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 no. 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.

When Canadian duo Purity Ring arrived, they struck like a meteor. Their 2012 debut album Shrines delivered one of the songs of the decade (‘Belispeak’) and spawned a cottage industry of ‘future pop’ imitators. It was boundary-pushing electronica: Corin Roddick’s arctic synth-driven production bounced against Megan James’ (mj) spacious vocals, creating an intoxicating sound that was both intimate and distant.

Since then, Roddick and mj have reshaped Purity Ring over and over like an origami crane. They’ve embraced thumping pop hooks (‘Bodyache’), sped up the tempo (‘unlucky’) and drifted into soft psychedelia (‘femia’).

But there’s only so far you can take a sound, even when you’re a pioneer, and the pair knew it.

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“The sound that we started on Shrines evolved and grew and went to a lot of different places by the time we did our third record Womb, but we still had the same kind of building blocks from the beginning,” Roddick tells me over Zoom.

“It felt like, by the end of that record, that we had — from my perspective — fully explored what was possible there.”

To usher in a new era, Roddick and mj escaped to the mountainous Idyllwild region of California for a writing trip. It’s a way of working that has yielded results since their second album Another Eternity, after completing their debut over the internet.

“Within the first few days that we were out there, we already had most of the ideas that would become the majority of the songs on the album,” Roddick says. “It really presented itself right away.”

mj sets the scene: “We were in a literal cloud for a lot of it. Like, the mountain is often in a cloud. At night, there were acorn trees around the cabin, and so they would fall on the roof, hundreds of them, everywhere. And I was like, ‘Are there squirrels? Like, what’s going on?’ But I mean, maybe squirrels, maybe rats, who knows? It definitely felt like it wasn’t here.”

The atmosphere was evocative of a fantasy world, a fitting foundation for the record that resulted — Purity Ring, a brave self-titled reset. Released last month, Purity Ring is a concept album designed to soundtrack a video game that doesn’t exist.

For a first attempt at a concept album, Purity Ring has gone all-in: the record has a thematic through line, a narrative, and a rich visual universe courtesy of fellow Canadian Mike Sunday. Sunday’s visuals depict Roddick and mj as avatars in an animated world, reminiscent of Nintendo 64 Zelda games or early iterations of Kingdom Hearts.

“After getting involved in the concept, I’m like, I get it. It really, really helps the creative process to have a direction,” Roddick says.

Final Fantasy looms as a heavy influence over Purity Ring — least of all for the gorgeous album art — and many of the album’s themes feel evocative of the series, which delves deep into grief, loss, conservation and renewal over its sixteen main-line games. And, like those games, Purity Ring takes its “hope and grief” from reality.

“It’s not an escapist fantasy or a desire for the past,” mj says. “It’s more about dreaming, and dreaming about building a better world and the possibility of that being a reality, and how we don’t have all the answers, but if we start building, we’ll find them.”

To build that world, Corin Roddick reimagined Purity Ring from the ground up. The record straddles the line between transformation and tradition, revamping the band’s canvas without discarding the core tenets.

“This record was more of a blank slate, throwing out any sort of blueprint we had from the past,” Roddick says. He details some of the changes under the hood: fast drum and bass double-time drums, a contrast to his usual slow hip-hop-style drums, and the flow-on effects from that.

“Just changing that affects all the production, because then everything has to fit with those rhythms in a different way. And that opened up this whole new experimental direction — different vocal effects, different types of melodies, different synths.”

The shake-up is evident all over the album, but there are certain points where Roddick’s production especially shines: mj’s melody on ‘memory ruins’ is commanding, but sparks fly from the track’s production. The album closer, ‘glacier: : in memory of rs: :’, is a touching tribute to Ryuichi Sakamoto, an unpredictable, swelling arrangement.

However, the record’s highpoint is also the most un-Purity Ring the band has ever sounded. ‘imanocean’, one of many songs on the album that integrates classical guitar, comes in closest to a indie rock number, mj’s vocals carrying heft through its fleet-footed production. It marks the first Purity Ring record to use guitar.

“At least once a record Corin would try and I’d be like, no,” mj says. Roddick laughs with her, and admits he too was “very against” guitar when Purity Ring started out.

“We came from a background that was all guitar and all drums, we started the project almost more as a reaction in the opposite direction, trying to do things differently,” he says. “But you know, all musical rules are meant to be broken at one point or another — especially your own.”

Roddick and mj’s rebellion paid dividends. As Roddick puts it, the classical guitar “fits into electronic music in a strange way that feels a bit otherworldly.”

Creative risks like this form part of what may make Purity Ring a divisive record within the band’s dedicated fandom. A dive into their community on Reddit shows some mixed feelings over the new sound, which is perhaps to be expected whenever an established act pulls a left turn.

“Being Purity Ring for 15 years now, we’re both pretty comfortable with the way we see ourselves in terms of our sound and how we write, and the way that we make music on our own and together,” mj says. “Making this record made me a lot more excited to make more music in the future.”

“It’s cool that if people like it or they don’t like it,” Roddick adds. “I just hope they feel one way or another about it. It’s cool that people might feel different ways.”

