena crowds.

“These people don’t give a fuck who we are, and that’s perfect for us, because we don’t give a fuck. ‘These are all new songs to y’all, what’s going on?’ Let’s just get up here and do the thing. Look at all these people I get to yell at right now,” Godsey says.

“It’s not personal. They came to see Alkaline Trio, they came to see Blink, then here I am: I got a polo shirt tucked into my pants, talking about the government. They’re like, ‘Whoa, whoa, this is not… is he talking about the Federal Reserve? The fuck is going on here?’.”

Between the talk of central banking and songs like ‘Empire’s Demise’ and ‘Anti-Colonial’, Godsey would comfortably fit the vanguard of hardcore’s latest wave of stridently anti-fascist voices. But he’s reluctant to prescribe any radical aims to his art.

“I look at it this way: if we were going to have a revolution, it would have happened by now,” he says. “I’m sitting around acknowledging the same issues my parents were acknowledging.”

“The poor think they’re rich. You are not a temporarily embarrassed billionaire. You are my neighbour. Our kids go to the same school. Just because you have a Mercedes does not make us of different classes. If I can knock on your front door, we are the same. As soon as people realise that we could come together and then, shit, fuck money.”

Or, as he puts more directly elsewhere in our call: “Steal from work. Show up late. Who gives a shit? It’s not your corporation.”

Akil Godsey not indiscriminate about this: seconds later, he’s again apologising about being late to our call by a few minutes, and often returns to the concept of respecting people’s time.

It comes up when admitting he was “unprepared” during the recording of Wrong Side of Heaven, which was produced by hardcore veteran Brian McTernan (Battery).

“I can be honest now it’s over, but we weren’t necessarily having the best communication with the band, because, again, we’re three grown men with shit going on,” Godsey said.

“By the time I got in the booth and started demoing vocal-wise and writing things, out of not wanting to waste Brian’s time, I just locked in … I know for a fact this grown ass man would much rather be home with his wife and child than here with me as I struggled through these hardcore songs.”

Wrong Side of Heaven met the high expectations set by the band’s previous work, and has given End It the opportunity to take their work global. Their first Australian shows will see them play 11 shows alongside Scowl, finishing off with a Flatspot Records/Last Ride World super-show in Melbourne.

Aside from its propensity to separate teeth from mouths, one of the best parts about End It’s live show is the way Godsey opens the set.

“When I’m on tour, I get diva privilege,” he puts it. “I get to be like, ‘Oh, yo, can you put this song on? I’mma warm my voice up.’ Which is, really, I just want to listen to this song.”

He’ll then sing — often acapella — anything from 50 Cent to Fleetwood Mac, arresting the audience’s bloodlust with vocals forged in a childhood at church choir, right before the band rips into form and shit hits the fan.

On Wrong Side of Heaven, Godsey flashes his range on ‘Could You Love Me?’ a cover of Maximum Penalty’s 1996 yearning, melodic stomper.

“If you with the hardcore, that’s just one of those songs. If you know, you know. But it really is like a b-side, because Max Pen didn’t get the respect they deserved, in my opinion, much like The Icemen, a lot of New York hardcore bands,” he says.

“It has elements in a pop structure, but it’s not like us covering Michael Jackson. It’s a hardcore band covering the hardcore song. I’m glad we got to do it to show a younger generation. If, for every 100, we turned at least three kids on the real 90s, fucking New York hardcore… that’s really what it’s about, is keeping the tradition alive.”

It’s a fitting time to talk about hardcore and its traditions. Hardcore’s mainstream eruption has yielded newfound commercial interest: Turnstile are suddenly eight-time GRAMMY nominees, Knocked Loose played Jimmy Kimmel Live! and SPEED can listen to themselves while playing a WWE 2K game.

But all the new eyes brings an influx of outsiders, some of whom may not fully grasp hardcore’s affectionate culture of consensual communal violence. Godsey is amused and thoughtful when I ask him how these worlds mix, likening it to a wedding.

“You get two different families coming together, and it’s like now by law and by ritual, we are one by law. You paid for a ticket. By ritual, we’re going to the concert, but we don’t live life the same way. Now you about to see some wild shit in this room.”

I suggest Australia might see this around the new year, when Turnstile play their run of headline dates, and Godsey jokes he might stick around to see it.

“You know what’s crazy? At this moment in my life, I really could just casually miss my flight and spend a week in Australia. It really wouldn’t affect much of anything,” he tells me.

