NEWS

The last time we spoke with Faisal Ryan, he described his previous EP as a kind of “Viking funeral” for the ’60s pop and rock that had shaped him. Some things, it turns out, survived the fire. The old-school melodies remain, as does that unmistakable ’60s pulse in his drums, but much of the world around them has changed. The polish is giving way to something rawer and grittier, with Ryan now imagining a sound closer to Death From Above 1979 or, in his words, “Motörhead playin

Black Atlantic began, in part, as a way of getting the noise out. When we first spoke, its creator described feeling lighter than he had in years. Music was therapeutic, the project wasn't supposed to end, and the things rattling around inside his head could be pulled out, turned into lyrics and given somewhere else to live. Some time later, the noise hasn't disappeared. But perhaps the distance between the noise has changed. Black Atlantic has continued growing, passing 10,0

There is a strange contradiction at the centre of Levi’s music. It feels enormous, yet very little is fighting for space. Guitars stretch towards the horizon. Synths appear around their edges. Notes are allowed to hang in the air long enough to become something more than melody. Where another musician might see an empty space and instinctively fill it, Levi seems increasingly interested in asking whether anything needs to be there at all. That philosophy sits at the heart of

Quasi Hearts writes from a specific corner of the world that shapes everything about the music. Vaughn Pinxit lives on a dirt road in regional Queensland, off-grid with solar and water tanks, in a house he shares with his wife Louise and a slow, quiet way of working. The project began where most people would call a low point. In 2020 he was made redundant, and after a decade at university earning his PhD, a Centrelink officer suggested he up-skill. He felt a knife go through

Some artists spend their careers chasing the next opportunity. Others spend a lifetime collecting stories worth telling. For the songwriter behind FizikalReck, music has never been about arriving quickly. It's been about paying attention. Across more than four decades of performing through Australia's pub circuit, festivals, clubs and stages in Thailand and Papua New Guinea, he's watched the music industry reinvent itself countless times. Technology has transformed, audiences

For Mira Smrita, being an artist doesn’t begin and end with the music. It exists in the way she presents herself, the way she steps onto a stage and the confidence with which she wants to be remembered. A singer, songwriter and fashion model, Smrita approaches creativity as something larger than any one medium. Fashion feeds into her sense of identity, live performance gives her an opportunity to connect directly with an audience, and songwriting becomes a place to put her th

XääD is Sydney artist Dylan Regtop's ongoing experiment in what happens when you stop trying to belong to any one electronic scene. Built around live looping and a stubborn refusal to pick a lane, the project moves fluidly between deep house, breaks, minimal acid and experimental electronica. The name itself is a bit of an accident that stuck, an offshoot of his slower melancholy side project SääD, whose name is a play on the English word "sad" and the Arabic word "Saad" whic

Annaliesa Rose has been singing her whole life and performing professionally for 27 years, and it shows in the way she talks about her voice. She doesn't overthink it. She learned technique from her mother Marjorie Shepheard and tone from the late Kerrie Biddell, and after long enough it stops being a set of choices and becomes something closer to breathing. What she has done deliberately is build a life. Between Canberra and Wollongong at home, Prague and Brno and Edinburgh

What begins as the story of an ordinary hospitality worker slowly unfolds into a devastating reflection on violence, empathy and the lives we so easily overlook. Built from real experiences, real workplaces and real people, the track blurs the line between personal storytelling and social commentary, proving that some of the most powerful protest songs don't begin with slogans, but with deeply human characters. As the opening track from Dylan's upcoming concept album Develop,

Her Shadow Crown is a Melbourne duo built on quiet risk. Lida (songwriter, vocalist) and Alex (producer) are creative and life partners who make music that treats memory as a raw material, spinning past selves and childhood images into songs that shimmer with vintage pop textures. Lida writes toward younger versions of herself that were never fully understood or given a place, and Alex translates the emotional centre of each song into arrangement, texture and sound in a way t