Whether people love Purity Ring, grow to appreciate, or they never come around, the record is an unqualified success: Corin Roddick and mj are reinvigorated, excited, and finding new ways to express themselves. Having released their latest album independently, they’ve found the sort of freedom — creative and financial — that most artists dream about.

Ian Shelton has always been hard on himself. The Militarie Gun frontman pores over footage of his live performances, often has post-show notes for his bandmates, and keeps tweaking songs long after they’re finished. That restless drive has taken his career to new heights, but it’s also threatened to sink him.

On God Save the Gun, out October 17, Shelton stares down his worst parts. Across the record, he is howling through baggy eyes and a bloated face (‘B A D I D E A’), begging to have his body desecrated (‘Fill Me With Paint’), and offering to mutilate himself to save a relationship (‘Throw Me Away’). At one point, he threatens to kill himself (I Won’t Murder Your Friend’).

Those images weren’t theatre. Shelton spent much of the album’s three-year writing process, as he puts it, “fucked up” and “in the eye of addiction.” Though he’d mostly avoided alcohol — scarred by a childhood surrounded by it — he began drinking at 30. He spiralled as Militarie Gun’s touring intensity picked up, buoyed by their breakout 2023 debut album Life Under the Gun.

“Being on tour all the time was really challenging, and it just ended up being that every day was starting to become, ‘How can I start drinking sooner?’” Shelton says over the phone. “It just kind of snowballed and became its own cycle.”

Now six months sober, Shelton is speaking from a tour van1 as the band treks through California. He’s eager for the world to hear God Save the Gun, which he describes as the group’s most ambitious and rewarding work yet.

“The excitement of the record, taking a moment to appreciate how far we’ve come as songwriters and musicians, and what we’ve done with this band in a short amount of time is really gratifying,” he says.

Militarie Gun began as Shelton’s pandemic-era side-project. He was, at the time, most prominent for directing music videos and leading hardcore band Regional Justice Center. But Militarie Gun soon took over his life, breaking out as a chaotic and combustible vehicle for his diverse impulses.

How many other bands can rocket through the stomping ‘B A D I D E A’ (originally written for Doja Cat)2 to the soft grunge of ‘Very High’ to the trip-hop of Dazy collaboration ‘Tall People Don’t Live Long’? It’s a short list.

That willingness to take on new sounds is complemented by a hunger to iterate. Militarie Gun’s music may sound kinetic, but it’s also the product of extensive refinement.

“The whole time my goal was to write catchy songs, but I wasn’t skilled enough as a musician to do it,” Shelton says. “I’ve just been working and working and working at unlocking that next level of ability to match what I hear in my mind.”

“Catchy” often comes loaded with commercial implications. Militarie Gun have scored a Taco Bell commercial, and have high-profile fans in Post Malone, Bob Mould and Fred Durst. But Shelton insists that chasing hits has never been the point.

“If we were going for commercialism, we wouldn’t sing about any of the shit that I’m singing about,” he says. “I would make far more digestible topics for everybody if that was the goal.”

Instead, Shelton uses his pop sensibility to smuggle in the macabre. That’s especially clear on the album’s climax, ‘I Won’t Murder Your Friend’, in which he sings directly to loved ones about suicidal thoughts.

The track builds from acoustic strums into harsh, Yeezus-era synths, building up to audio from an interview with comedian David Choe, grieving the suicide of his friend Anthony Bourdain, in which he sobs: “You’re a fucking asshole, dude. You murdered yourself. You killed someone, that person happened to be you, but you couldn’t even show up for yourself.”

“It recontextualised the idea of suicide so much for me,” Shelton says. “I think we’re taught it’s this glorious martyrdom, that you’re kind of above reproach — you’re not allowed to be criticised anymore if you take your own life. I really enjoyed changing the perspective to being about the selfishness of suicide and the impact it has on everyone else.”

“Something that’s kept me on Earth many times is the concept of the person who has to walk in the room and discover my body, or the phone calls to my family members, or the idea that someone would have to come identify my body. I wanted to make a song that took away that glorification of suicide and provided the opposite point of view — to give somebody who’s in that headspace a brutal wake-up call.”

To clear the interview sample, Shelton sent a “very passionate text message” to David Choe. It took three days to hear back, but Choe signed off.

A similar saga played out with Shelton’s dream collaborator, Modest Mouse frontman Isaac Brock, who appears on the interlude ‘Isaac’s Song’. Shelton’s affection for Modest Mouse is long documented, but getting Brock on a song was a “fucking odyssey”.

“Someone gave me his number, and I just texted him like, “Hey Isaac, it’s Ian from Militarie Gun, blah blah blah.” And then he just instantly called me, and I’m like, ‘Oh no, fuck, holy shit—now I have to talk to Isaac Brock on the phone. This is terrifying’.”

What began as Brock singing over ‘Thought You Were Waving’ turned into a fraught back-and-forth. Brock hated the first iteration and didn’t want it to be used, leaving Militarie Gun with a dream link-up that seemed destined for the vault. Then Shelton went to work.

