Swapmeet are ready for the ascent
The Adelaide four-piece come with plenty of expectations, and they don’t seem the least bit bothered by the hype around 'Mount Zero'.
If you’re in a dimly lit bandroom anywhere in Australia and you listen closely enough, you’ll hear whispers of a band everyone seems to be getting hooked on: Swapmeet. The Adelaide four-piece have been playing together since 2021, but are picking up speed ahead of the release of their debut album Mount Zero (July 17).
It’s already been a big year for Swapmeet. In February, they became the first international act to sign with buzzy Los Angeles indie label Winspear (Wishy, Slow Pulp, Barrie) and immediately parlayed that into a sensational run of shows at SXSW Austin. Since then, pretty much every rock critic worth their salt has earmarked Swapmeet as a band on the rise1
Not that they seem too worried about it all. When Maxwell Elphick and Jack Medlyn — half the band, alongside Venus O’Broin and Joshua Doherty — join the Zoom call, they seem as relaxed talking about their debut album as they are discussing the weather. We’re speaking in May, and I ask whether the impending release of Mount Zero comes with any anxiety.
“We’ve never really been the nervous type,” Elphick says, before adding: “It tends to work in our favour.”
Sure enough, Swapmeet are abundant with assurance. Mount Zero is a spell-binding statement of intent, a debut that feels beyond its years. The record is beautifully textured and tightly composed. It has all the trappings of a familiar, phenomenal guitar record, but makes so many sharp creative choices over its nine tracks that it never runs the risk of feeling played out.
As Elphick tells it, the band’s confidence came from its beginning. While the four bandmates knew each other and played music together across bands in Adelaide’s small rock scene, it took one of O’Broin’s other bands pulling out of a gig at Hotel Metro for Swapmeet to formally play their first show.
“It was mainly our friends, which is really good for a first show,” Elphick said. “After that, it kind of just kept happening. Friends kept coming and brought more friends, and it just boosted our confidence a lot.”
There’s a touch of humility in the band’s retelling (or perhaps every one of Swapmeet’s 13.3K Instagram followers is a friend of a friend), but it explains why Swapmeet, playing for and among friends, have felt comfortable trying new things without fear of failure.
Those bets pay off on Mount Zero: ‘Seeds’ shreds hard, ‘I Know’ flares in such a weird and wonderful way, while ‘Bonny’ fills a gap in lyrics by simply singing “Malcolm in the Middle” in a line that shouldn’t work but absolutely does.
“There’s no one judging, which is awesome,” Medlyn says of the Adelaide scene. He compares the local culture to a school sports day: “Even if your team is losing, people would still cheer you on.”
Mount Zero is a different beast from the Swapmeet live experience. When the band plays together in-person, the guitars seem to swim around one another. On the record, everything feels deliberate and purposeful.
“We realised early on that recording our stuff how we play it live, you need the crazy expensive studio to do that,” Medlyn said. “It just doesn’t sound the same when we do it compared to an epic studio.”
Swapmeet’s workaround was enlisting the most powerful instrument of them all: the laptop. Medlyn self-identifies as the “Ableton legend” of the band and credits Elphick the “Logic legend”, giving Swapmeet a one-two punch in digital production that most bands would die for.
“I remember when we were doing ‘I Know’, there’s this Logic beat repeat plug-in and we put a guitar through it, and it really fit, but we were doing the song in Ableton,” Medlyn said.
“I can’t remember exactly how we ended up doing it, but we’d send it over to Logic and put it through the beat repeat plug-in on Maxwell’s laptop, then send it back … it was so messy, but we got there.”
Mount Zero is more than a technical marvel. There’s a beating heart that runs through the record. The band shares vocals almost as much as they swap around instruments (a lot), and it gives the record a beautiful sense of place and time. It’s not one person’s story so much as a collage of shared experiences from four people who exist in the same small world.
The epitome of this comes on the title track ‘Mount Zero’ — it’s a swirling, magnetic song that floats between voices, peaking with an outro which cross-threads the vocals. As Elphick and Medlyn tell it, they wrote the outro together while lying on the floor and working with a notepad.
“We’d write a line and be like, ‘Oh, this is awesome’ — jumping up, dancing for a little bit — then we’d go to the next one,” Elphick says. “It just got more and more exciting that I wanted to wake everyone up to show them that we’d done it.”
“We had a lot of time to finish that song, and it was really getting to the end of it,” Medlyn adds. “We had to work out this intro, and we were like, ‘We got it! We got it!’’”
There’s palpable excitement in the way Elphick and Medlyn talk about minutiae of making music: feeding your Ableton and Logic concoctions back into one another, writing the line that unlocks the sonic block you were stuck on and so forth.
Swapmeet may be unfazed by the attention gathering around them, but they light up when talking about the tiny decisions that make the songs work. That might be the clearest sign they’re ready for all of it.
'Mount Zero’ is out July 17 via Winspear. Pre-order or pre-save the album here.
And now they’re being featured on the world’s most popular and adored music publication, BAD SCENE! Congratulations, Swapmeet.