The Underground StageEssential new music from Australia’s most exciting artists
Salarymen return with another irresistible slab of sun-drenched harmony and aw-shucks charm, a gently insistent shuffle. Sure, it throws back to a simpler time, but when times are as tangled as they are today, perhaps we could all do with a bit less complexity. And when it sounds this good, what more would you ask […]
The Buoys crank the generator for their latest, an insistent slice of fizz and energy, all wiry, urgent, and lean. Dead on three minutes long, not a scrap of energy is wasted here – there’s all the urgency and tempo you love but none of the superfluous flourishes you don’t. You’ll be digging out of […]
A Clay J Gladstone track always seems to have more ideas than the average song can hold, and their latest once again strains at its bounds, pulling at the seams holding it together. Teeth clenched and veins bulging, ‘Balance’ hulks out of its clothes, ragged and wild-eyed, coloured in outside of its lines.
Cat & Calmell return with another preview of their forthcoming EP, an everyday tale of breaking down at the roadside and having a bit of a flirt with the strange but helpful chap spraying pesticide on the verges. As bonkers a premise as you’d expect from this outfit, it’s another glorious and giggling cut – […]
Royal Chant set an appropriately regal tone on this new slice of fuzz, standing square and upright and imperious. All that confidence might just be a trick though – while it sounds like you’d need a wrecking ball to knock it over, there are enough wisps of melancholy and weary cynicism in there to give […]
We Are Not Robots’ latest doesn’t so much let the brakes off as cut the lines, mash the accelerator, and close its eyes. Travelling at unsafe speeds of at least a thousand words a minute, it barrels around the room and inside your head, crashing into the inside of your skull and leaving tire tracks […]
Amends burst in with an absolute riot of a track, the jauntiest and most harmony-est song you’re likely to swagger down the street to in a long while. Rich and happy and stubborn and defiant, this is enough to put one last bit of oomph into the weariest of shoulders. Amends are joined on this […]
I’ve no idea what sort of temper Royal Chant were in when they wrote ‘Big Mood’, but it’s working like a charm. While squirrelly little bits of guitar float about the place, swirls of feedback lurk in the background like a threat, with the vocal switching gears on a dime between a drawl, a snarl, […]
Down For Tomorrow return with another slab of roiling, plaintive chuggery, breaking down the hard things in life to simple advice – “just be a good person”. A song as simple and as complicated as its message, the addition of a gloriously bonkers intermezzo – which sounds like you’ve accidentally skipped into an entirely different […]