The Underground Stage
Every week I scour the latest releases from emerging, DIY, and independent artists in Australia. The best of them end up on the playlist. Follow The Playlist Listen to this week’s edition here, 100% made up of the best brand-new music from the best new artists in Australia – never pay-to-play, and always only new […]
Lock it in (and start planning now!) SXSW Sydney has announced that the dates for the 2025 edition of the event (their third) will be happening 13-19th October 2025, which runs the full Monday to Sunday. If memory serves, that’ll make it the first year that officially runs right up to the Sunday – in […]
“Carla Wehbe really seems to be enjoying this. Accompanied tonight by (someone put a leash on my excitable heart) no less than Charlie Collins, it’s a close-up acoustic session made of classic pop covers that matter to and have inspired her (ABBA, Swift, Roan, Wheatus) but interspersed with crowd-chosen originals – a festival of singalongs […]
“Mikayla Pasterfield sings many songs about heartbreak, and okay, yeah, so far, so singer-songwriter, right? BUT. The depth of emotion here is enough to give you vertigo, the stories are near-blinding in their clarity, and the voice isn’t so much a tear-jerker as something that reaches into your face and squeezes your eyeballs dry of […]
“Haley Holgate’s fabulous solo set barely raises its voice above a whisper, but the stories and the emotion that pour off the stage yank your head around towards it, demanding attention. The sharp wit and the keen observations match with engaging narrative and rich musicality to leave you far better off than you were when […]
“Chimers sell out tonight’s show, density in crowd and sound. There may only be two of them, but Chimers make a hell of a racket, packing more noise into songs than two people should reasonably make, a pounding bag of tracks delivered with poise and precision. With enough thudding urgency to alarm the most placid […]
“I’ve seen Antenna twice in just a few weeks, both times right at the end of the year, and in those two short shows they’re now basically camped out towards the top of my holy-cow-I’m-glad-I-caught-that-show list. Immediate doesn’t quite cover it – this set causes a reaction like Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction, a massive […]
“Cammy Cautious and the Wrestlers are – even for them – particularly skittish and jittery tonight, a wired set of high intensity and tempo. Their trademark sandpaper still takes layers of skin off with its usual efficiency, but tonight it flies off the bone even faster than normal.” Gallery Listen
“Sevilles play a fully whimsical set, dreamy and smoky and full of imagination. There’s melancholy written through it too, but it’s never cloying or suffocating, a sharp breeze always cutting through the haze.” Gallery