“I took these random pieces he sang, and I made the structure of what ‘Isaac’s Song’ ended up being,” he says. “I sent it to him and said, ‘Hey, I’d really like you to reconsider this. We restructured it, did some stuff to it — let me know what you think.’ And he just said, ‘Sounds good. Use it.’ That was the text.”

For Shelton, that blessing was almost as powerful as the collaboration itself. “The idea that he ended up letting us use it — it’s just so crazy to me. It’s beautiful. Hearing it back in the context of the full record was truly an overwhelming moment.”

“So much of what I want to do is heal my inner child, and so much of what we’ve gotten back from the success of Life Under the Gun was that a lot of the people I’ve looked up to throughout my life have stated their fandom of the band or said something positive to us.”

God Save the Gun is not a recovery record,3 but it concludes on an uplifting note. In our conversation, Shelton zeroes in on the very last line of the album, in which he sings “If you want to keep your life, you have to let it go”:

“That is instructional in a way, but it’s not — I don’t claim to have any answers. I’m not telling anyone how to live their life. But I think if you look at everything happening and decide something isn’t working, then obviously it’s best if it’s left in the past.”

For Ian Shelton, that meant getting sober and putting aside his suicidal ideation. God Save the Gun survives as an artefact from the life he let go — confronting, honest, and immortalised on one of the best rock records of the year.

‘God Save the Gun’ is out October 17 via Loma Vista Recordings. Pre-order on Bandcamp or pre-save on Apple Music.

In Australia, support is available at Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636, Lifeline on 13 11 14, and at MensLine on 1300 789 978.

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Good morning, Bad Sceners. I’m taking a breath this week to tend to the rest of my life, so now’s probably a good time to say a deep, sincere thank you to everyone who has subscribed, read, liked, or just made polite conversation with me about this project.

It is unbearably daunting posting my work, under my own name, on my own project, and the fact so many people care enough to support it in any capacity is perhaps the most rewarding experience of my music journalism journey.

Alongside that, I’m immensely grateful to the artists who’ve spoken with me thus far — Freak Slug and Georgia Maq — and the people behind the scenes who make those interviews happen.

I’m stealth-launching this post, meaning it’s not going out via email to everyone, but if you’re hunting for BAD SCENE reading this week, then congratulations — you found it.

This week, I’m putting together another mixtape of songs I’ve been enjoying over the past week or so. It’s a bit more haphazard than BAD SCENE VOL. 1, as reflected by the stream-of-consciousness writing in this post, so it didn’t feel right to call it a VOL. 2 per se. This one’s more of an in-between. With that said, enjoy, love ya, talk soon.

Could You Love Me? — End It

Since I was introduced to Baltimore hardcore champions End It, I’ve been obsessed. This cover of Maximum Penalty’s 1996 anthem plays it straight, because why fix something that’s not broken? It’s just straight up an exhibition for Akil Godsey, a vocalist with golden tonsils who can wail just as well as he screams. ‘Could You Love Me?’ also has a chorus for the ages — shout-out Maximum Penalty — so I’m incredibly grateful End It have brought this one back for a new generation.

Go see End It with Scowl and Secret World on their Australian tour — not a sponsored plug, I just want this tour to sell really well so they come back ASAP.

All My Friends Are so Depressed — Joyce Manor

I haven’t seen this song get a lot of love from my trusted corners of the internet, and I get it. “Joyce Manor doing The Smiths” is the kind of thing that can easily veer off the rails, and maybe I’m being blinded by my biases in loving this, but I do.

Joyce Manor is phenomenal at writing weird shit that somehow finds a way to resonate (c.f. the entirety of ‘Constant Headache’). Case in point on this one: “Easy come and easy go/Dishwasher just over-flowed/Keylime pie and Frampton live/Wish that I would fucking die.” What The Hell, Sure.

Feel It Change — Stella Donnelly

She’s back! When Stella Donnelly first burst onto the scene, her delivery was so distinctly hers that it knocked you off-balance. Now she’s a few albums deep, it’s orienting and comforting. If she were a megastar (which she should be), there’d be a TikTok sub-genre of Zoomers ‘showing you how to make a Stella Donnelly song’ and it would be awful.

‘Feel It Change’ gets into the gritty middle between a damaged love and the sterile anonymity of coming out the other side. It’s not heartbroken, but it’s not painless, and it’s not angry, but there’s bitterness. Getting through the stitches and into the wound is a hard thing to do when you’re writing love, the most universal topic in all of art, but Stella consistently finds ways to sneak through.

Break The Girl — Florence Road

Oh, yeah. This is a very, very fun chorus. This band from Bray could be next up if you’re reading the tea leaves — a Warner deal, an Olivia Rodrigo tour support, and a bunch of really good tracks.

‘Break the Girl’ could be written any time in the last 30 years, and it’d be a hit in any environment. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel, nor does it need to. It’s fast, it’s written tight, and it doesn’t overstay its welcome. Shit, I could learn a thing or two from these women.

Alastair — dust

Real talk: every week or so I mull whether I should just move overseas. There’s never been a strong reason to, but there’s scarcely a really compelling reason not to either. Then I ultimately swayed to stay because I hear another great Australian band appearing, seemingly, out of thin air and I realise I just can’t quit this big old dustbowl.