It’s a deserved place for one of the most beloved and respected figures in modern hardcore. In a scene where tour abroad scarcely feels within reach, even relative to the already-constricting world of the arts, End It are a standout success story.

With achievement comes new perspectives, and Godsey wraps the call with two thoughts. The first he admits is a “hard conversation” to have, and he speaks broadly without naming names.

“Motherfuckers are gonna take it to heart, but I don’t mean it in any disrespectful way,” he qualifies. “Just because your name has a legacy does not mean it still got the weight it once had. Sometimes it will behove you to co-headline. Don’t headline.”

He analogises it to taking care of his ageing father: “Everyone can win. Oh no, your bills are paid. You wrote this song 30 fucking years ago, and you just paid your rent and your phone bill off of a 20 minute performance to full packed house, you’re welcome.”

“I can’t wait for the day where there’s a younger generation of kids doing their thing. They also selling out Baltimore. ‘Hey, can End It co-headline?’ I’d love to. I get to leave early? Oh, beautiful. I left you kids a note in the green room and a little bit of weed in the jar. I grew it in my basement. I’ll talk to you later, and I can go back to fucking nowhere and shut the fuck up.”

But while Godsey is eager to take care of the generations who earned his trust, his second thought is of the “appreciative” but “weird space” he’s in about requests for him to feature on other artists’ songs.

“Because hardcore is still in this very infantile state to a degree, it sucks that you can’t risk doing a feature for someone, and then you find out that he’s been taking pictures of girls’ feet while they sleep and shit like that,” he says. “Now I’m lumped in with this dude because I decided to collab on a song, and I hate that I even have to have those thoughts.”

“Let’s leave them with this: If we treat each other better, we can all trust each other. You ain’t got trust, you ain’t got shit. Everyone wins if you can trust each other, so just stop being a fucking scumbag. I know it’s hard. I love doing scummy things. The moment I actually gave up the ghost and decided I wasn’t going to live life like that no more, I opened for Blink-182.”

End It is touring Australia from November 28 with Scowl and Secret World, dates and tickets available here. They will also be playing Flatspot/Last Ride World at Melbourne’s 170 Russell on December 13 (tickets).

‘Wrong Side of Heaven’ is out now via Flatspot Records. Listen now on Bandcamp or Apple Music.

When you’re in love, there are liminal spaces that you can slip in and out of that can feel nothing short of surreal. It’s a light-headed blood rush — places you’re innately familiar with completely transform when you see it through the eyes of someone you adore. At its best, love actualises the aspirational version of yourself: endless reserves of patience, attentiveness, conscientiousness. The mundane becomes thrilling. To occupy love, and be loved, is beautiful.

Harriette Pilbeam understands this better than most of us. The Brisbane-born, Melbourne-based musician is a connoisseur of romance films and has written some of my favourite love songs of the last decade under the pseudonym Hatchie. Her third album Liquorice, releasing November 7, is her latest and most fully realised treatise on love and matters of the heart.

“I wanted to delve deeper into those themes of heartbreak and romance that I started exploring with my early EP and album [2019’s Keepsake]. I felt like there was still a lot I’d left unsaid,” Hatchie tells me over Zoom, dialling in from her home in Melbourne.

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Emerging after stints in Brisbane bands Babaganouj and Go Violets, Hatchie started releasing her own music in 2017, and quickly charmed with her catchy hooks and lyrics that captured the in-between feelings of a courtship. She caught the eye of Cocteau Twins guitarist Robin Guthrie, inked a slew of record deals, and became an ascendant indie rock star synonymous with writing world-class love songs.

That reputation served as a gift and a curse. Hatchie confessed to Rolling Stone in 2019 that she put a lot of pressure on herself to avoid writing about romance. She was more explicit in 2022, talking about her album Giving the World Away: “There’s more to me than just writing songs about being in love or being heartbroken.”

“I definitely was really concerned back then with ticking certain boxes and avoiding certain things. I spent so much time setting expectations for myself that I just drove myself crazy. I realised nobody cares this much — at least, not as much as I do,” Hatchie says.

“I tried to let go of all those preconceived concepts and boundaries I’d set for myself this time, and I wasn’t ashamed to write about love and romance. I think younger me thought it wasn’t very feminist to do that, whereas now, yeah, it is such an evergreen topic, and I’ll always have more to say about it.”

