Luke Steele – Common Man
For fans of: MGMT, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, the Sleepy Jackson
After traversing the cosmos with Empire of the Sun, producing pop songs for Beyoncé and trading sequencer settings with Daniel Johns in Dreams, Luke Steele gets back to where he once belonged with Common Man. Steele’s first solo single picks up sonically where the second Sleepy Jackson record left off back in 2006. There’s smatterings of George Harrison-style slide, a gentle pastoral melody and enough backwards bits to suck you into a vortex. Mostly, it seems like Steele is revisiting the style of songwriting that commanded his Sleepy Jackson debut Lovers, with acoustic strumming, thoughtful melodic leaps and beds of wordless vocals, all making for an otherworldly sound without diving into the sci-fi that often made Empire of the Sun seem robotic and forced.
For more: Steele’s debut solo album Listen to the Water is out 13 May.
Missy Higgins – Total Control
For fans of: the Motels, Divinyls, Cyndi Lauper
For someone who showed such preternatural songwriting talent at a tender age, Missy Higgins seems most comfortable when interpreting the songs of others. In 2014, she released a covers album featuring songs from Something For Kate, Slim Dusty and Kylie Minogue, while more recently she recorded a song penned by Tim Minchin and rang in Sydney’s New Year’s Eve celebrations with a Perry Keyes cover. Here, she slays the Motels’s classic Total Control, opting for a faithful rendition rather than a reinvention (if it ain’t broke). Total Control is the title track and gateway drug to her new EP inspired by the calls for widespread change brought about by the horrific experiences and impressive strength of Grace Tame and Brittany Higgins. In this context, it casts Total Control’s yearning lyrics in a new, more urgent light.
For more: Total Control EP is out now.
Beddy Rays – Milk
For fans of: the Get Up Kids, Bodyjar, Tuesday
Avril Lavigne is working with members of Blink-182, and walking tattoo Machine Gun Kelly has a guitar slung around his shoulders in every second promo shot. Pop-punk must be back! In truth, bands such as Brisbane’s Beddy Rays, along with the likes of Bugs and Luca Brasi, have been carrying the pop-punk torch in Australia for the new generation, while stalwarts such as Bodyjar and Frenzal Rhomb continue to sell out venues nationwide. Milk is a tour de force, boasting more hooks than Alf Stewart’s bait shop, tight chorus harmonies, and a gleeful, giddy sense of forward propulsion. “Milk is about breaking out of a rough patch, moving on and reminding yourself that sometimes you need to let go,” frontman Jacko shares. Momentum never sounded so sweet.
For more: Check out recent singles On My Own, Week on Repeat, and Wait a While.
Screamfeeder – Don’t Get Me Started
For fans of: the Hummingbirds, the Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Smudge
“We just need to look away,” sings Kellie Lloyd on the new Screamfeeder single, coming 30 years since the Brisbane band’s debut album Flour, and sounding like it could have been ripped from the same sessions. Despite the fuzzy guitar, 90s pop production and Lloyd’s distinctly twee melodies, Don’t Get Me Started is a tune built for 2022, referencing Trump’s less-than-stellar advice to stare at the sun to avoid Covid, imploring people to turn away from their smartphones, and yearning for slower, more thoughtful reflection in a world of hot takes and reactive culture wars (not to mention the real wars). “Time feels like it doesn’t exist any more anyway,” muses Lloyd in the presser for this single, and listening to Don’t Get Me Started, it seems she has a point.
For more: New album Five Rooms is due out 8 May. The band is touring in June.
Hobsons Bay Coast Guard – Love Song
For fans of: the B-52s, Wavves, Passion Pit
If Prince grew up on the beaches of California, riding a longboard and studying the vocal harmonies of the Beach Boys, he would have arrived at a sound similar to this slinky, sunburnt tune from Hobsons Bay Coast Guard. Love Song has more falsetto than the entire Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, wrapped in tremolo runs and funky chorused-out guitars that urge you to either catch a wave or hit the surf club dancefloor and boogie. Love Song is the latest single from HBCG’s album Tubular Swells, which is chock-full of the same frenetic songwriting and genre-leaping contained here.
For more: Listen to Tubular Swells, or the band’s 2019 self-titled debut.
