Alien Nosejob’s unhinged, unleashed hardcore is a timeless thrill
Jake Robertson shares his thoughts on opening for Wednesday (awesome), my album theories (inaccurate, sorry) and the secret to a great vomit sound (involves Tupperware).
Alien Nosejob’s ninth LP How a Mosquito Operates takes its name from a 1912 Winsor McCay animation. The six-minute film, hailed as ahead of its time, reportedly made audiences laugh so hard they cried. Watching it over a century later, it’s more eerie than amusing. An anthropomorphised mosquito breaks into a man’s apartment and feeds on him as he sleeps, gorging over and over until the insect becomes so swollen it bursts.
It feels like a fitting companion to the album. Alien Nosejob’s latest record is abrasive, claustrophobic and relentless enough to meet this particularly charged moment in history.
“Time is running out and I don’t even care,” Jake Robertson shrieks on the nihilistic ‘Nowhere to Go’, a song that sums up the album: it seems to revel in its own futility, accepting that things are fucked and all you can control is how loudly you broadcast your rage.
I put a version of this narrative to Robertson. The man behind Alien Nosejob, Robertson tells me he’s “kind of just walked out” of work to jump on the phone and entertain my fervent attempts to intellectualise his album. I ask him if any of the above sounds right.
“Absolutely not,” he laughs, telling me there’s no overall message the album is trying to thread. In fact, most of How a Mosquito Operates was conceived years ago — written about five years back and recorded sometime around 2023. Still, I insist, a song like ‘The Night Before the War’ doesn’t feel any less urgent in 2026.
“Well, I mean, honestly name a year that there wasn’t a war,” Robertson says, fairly enough.
This dance is part of the magic of the Alien Nosejob project. I throw questions at Robertson trying to extract details about the process, the vision, the long-term view, and he very politely explains to me that there isn’t really one.
A harsher sceptic might call bullshit — Alien Nosejob records are fun and messy in all the best ways, but they don’t feel off-handed or thrown together. There’s a lavish craft behind what Robertson does, from the way his guitar pinballs around the track on ‘Westside Story’ to the curious and charming stuttering start to ‘Neo’.
But I don’t get the sense anything about Robertson is a cultivated persona.1 When Alien Nosejob got the call to open for Wednesday’s Melbourne show in May, Robertson tells me he was mostly concerned with finding out from mutual friends whether the Asheville rockstars were good folks.
“We pretty much did that show based on the fact that they were really nice people,” he says, admitting he hadn’t really heard much Wednesday prior to the gig. “I wasn’t really expecting to love the show, but it was actually awesome.”
Alien Nosejob came to be in 2018 while Robertson was playing in Ausmuteants, the band he co-founded with Billy Gardner in Geelong. At the time, Ausmuteants were about a year away from scoring a nomination for the Australian Music Prize and were at the height of their powers. Alien Nosejob was an anonymous outlet for Robertson to dabble. Since then, it’s grown into a full live band and Robertson’s main project.
Its sound has shape-shifted on more or less every release. Picking up a random Alien Nosejob album is a lucky dip with no losing prizes: Paint It Clear is a sleek, synthy New Wave dream, Turns the Colour of Bad Shit is good old vintage rock and roll, Various Fads and Technological Advancements is a disarmingly unpredictable pop record.
“At the end of the day, I don’t really take what I do very seriously,” he tells me. “The end game of what I was trying to achieve was done pretty much the first time my high school band played a show. That’s the apex already, and I’m just happy continuing doing what I’m doing.”
So, no Grammys or Coachella on the horizon?
“Honestly, this is no disrespect to Coachella, but I feel like if we were asked to play and we did play, I’d probably go for the duration of the set that I played, and then fuck off somewhere else. It’s not something that’s ever interested me,” Robertson says.
“There’s obviously things that I haven’t done that would greatly interest me, like writing music specific for a show or a jingle or something … but from a very young age I told myself that music should not be a way of getting money. If there’s certain paid jobs, awesome, but I never want to be a careerist.”
That mindset imbues Alien Nosejob with a certain kind of creative freedom which comes through on How a Mosquito Operates. It is a hardcore record through and through, drawing from the well of bands like the skittering Canadian punks Neos and the immovably lethal Adrenalin O.D. 2
The album is an absolute blast: every note is shouted (or screamed, choked, anything other than sung, really) and the record feels like the Energizer Bunny doing a Swanton Bomb into a moshpit.
“Hardcore was the first music that I discovered by myself,” Robertson says, before allowing that his brother did put him onto Dead Kennedys. “The rest was either on Soulseek when I was 13 or 14 or finding compilations like the Killed by Death series or Back from the Grave.”
In particular, Robertson says the bands he was most drawn to — the aforementioned Neos and Adrenalin O.D., as well as MDC — “don’t really sound like other hardcore bands from the time and, more importantly, don’t really sound like any current hardcore bands”.
And in the spirit of that, How a Mosquito Operates sounds like no record before it. It is an album that leans into the desperate and disgusting to captivating effect, best surmised by a gnarly hurling sound at the end of ‘Prosecco’.
“I’m not actually vomiting,” Robertson tells me. “Okay, I am. I did stick my fingers down my throat to make myself dry-retch and then I poured water from a Tupperware container into a toilet bowl and recorded that.”3
Alien Nosejob’s album also doesn’t look like any hardcore record in shelves at the moment. Its cover, designed by New York cartoonist Max Burlingame, was made to resemble a comic book.
“I actually hit up a lot of comic book artists, especially ones from the 80s that are retired now, and some seemed interested. But it just got to a point where I was like, ‘if I actually want to get this done, I should probably get someone’,” he says.
“I’ve never met Max, I just sent him a message on Instagram and he got back to me and seemed… I don’t know if stoked is the right word, but at least on board enough.”
What results looks and sounds fresh, even if it is an album Robertson effectively made three years ago. It is one of my favourite hardcore records from this year and in a fair world it would be the breakthrough moment for one of Australia’s most consistently great DIY projects.
But I suspect Jake Robertson is entirely unbothered. He tells me at one point how he felt when Ausmuteants began, a perspective that never shifted.
“I remember when we started, all we would have liked to get to is just being able to put on our own shows and have them roughly attended,” Robertson says.
Fifteen years and an absurd number of records later, the crowds are still turning up. Everything else is just a bonus.
‘How a Mosquito Operates’ is out now on Anti Fade Records. Buy or stream it here.
When I reached out to Jake via email, I said I'd be happy to provide any audience data to him or a publicist to help them weigh up whether this was worth their time. He replied "I don’t need the stats and I’d need to hospitalise myself if I decided to acquire a publicist."
Sorry, tangential, but I have to share this comment from the YouTube upload of Adrenalin O.D.’s ‘The Wacky Hi Jinks’ LP: “I played this album at my job at Godfather’s Pizza in 1986...got fired. My boss named Diane threw the EP and portable turntable in the dumpster and I dumped an uncooked pizza on her goddamned head!!! She had no taste in music at all.”
Tupperware, my inbox is open if you’d like to pitch some sponsored content.