Liqourice is proof of concept. It’s gorgeous, light and dreamy, straddling shoegaze and dream pop. Influences like The Cocteau Twins and The Cranberries remain touchstones, but Hatchie continues to set herself apart with sharp, direct songwriting, and immaculate polish. On ‘Only One Laughing’, Hatchie turns over the binary of ‘erasing the night’ and ‘chasing the light’. The title track ‘Liquorice’ is playful but assertive. It’s a record that is joyous enough to revel in romance, but wise enough to hold the impermanence of the moment.

Part of what inspired Hatchie was delving deeper into romance films, a quiet obsession of hers (top picks: The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Blue Valentine, Moonstruck, Close, and one of Linklater’s Before films).

“No matter how many I’ve watched, I’ll still discover some that say things I haven’t already seen or thought about. I thought that was really interesting, and something kind of clicked,” she says.

“I could watch more and more movies that are technically, broadly speaking, about the same thing but they all feel so different and show completely different sides of the same experience. So I was like, I feel like I can do that with music.”

That cinematic mindset, finding new angles on familiar emotions, guided Liquorice through a period of real-world upheaval for Hatchie and her husband, close collaborator Joe Agius. The couple moved to the United States in late 2021, returned to Brisbane after a year before settling for good in Melbourne in early 2023.

“We were like, ‘Okay, it’s now or never’. We went, and I think we weren’t really ready mentally, but we just jumped at the chance. Once we were over there, we realised we hadn’t really thought it through. We just got a bit overexcited and went for it,” Hatchie says.

“It was really scary to go over there, and then really scary to come home. It was hard not to feel like I’d lost out on something, or failed in some way by coming back. But I think the timing just wasn’t right.”

Hatchie went back to the United States to record Liquorice with producer Melina Duterte, who records as Jay Som and has been hailed “indie rock’s secret weapon”. Duterte was tapped after Hatchie made the call to work with more women on this album.

“I wanted to change things up. It’s very common for female pop artists to work with male producers, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s not that hard to take a little extra time to research and figure out who else I could work with,” she says.

“Melina was one of the first people my label suggested, and it was a no-brainer. It’s not that I don’t feel comfortable working with the male producers I’ve worked with, but this just made sense for the album. It has such feminine energy and such a romantic feel that it felt right.”

Hatchie credits Duterte for making the guitars so good. From the defiant crunch on ‘Wonder’ to the pacey jangle of ‘Stuck’, Liqourice is spoilt for choice when it comes to the six-string.

“She also just instantly gets what we’re going for. Whenever we make musical references, she just clicks,” Hatchie says. “It was like we already knew each other when we started working together. There was this shorthand. I feel like I can hear the fun we had in the studio when I listen to it.”

Like the films that inspired it, Liquorice unfurls. The opening track ‘Anemoia’ offers a mission statement that the rest of the album wrestles with: “You won’t always recognise when you’re meant to stay/Maybe the world you want has to slip away.”

It was inspired by a conversation Hatchie had in New York with a friend who had been through a “really big breakup”.

“She said that when she was trying to get through it, she kept having to tell herself, ‘There’s no alternate timeline where we end up together. This is the only timeline. Whatever happens is the right thing to happen. It’s what’s meant to happen’,” Hatchie says.

“I really felt that — not just about relationships, but about my general life path and purpose. I’m often reminded of that. I thought it was a really fascinating and comforting way to frame things.”

For a “very uncertain person”, that brought Hatchie a sense of clarity and conviction.

“I’m always writing about not being sure, or not knowing, or wondering, or yearning, or longing for something. I’m very much an overthinker. When I was writing that lyric, I was trying to make myself feel better about that — to accept that I am that way, and that you won’t always recognise when to go or when to stay. You just have to trust that you’ve made the right decision, whatever that is.”

Acceptance is a slow evolution. But Hatchie seems to be at a stage in her life where she’s making peace with however the chips fall. She’s back to writing about love, and doing it better than ever.

“Regardless of how well received this record is, I feel like I’ve made massive strides in that part of my life. I’m strict with that — whatever happens next happens. It doesn’t matter. The whole experience was just so great in terms of valuing myself more. I know how much I value myself now as a result of the experience.”

Liquorice echoes with the assurance of an artist who is able to fully trust her heart, not just in relationships, but also now in her music.

‘Liquorice’ is out November 7 via Secretly Canadian. Pre-order on Bandcamp or pre-save on Apple Music.