That’s a long-winded way to say that dust are the real deal. These boys from Newcastle do the fundamentals of post-punk exceptionally. ‘Alastair’ is peppered with fun little twists all throughout — a funky bassline, a speedy chorus designed to be mumbled incoherently in the moshpit and a saxophone. In the hands of a weaker band, it’d be a mess. With dust, it’s impeccable.

NEW AGE — sleepazoid

‘NEW AGE’ opens with such ferocity, I was anxious the rest of the song would be a disappointment. What was I worried about? Nette France doesn’t just meet the challenge, she obliterates it. She’s slick, sensitive, fierce, all the superlatives. ‘NEW AGE’ throws about six different looks at you in its 3:32 runtime, and each one worked to perfection on me.

Wasp — Wednesday

Bleeds was always going to be an Album of the Year contender. Wednesday were on every critic’s radar after Rat See God, guitarist MJ Lenderman’s solo blow-up had them teetering adjacent to the mainstream, and the tactful choice of leading the album with the gorgeous ‘Elderberry Wine’ lulled everyone into a false sense of comfort.

But of course it wasn’t going to be cosy. This is Wednesday. And ‘Wasp’ might be the most ferocious song they’ve done. It’s a straight up thrasher, and the fact Karly Hartzman does this night on night without ending up in hospital might be among her finest achievements.

Light Sleeper — Home Front

Edmonton punk duo Home Front have a sense of grandeur to everything they do. They know how to cultivate a sense of the aura, between the swelling synths that underwrite their pacey drums and ripping guitar, and their shouty duo vocals land somewhere between Death Grips and Sleaford Mods (a compliment, I swear).

‘Light Sleeper’ is one of their straighter cuts, almost invoking something spacey at times, but it’s a good jumping on point if you’re not already across their work.

GODSPEED — These New South Whales

I tried not to write about any acts I covered in my first BAD SCENE post, but I just can’t help myself. ‘GODSPEED’ is the second single and title track of These New South Whales’ latest album and it affirms a hunch I’ve had: this is going to be their best work yet.

It’s a huge level up. They’ve gone from one of Australia’s great bands to, quite possibly, our very best. ‘GODSPEED’ works on every level. It’s just a very pleasant-sounding song, taking the best of Britpop and keeping the grit in there, but it’s also a beautifully composed track. Frontman Jamie Timony is singing about his experience leaving Alcoholics Anonymous after nine years, and he breathes life into every line. Something like the closing stanza — “Don’t let anyone in your life tell you what you can’t or can’t do/The choice is yours/Godspeed” — could be tacky in less sincere hands, but with Timony it’s genuinely spine-tingling.

Hell is an Airport — Liquid Mike

Liquid Mike is the easiest and hardest band to write about. On one hand, how much there is to gush about. On the other, how do I steer away from the obvious? I mean, yeah, Mike Maple sounds great and their songs are insanely catchy and every time it’s well written, and of course it rips. But isn’t it boring that I say this every time?

I think my favourite part of this song, personally, is the way Mike’s vocals hang a little near the end of each line on the first verse. It’s very Chris Farren, which means it’s very good. Shout-out Chris Farren.

Also on the playlist…

We Dont Count - Yves Tumour & NINA

Pop Punk Anthem (Sorry for the Delay) — Die Spitz

Shameless Faces (even the guy who made the thing was a piece of shit) — Algernon Cadwallader

Trenches — Maruja

Cinder Block — Samia

Scared of Everything and Nothing — DRAIN

Hurt You Bad — Angel Du$t

Throw Me Away — Militarie Gun

second spring — Total Wife

Leading Man Lost — Selve

Maia Maia — Nia Archives & CLIPZ

Hesitate — FOOTBALLHEAD

Between the X’s — Camp Trash

Superglue — PONY

Barroom Wonder — Lawn

Masquerade — Cardinals

Drag — Yumi Zouma

Nosebleed — Weakened Friends

Every Day Without Fail — Guitar

Change My Mind — Phantastic Ferniture

Life of Mine — C.Y.M. & Day Wave

Sediment — Glean

PEACE — Speed

Lose It Again — Hatchie

Crush — Grumpy

want someone — The Empty Threats

Check out the playlist on Apple Music if you’re so inclined.

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“I think everyone in Australia hates me,” Georgia Maq tells me from her adopted home of Los Angeles.

“I think that all the time. And maybe they don’t. Maybe no one cares. Maybe no one gives a single shit about whatever the fuck I’m doing or thinking.”

We’re both trying not to talk too much about the past. We are, after all, on this call to discuss her phenomenal new EP God’s Favourite, a country-focused reset that sees the former Camp Cope vocalist sounding sharper and more spectacular than ever.

Still, a legacy as large as Maq’s casts a long shadow, and the conversation keeps drifting back towards Australia, which Maq left many years ago. At one point in our call, discussing it brings her to tears.

“I don’t know how anybody feels about me in Australia anymore and I don’t know how I feel about them,” she says. “It’s complicated because when I left, I ran.”

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Those around Australian music over the last decade understand why Maq, in her words, ran. Camp Cope were first and foremost one of Australia’s best bands of the decade, but they were also at the epicentre of an industry culture war around gender.

