The Underground StageEssential new music from Australia’s most exciting artists
Lunatics On Pogosticks return after several years apart, and these former Unearthed High winners have grown up to learn some of the harder lessons life has to offer. Without so much as a trigger warning for suicidal thoughts and depression, this return to the fray doesn’t sugarcoat a thing right from the off, with stories […]
Neighbourhood Void go fully Territorial Pissings on their latest slab of high-energy twitching and speeding. Staying only just the right side of being in control, it barrels around like a chainsaw atttached to a whoopee cushion, hugely fun but covered in blood and trauma.
Candy’s new track comes after an episode of derealization experienced by singer Calum Newton last year. He’s described it as a song he wrote to both help get him through it, as well as raise awareness of the experience. While the symptoms sound slightly terrifying, Candy brings a hefty dose of optimism along for the […]
Connor Brooker has always been both prolific and prodigiously talented and it’s a pleasure to see new solo material again, especially when it’s this glorious and adorable. Brooker’s feelings run deep and ‘Miss You’ is similarly all heart, pounding and thumping and churning in those ways that make life both delicious and painful all at […]
After a quick outfit change, Second Idol’s debut arrives with a barrage of guitars, coming as no surprise to those familiar with the band’s previous form as Bruise Pristine. Opening with a ringing wall of sound, it pounds and strides and generally gives you the death stares, right up in your face and absolutely unfliching. […]
Throbbing with menace in the verse, but exploding into ramshackle joy in the chorus, Human Noise’s latest chugs and thrums like an engine. Bookended by a no-nonsense start and a whiplash ending this is smart songwriting, chock full of musical flourishes and sharply observed scenes. Great stuff.
The outstanding Hope D returns with her Cash Only EP and among this excellent set of songs sits this, another sharp set of observational everyday notes elevated into a swaggering digitised stomp of a song. While stylistically this is showing *another* side to her polygonal talent, at the heart of it all lies a questioning […]
Wow – when Carla Geneve lets it all go, you’re going to want to duck. Following on from a series of (musically, not lyrically) more gentle songs, this one is let off its leash and is commanded to go for the throat. “I’ve been listening to screamo / I’ve been feeling real emo… again” goes […]
Over the last year, Start Your Own Cult have morphed from a previous band into this current form, emerging not as a fragile and organic buttterfly, but as something a lot more shiny and technical. Following in the heavy steps of bands like Redhook this has certainly got density and mass, but its armour is […]