Have you heard the joke about Frankston? If you search for the coastal Melbourne suburb on YouTube, you’ll see a string of videos like “I Survived 24 Hours in Melbourne’s Most Dangerous Area” and “Visiting Australia’s Most Dangerous Suburb!” by some vlogging rage merchants.

For those who grew up around certain parts of Melbourne, you either knew of Frankston as the mythological badlands of the (let’s be real) very safe city, or you had a local equivalent.

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The Belair Lip Bombs would’ve heard it all, too. The four Frankston locals — guitarist and vocalist Maisie Everett, drummer Daniel ‘Dev’ Devlin, bassist Jimmy Droughton and guitarist Mike Bradvica — came together and found their feet playing local shows, incubating in what was less a warzone and more a vibrant creative scene.

“I think the Peninsula is a great place to connect with other kids who are creative or into music, because it’s sort of easier to weed people out down there,” Dev tells me over Zoom.

“For us, having somewhere like Singing Bird Studio in Frankston was really important. We rehearsed there a lot and were able to start out there, play our first shows there, and meet kids and form that community.”

The band wears their hometown as a “badge of honour”, even as their world grows exponentially. The Belair Lip Bombs’ second album Again could make them Australia’s next big musical export, marking their first original release since signing with Jack White’s indie label Third Man Records.

Serving as the follow-up to 2023’s Lush Life, put out by Frankston DIY label Cousin Will, the new record is a testament to how fast The Belair Lip Bombs are coming along. They sound assured, making the tenets of classic rock feel fresh and invigorated. It’s their best work yet, striking the tricky balance of honing their established sound and branching out into new pockets.

“We didn’t have as much time to write this album, but we had more of a well-rounded idea of what Lip Bombs was and maybe what we wanted to explore,” Dev says. “We wanted to make an album that had lots of different moods and vibes, and I think we achieved that.”

The result is a record that is more fierce and confident, something Dev credits to producer Joe White (of Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever) for “help[ing] shape the record.”

“He’s a great musician himself, but also a big supporter of the band to begin with, so he really understood the sound and was really helpful in getting the songs from that 90 percent point to the 100 percent finish line.”

The little flourishes are all over the record. Lead single ‘Hey You’ is a patiently building thunderstorm with an impeccably deployed motherfucker on the pre-chorus. ‘If You’ve Got The Time’ is a blossoming jam partly inspired by the Rolling Stones. ‘Price Of A Man’ draws you in with captivating songwriting and keeps you around with its dynamic performance.

On Lush Life, the band established itself for some strong hooks and strong rock chops, but Again sees them daring to do a few things differently — ‘Cinema’ is the poppiest song they’ve done, heavily leaning on funk with a brilliantly laconic chorus, while the penultimate ‘Burning Up’ is a stripped-back piano-led anthem made to get phone torches waving.

“They’re two of our favourites on the album, just because they were two big labours of love on the record,” Dev says.

“For ‘Burning Up’ we recorded a version that kind of sounds like ‘Summertime’ by The Sundays, or like Sugar Ray or Third Eye Blind, like very ’90s rock. It’s very much not like that now. It sounds like a piano ballad now. So that really changed, and that was a really fun, challenging experience in the studio — transforming that song from one entirely different thing to another.

“‘Cinema’ was one of those songs where we probably wrote, like, ten different choruses for that song, and we almost scrapped it just because we couldn’t land a chorus. But we pushed through it because we loved that song.”

Iteration comes up a lot when the band talks about Again. It’s an achievement that, despite the time spent tweaking and tinkering, the songs sound as free as they do. Album opener ‘Again and Again’ is a downright blast and the record rarely lets up from there.

The band isn’t just growing as studio musicians, but they’re also racking up other career milestones. When Dev and I speak, he’s just conquered his jetlag after the band’s longest ever tour supporting Spacey Jane across North America (six weeks, 25 shows, 17,500 kilometres in a van, by Dev’s calculations).

“It was very, very long, but so much fun,” he said. “The best part was just playing in cities for the first time and meeting fans. We were supporting another band, but it was really sweet when people were there to see us and who had been listening to our music for a long time and maybe never thought we’d actually make it over to the States.”

Those North Americans probably don’t need to worry. Again is the sort of record that makes bands very famous, and it’s being released on a label that is important enough for tastemakers around the world to sit up and take notice. Enjoy The Belair Lip Bombs while they’re here, because the stage is set for them to take off sooner rather than later.

‘Again’ is out October 31 via Third Man Records. Pre-order on Bandcamp or pre-save on Apple Music.