They became reluctant martyrs, because they were three women, and because they made music on their terms, and because they had the so-called audacity to demand safety and respect at their workplace.

Maq has complicated feelings about Camp Cope, which dissolved amicably in 2023. She thinks the music “sucks” (strictly because of her input, not her bandmates’, she stresses), but also worries it’ll be thought of as her peak.

“I have fears that I’m like, ‘Was Camp Cope the best thing that I ever did? Was that my prime? Is that the most I’m ever gonna be able to do?’” Maq says. “I’m so critical of myself. I listen to it and I’m like, ‘Who in their right mind enjoyed this?’”1

She feels similarly about her 2019 solo debut, Pleaser, which she at one point wanted to completely erase from the internet.

“I fucking hate that record. I almost wanted to destroy that entire era because I’m so embarrassed by it,” she says.

“But then, when I was on tour, this trans woman came up to me at a show and said she realised who she was, and realised she was trans, when she saw the cover of Pleaser.

“I was like, ‘Oh, it’s all worth it, me hating this record and not wanting it to ever be heard again’. Now my feelings have changed, because it helped someone figure out who they were.”

Georgia Maq has a more straightforward relationship with God’s Favourite: it’s good, and she knows it. Her first project since moving to the United States, it’s an intimate and bluesy EP produced entirely by close friend Daniel Fox. It’s, in Maq’s words, the music she’s “meant to be” singing over.

“I always had that feeling but didn’t do it because I didn’t think it was cool, or the tools weren’t available to me in Australia, and I wasn’t good at guitar,” Maq says. “Now, I’m better at guitar, better at other things, I know a lot of people who play a lot of instruments.”

The star of God’s Favourite is Maq’s vocal performance, which is far and away the most captivating she’s ever sounded. In Camp Cope, Maq’s voice shone in an entirely different light — it was jagged, potent, and could go from conversational to riot-starting on a dime. God’s Favourite is comparatively gentle — to borrow a word from Maq — “pretty”.

“I got vocal nodules from singing in Camp Cope, and I had to get three vocal surgeries, and that was so fucked up,” she says.

“Then I found this singer on TikTok who offered lessons, and she taught me how to sing the way Ariana Grande sings. I did maybe three or four lessons with her, and she changed my fucking life. I learnt not to scream or belt anymore — I did it in a safer and nicer sounding way.”

The shift in Maq’s singing allows her songwriting to shine in new ways, too. ‘Citronella’ was the last song on the project to be finished, and it’s one of the strongest.

Written on Maq’s porch, it’s cryptic and lingers in the middle ground between the cheeky (“Being what you can’t handle/And too cute to cancel/Oh well, that’s me”) and the diaristic (“Eucalyptus in the bathroom/Coffee stains on white sheets”).

“I like to keep things open for interpretation a lot of the time these days,” she says. “I don’t even know what it’s about. Just being insane, probably. I don’t know. Romance, being complicated, all that kind of stuff.”

Maq can be coy about the meaning behind her songs. As a friend opined to me, Maq’s music seems to have a lot of herself in it, even for an artist. That can make it difficult to discuss at length, something Maq gestures towards late in our conversation.

“It feels weird talking about some of the songs, because they're very obviously not about the happiest human experiences that a person can have,” she says. “Talking about them feels kind of embarrassing, in a way. It is a weird part of this.”

Still, Maq is generous in confronting the strangeness. One of the EP singles, ‘Slightly Below the Middle’, pays tribute to her late father, Hugh McDonald, famed for his work in Redgum. The track weaves in The Charlie Daniels Band classic ‘The Devil Went Down to Georgia’, a song he often played during her childhood.

“I think I’ll be singing about my dad forever. It feels like communicating beyond the grave, the songs are a Ouija board or something,” she says. “I’m talking to my dad and trying to continue his legacy of being completely fucking nuts.”

Maq’s mum also gets a mention across the last two songs of God’s Favourite, ‘The LA River’ and ‘Mercy & Grace’.

“I didn’t have a huge amount of appreciation for my mum for a lot of my life. I feel like putting her into songs is making up for that a bit. She’s the fucking best person in the entire world,” Maq says.

“The choruses are essentially saying the same thing in a different way, and they’re both directed at my mum. They’re kind of depressing. They say some really sad things in a beautiful way. I just love my mum, she’s so cool and so rad.”

As Maq says this, I realise she’s stayed on the call for about 20 minutes longer than the allocated time. She’s been generous with not only her candour, but her time. Some of the things mentioned on the call but not detailed in this article: the Jersey Shore blanket she’s knitting, a Las Vegas trip, a Sims save she made where all the men are locked in her basement (“normal girl hobbies”), and vaping.

Still, what I come back to long after our call’s ended is something Maq said right before pausing to wipe away tears. I ask her whether, despite the conflicted feelings about her musical career in Australia, she could also see the good she’d achieved alongside Camp Cope.

“I hope so. I hope I did something,” Maq says. “I’ve always just wanted to do good in the world.”

Maq has already well and truly achieved that goal. She was a nurse in Melbourne during the COVID-19 pandemic. She was one-third of an all-time great Australian band. She was instrumental in the introduction of anti-harassment hotlines at festivals and calling out gender imbalances on lineups.