Sydney’s Inner West rockers Yendys—Sam, Shane, Harry and Nick—are four mates navigating office jobs, rising rehearsal-room costs and the creeping suspicion that escape from the nine-to-five may no longer be possible. Fortunately, they have loud guitars, a shared love of palindromes and a reliable supply of small appliances to raffle off at their shows. Their rowdy, tongue-in-cheek rock ’n’ roll finds honesty in the everyday frustrations of working life without surrendering to

Shire are a band brought together by music. The Brisbane/Meanjin four-piece - Patrick McLeaire, Sylvie Morse, Angus Clifton and Ewan Heslop - came together through different paths while still in high school. Despite their different personalities and influences, three years of playing together have forged the group into what they now call their “final form.” Their debut single, Decay, sits somewhere between dream-pop, shoegaze and post-hardcore, introducing a band interested i

Cherokee Dreams is Joshua Lynchard's most authentic emotional dumping ground. Working primarily solo, pulling together an inherited grunge palette with lo-fi textures, MIDI drums, cassette dubs and hardly discernible narratives. It sits inside a wider constellation of collaborative bands where Joshua usually plays drums a little too fast with wobbly tempos (the Invisible Teardrops, the Dismals, Nightmare Boyzzz), and Cherokee Dreams is the version of him that fully leans into

Hurb Jephasun tells the same story in two languages. The Perth artist works in music and paint simultaneously, letting whichever medium an idea arrives in dictate its final form. Sometimes he wakes up with a fully-formed song already sitting in his head and races to record a demo before it fades. Other times a painting shows up the same way. Both come from the same place, a mind that trusts itself to know what needs to be made and refuses to overthink it into oblivion. The th

Louis Wall writes songs the way a kid takes apart old appliances to see what makes them tick. The Auckland-raised songwriter grew up questioning the normal, seeking the truth in a house where the truth wasn't always around, and music became the one place nobody could tell him he was wrong. He watched his two older sisters own the family SingStar mic and quietly practiced "What About Me" by Shannon Noll on his own time until he could out-score them. He kept the whole thing to

Tonkin Park write with the double consciousness of people who grew up on nu metal and stayed. The Perth band, made up of members in their thirties and forties, spent their formative years inside the primal screams and haunting melodies of Linkin Park, System of a Down, Deftones and Evanescence, and never quite left. What sets them apart is the second inheritance sitting behind that one. Their Filipino heritage plugs them into a deep pocket of the early 2000s metal genre still

Terrestrials arrive with the confidence of a band that knows exactly what it isn't. The South East Melbourne group treat "heavy" as a mood rather than a checklist, weaving jazz, funk, Latin and progressive rock into a dark alt rock foundation that refuses to sit in any one scene's lane. What holds it together is dynamics. Light and dark ambience, tension and release, the space between a hush and a hit. In Melbourne's heavy rooms alongside acts that stay firmly in one style, T

Most Epic Dream is the solo project of Damian Walters, a producer and songwriter who's built a whole world out of restlessness. Started under a name that once sounded aspirational and now reads as a quiet mission statement, the project has shifted through ambient, electronic pop, post-rock, goth and trip-hop over the last decade without ever losing its shape. What holds it together isn't a genre or a scene, it's an emotional register. Damian writes to work through things, to

Blackbird Green writes like someone who has been paying attention for a very long time. The Melbourne project, led by singer-songwriter Simon Ferwerda, has moved through line-ups and long stretches of quiet since 2013, but the through line has always been the same, songs that arrive when they are ready, not when they are demanded. Some of the tracks on the new album Spans were written twenty years ago and quietly put in the bank, waiting for the right moment to be pulled back

Bella Habib doesn’t pick a lane, she picks all of them at once. The 22 year old Sydney alt-pop artist writes from the exact spot where confidence and insecurity, glamour and mess, power and vulnerability sit on top of each other and refuse to separate. Her debut single “Royal Blue” is a study in that push and pull. The colour itself is the mood, expensive and regal on the surface, riptide and treasure underneath, and the song lives in the space between wanting something that