She spoke about her own traumatic experiences to help others feel less alone with theirs, and she’s had an indelible impact on helping many young women in music feel seen in ways most of her male peers did not. Georgia Maq is already a legend of Australian music, even if she may think otherwise.

God’s Favourite feels like the definitive close of one chapter and an exciting start to another. Maq is — as she says elsewhere in our call — staying put, keeping her head down, and working on her shit. It’s giving her the time and space to begin seeing more of the good in herself. We’re all the better for getting to hear the results.

Lead photo credit: Supplied, twnty three.

I love when a song feels at odds with itself, channelling two discordant sensations at once and yet coming together cohesively. It’s a musical magic trick, a sleight of hand that sets you up for one feeling, only to bludgeon you with another. ‘Honest Man’ by Manchester-based Freak Slug, the project of Xenya Genovese, is one of those tracks.

‘Honest Man’ comes into focus fast. It starts mired in sludge, with the rumble of voices from the next room, sharpening as Genovese’s vocals enter the frame. It’s mood manipulation as a science — you yearn for it to clarify, only to be pierced with its directness when it does. It’s aching and intimate, but it’s also a tight and precise snapshot of a very particular feeling. Written six months after a break-up, ‘Honest Man’ lingers in the emotional afterglow of the split, propelling itself forward with the repeated refrain “Every bruise and every cut.”

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Whenever I hear a song like this, I want so badly for the artist to tell me more about how they put it together. And so, for the first edition of BAD SCENE, I asked Freak Slug.

“More and more, I’m writing from a place beyond the body. I don’t think too much when I write now,” she says, joining the Zoom call as she’s making a coffee.

“My process has changed: I’ll sit in my living room with candles and my acoustic guitar, and songs just come subconsciously. It feels spiritual. In the past, I wrote more from the mind, but now I try to go beyond thinking — just doing, just feeling. It’s almost like automatic writing, but with your mouth.

“Sometimes when you’re in a deep conversation, or when you’re helping someone, words just channel through you. I think songwriting can be the same. It’s not just me, Xenya — it’s something bigger, a message that comes through me.”

The turn towards more free-flowing, instinctual songwriting has yielded what might be Freak Slug’s most lavishly detailed song yet. ‘Honest Man’ captures such striking detail, like the churn of hovering over an old photo in the camera roll and dwelling on the moment in time.

“I try to sing and write with as much energy and feeling because once that song's made, that will be forever contained just that way I've delivered. I really wanted the verses to be super upfront and raw,” she says.

“I didn’t want any effects. In a world of over-processing and Auto-Tune — which I don’t have a problem with, I think it’s cool in its own way — but I think this song deserved a really raw upfront vocal and it does its job.”

Freak Slug’s music hasn’t always been raw. Music was at first an outlet for Genovese to blow off steam while studying visual arts in Barcelona, and her early songs are mostly warm lo-fi guitar-driven pop. But once music became her main medium for expression, Freak Slug took off: her impeccably titled 2023 EP Viva La Vulva melds jangly rock indebted to her Manchester heroes The Smiths with spacey, breathy vocals and a sense of whimsy.

That EP was the first building block in what would become Freak Slug’s debut album, I Blow Out Big Candles, released last October. It’s a record that wears its influences proudly. Different listens evoke different inspirations. She sounds a little like Molly Rankin on ‘Be Your Girl’, or Nilufer Yanya on ‘Sexy Lemon’, or Stella Donnelly on ‘Piece Of Cake’. ‘Shiver’ feels like a softer take on The 1975’s thumping pop-rock, without the bombast or obnoxiousness of Matty Healy.

“I’m one of those people who returns to my classics. It takes a lot for me to embrace a new artist as a classic. I usually stay in the ’90s and 2000s, unless something really grabs me,” she says of her influences.

“I love the slacker vibe. I love messy, grungy textures with a bit of satire on top — that’s so me. When I was 20, I listened to Pavement constantly, and even now I love [Pavement frontman Stephen] Malkmus’ solo stuff. They’ve been important bricks in building my taste.”

Just as vital is her home city of Manchester. The city has a proud legacy of legendary rock bands, including many whose DNA lives on through Freak Slug’s music: Joy Division, The Smiths, Oasis, The Durutti Column.

“I’m glad you hear a bit of that in my music. Going forward, I’m really leaning into it, giving an ode to what I love so people don’t forget Manchester’s history,” she says.

“A lot of people move there now who aren’t from there, and sometimes I feel like the city’s cultural significance gets forgotten. Manchester has given so much to the world — I don’t want to forget that.”

As Freak Slug explains, her connection to the culture comes in part from her spiritual side.

“I’m very spiritual. I believe we’ve had many lives on earth. Maybe I’ve lived in the Celtic lands in another life, so I can appreciate Irish and Scottish culture. Looking through that lens, you realise we’re more similar than we think.

“It makes you want to preserve cultures everywhere. I love seeing Irish musicians revive traditional music—it’s like defying the history of it being stripped away. When people hold onto traditions and what makes them who they are, that’s fucking cool.”

It makes me wonder what Freak Slug will make of Australia. She’s set to grace our shores in October, playing three shows ahead of the release of her EP Loose Tooth and a Short Skirt, arriving in November.

“I’m a bit scared of the animals — kangaroos are a wild concept to me. I’m not one to plan too much; we’ll go with the flow,” she says.

“I’ve actually always wanted to come. I once had a dream where I was flying around over the streets of Melbourne, so clearly I want to be there.”

Freak Slug’s dreams come up again not long after. I ask her — out of curiosity more than anything else — about an Instagram post from last Christmas in which she mentions performing the Heimlich manoeuvre on a stranger.

“Lord, thanks for reminding me. Weirdly, I dreamt last night that I was de-choking someone,” she says.

“Christmas Day, I was having a meal with my family. Another family was at the table next to us — mother and daughter. The mum started choking. I asked the daughter if she knew how to help and she said no. People weren’t really taking action, which scared me — there was a life at risk. I asked the mum if I could help, she nodded, and I did back blows and abdominal thrusts. She coughed up this slimy ball of food and started breathing again. Afterwards I told them to please learn how to do the Heimlich manoeuvre because they could’ve lost their mum.”

She finishes her story with a grin and a deadpan: “Gave them a full serious chat — on Christmas Day.”

I suppose if one of the UK’s fastest rising stars can find time to learn the Heimlich in between touring Australia and recording a song as potent as ‘Honest Man’, then there’s really no excuse for the rest of us.

Lead photo credit: @squish.agency

Introductions are always somewhat awkward, but let’s give this our best go. My name’s Reece, I’m a music writer based Down Under and I’m taking the revolutionary step of launching a Substack. Am I the first music writer to ever do this? I assume so! If I’m wrong, you’ll have to subscribe to let me know in the comments.

I’ve been interviewing bands and artists for a while, and I’m hoping to do more of that here. It’s no secret that the architecture of music media is thoroughly broken, especially in this country, so it might be nice to be able to do some things on my terms.

If you’re new to my work, here are some of my personal favourite interviews of mine over the journey: SPEED, Jeff Rosenstock, Little Simz, Good Morning, 1300, Luca Brasi, and The Last Dinner Party. And if you’re an old friend, it’s nice to see you again, how’s the family?

BAD SCENE is a project I’ve been kicking around for a long time now, but I’m excited to finally pull the trigger (thanks to my very patient friends). Like anything new, it’ll find its identity over time, but the founding vision is good conversation with good artists, writing feature-length pieces with a rigour and passion that respects the readership.

We’re lucky in Australia to have so many flourishing acts, new and established, but there’s unfortunately a paucity of coverage that does their work justice. This isn’t a shot at anyone in particular, it’s just a tough economy and those helming publications have plenty of plates spinning at once.

That said, I want to write well and read even better, and hopefully this project can be a small part in fostering an ecosystem that encourages more people here to do the same. I love TikTok as much as the next person, but there’s a nuance and heart to the written word that I don’t think video can ever replace. Plenty of outlets feel otherwise, and I’d love for us to prove them wrong by making something that flourishes in this little corner of the internet.

I came to writing about music because of so many of the greats who inspired me, deepened my passions for the art I love, and helped me see the world in new and beautiful ways. A very non-exhaustive list, but I’m thinking of Lindsay Zoladz and Jeff Weiss and Kristen S. Hé. Outlets like cokemachineglow and VICE AU and Grantland. Articles like Hanif Abdurraqib reflecting on Carly Rae Jepsen’s EMOTION for MTV (tragically, relegated to the Wayback Machine) or Ta-Nehisi Coates going behind the mask on MF DOOM. And, yes, it’s a cliche but Lester Bangs versus Lou Reed, a read that gets more incredible with time.

We’ll get rolling with the interviews soon (publicists, hit me up). In the meantime, here’s an introduction to some of the music I’ve been enjoying lately. Consider it a tasting menu of what BAD SCENE is all about. If you like it, we might get along.

Bad Scene, Everyone’s Fault — Jawbreaker

The only song on this list that isn’t a recent release, but I can’t do an introduction without mentioning the inspiration for BAD SCENE’s name. For me , Jawbreaker is a formative band, and they remain vitally important because they remind me of the one question to always consider when evaluating a song: “Does this song rip?”

When Jawbreaker is involved, the answer is almost always yes.

The Beat — Angel Du$t

Have you just discovered Turnstile? Would you like to get slightly heavier without lurching into anything too scary? Can I introduce you to Justice Tripp, vocalist of Angel Du$t and author of the best tweet ever?

Hey You — The Belair Lip Bombs

There are few sounds sweeter than a band stepping out on their second record and smashing it out of the park. If ‘Hey You’ is any indication, we’re in for a treat of a sophomore effort from The Belair Lip Bombs. It’s is an unequivocal level up from Frankston’s finest, more crisp and assured than anything they’ve put out before. It builds patiently, something you can afford to do when you write this well, and kicks into gear when Maisie Everett nails the gear switch with a well-timed “Motherfucker, just say what you mean.” Already gutted to have missed them tearing it up at Old Bar.

Strobe — Armlock

Armlock are a Melbourne duo who make luscious guitar music on a spectrum that tends to fall between meditative and head-bobbing shoegaze. ‘Strobe’ lands firmly on the former end, and it’s a sonic delight. Armlock’s guitars sound like instruments of healing, and ‘Strobe’ is the latest in a growing line of quiet charmers in their catalogue.

INSTINCT — These New South Whales

Did These New South Whales wake up one day and decide they want to sell out an arena? Because this is the sort of song that sells out an arena. In a fair and just world, they’d already be global sensations for their brand of versatile punk, which sometimes has a ring of Ramones and other times leans grungier. Jamie Timony’s always been dynamic (just watch their short-lived YouTube talk show TUNSW Tonight!), but here he feels like an absolute livewire. And, if you’re not already sold, they’ve only gone and gotten the best video producer in the country in Passive Kneeling to cap off the visuals (strobe warning).

Slightly Below the Middle — Georgia Maq

In the press release for ‘Slightly Below the Middle’, Georgia Maq admits to feeling “shame and embarrassment” when looking back at her catalogue, which is sad because she’s put out plenty of stellar music. I’d say she’s her own harshest critic if she didn’t make the worst kinds of men self-immolate every time she makes a keystroke on the internet. Still, I’m glad Maq and I are both fans of her latest. Country-pop seems to be all the rage at the moment, but few voices are better suited to it than the quiet muscle in Maq’s smoky vocals. I love this one, it’s understated without ever drifting into the background.

Changes — Alien Boy

I hate the winter, but I love a cold night walk. There’s nothing better than a self-absorbed stroll with headphones on where you can revel in your melodrama, and allow yourself to be the main character devoid of inconveniencing anyone else with your narcissism. Please listen to it and try not to mimic Sonic Weber’s indelible hook “Changes got me feeling fucked up/Going me freaking out, like I’ll never be home again” back to yourself at some point in the next 24 hours.

Cowbella — bar italia

Some people see bar italia as the second coming of God, I am not one of those people. That makes it even more intriguing when one of their songs gets its hooks into me. ‘Cowbella’ has a lot of indie sleaze in it — is it sacrilege to say it has a bit of Dandy Warhols about it? It feels like bar italia are having a lot of fun on ‘Cowbella’, and I have fun when people are having fun (so long as they’re nice), so this one gets a big tick.

B A D I D E A — Militarie Gun

A few months back, I saw California’s own Militarie Gun battle bravely in front of a mostly disinterested crowd of ageing emos at a Touche Amore gig. Still, even the most sour-faced holdouts couldn’t resist the allure of ‘B A D I D E A’ when it hit. Frontman Ian Shelton embodied the song’s energy: skittering around the stage, wrestling with the mic stand like his life depends on it. The song runs 109 seconds, and each one feels like treading water in raging seas. And if that doesn’t win you over, at least stick around for the most fun spelling-related chorus this side of Chappell Roan.

Garden of the heart — Bootleg Baby, Sidney Phillips & lil ket

A bombshell revelation: sometimes. I like songs that don’t have guitars. Once upon a time, I briefly had a rap column. I’m a big fan of Sidney Phillips and lil ket, who sometimes thrive because they conjure up pockets amid a maelstrom of chaos, but I personally love it most when they’re gliding on tracks like this. Over Bootleg Baby’s quiet, stuttering drum and a piano loop, without much to hide behind, Sidney and ket do their thing in a way that creeps up on you. It’s affecting, charming and a big part of why I ride for both artists.

Shoutout Australian music media titan Ben Madden for putting me onto these two — I’d everyone you to subscribe to Spin To Win, but I’m near certain if you’re reading this then you already have.

Mermaid — Water Maze

Last year I went to Tokyo and stumbled across Water Maze, one of my favourite new bands, playing to about a dozen people in an upstairs living room. They’re messy and brash, crackling with the type of brilliance of some kids who don’t yet realise just how good they are. Their latest EP ‘PAST BEACH, FAST DREAM!’ feels like combing through the shrapnel of a cohesive project that was recorded then detonated before ever being released. ‘Mermaid’ is one of their most fun tracks yet, full of twists and turns that kept me grinning the whole way through. Sometimes they sounds like The Strokes, other times it sounds like they’re about to break your window.

Also bumping…

Signal Them In — Camp Trash

The Fool — CIVIC

Stealing Happiness from Tomorrow — DRAIN

Drawbacks — dust

Fuck Me Eyes — Ethel Cain

Ball & Chain — Preservation & Gabe ‘Nandez

Break Right — Hotline TNT

VCRs — JID & Vince Staples

Pillman’s Got a Gun — Jobber

Claws — Liquid Mike

Bankroll Peelers — Naeem & Spank Rock

Toyota Camry — Radio Free Alice

Worldwide — Snõõper

milk of the madonnna — Deftones

Unscarred — Teen Jesus and the Jean Teasers

Somebody New — Tunde Adebimpe

Uno II — Viagra Boys

Pick Up That Knife — Wednesday

Honestly — White Reaper

If you’d like to get it all on a playlist, you can follow along on Apple Music. Spotify can get in the bin.

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