Archie Roach – One Song
For fans of: Bob Dylan, Paul Kelly, Will Oldham
Archie Roach has spent the last few years looking back. He penned his moving memoir Tell Me Why, re-recorded his classic 1990 debut album Charcoal Lane, and will soon release an anthology spanning his entire career, before heading out on his final national tour. Fittingly, Roach’s new song ends his best-of collection and finds Roach sharing ancient wisdom, reaching across waters, land and time to instruct the younger generations: “Remember well what we have told you, and don’t forget where you come from. Mother earth will always hold you, and you are born of just one song.” Roach’s voice is a remarkable instrument, no longer imbued with the pure, youthful timbre of his earliest work, instead worn and cracked with experience, like hands calloused from a lifetime of honest, good work. This is a beautiful, timeless tune. Hopefully there are many more to follow.
For more: My Songs: 1989-2021 is out on 11 March.
Ball Park Music – Stars in My Eyes
For fans of: the Shins, Spoon, Iron and Wine
Another sublime single from Australia’s most consistent pop band, Stars in My Eyes questions the faulty mechanics of memory as vocalist Sam Cromack looks back on his past romantic self and wonders how much of what he felt was actually real. He also casts forward to the present, hoping he is still able to conjure that same starry-eyed view of life. Like all nostalgia worth its weight, it is bittersweet and blurry, soundtracked nicely by jangly guitars that swoop in and out, and Cromack’s falsetto leaps in the chorus. As with last year’s Sunscreen, this tune adopts a wonky structure, with more than a little ELO informing the spacey distorted last half. Ball Park Music’s forthcoming album, Weirder and Weirder, was recorded in the band’s home studio in Brisbane, and the extra space and time to stretch out experimentally seems to have resulted in their best instincts coming to the fore.
For more: Weirder and Weirder is out 3 June. The band will tour nationally in support of the album.
Jet City Sports Club – She Don’t Need No One
For fans of: Hayley Mary, the Go-Betweens, the Stone Roses
A glimmering shard of sunshine through heavy curtains, She Don’t Need No One contains many small moments of poetic romance: a seatbelt tan line from driving topless in the sun; a momentary crush spawned from the brief touch of an arm; a city not feeling the same any more, despite a 40C day. Sydney four-piece Jet City Sports Club formed in mid-2020 as the pandemic raged. Somehow they managed to enter a studio during this time to lay down an EP’s worth of scorched pop anthems which yearn for lazy summer days that seem now like remnants of a distant past, both sonically and thematically. She Don’t Need No One builds upon this template, with a widescreen sound and an emotive, chiming vocal. Hopefully, they will be able to tour the country soon, brightening the corners of the nation.
For more: Check out their debut EP September Sun.
Body Type – Sex & Rage
For fans of: Sonic Youth, Placebo, Magic Dirt
It’s been four long years since Body Type released new music, a curiously long wait given the momentum built from their twin EPs, rave reviews from the cooler music media around the world, and tours of the UK and US. As with any unexpected period of inactivity these days, the answer is obvious: Covid. Sex & Rage was actually recorded, along with the rest of the band’s forthcoming debut album, in early 2020, before the pandemic laid waste to society (and release dates) as we know it. Two years is a long time, but luckily Sex & Rage explodes out of the gate with an urgency that sounds like it was recorded just the other day. A dissonant lead guitar squarks throughout the entire song as vocalist Sophie McComish bemoans the banality of modern life while celebrating any drips of passion that can be squeezed from it. It’s a decidedly post-Covid notion, backed by a steam-engine rhythm section and some very present production from Jonathan Boulet.
For more: Debut album Everything Is Dangerous But Nothing’s Surprising is out 20 May.
Bones and Jones, Folk Bitch Trio – Friendly Neighbour
For fans of: Lucinda Williams, Gram Parsons, Emmylou Harris
Bones and Jones’s Ginger Gold was an easy contender for Australian album of the year in 2021 – except nobody seemed to be paying attention. Filled to the brim with countrified tunes that seem to breathe the same mountain air as the storied troubadours of Laurel Canyon in the late 60s, it was music well removed from the times. Same goes for Friendly Neighbour, which sees the six-piece team with fellow Melburnians Folk Bitch Trio for a relaxing slice of Americana. With a chorus built upon a rising major scale countered with tumbling drums and more than a liberal smearing of pedal steel, this is a masterful and heartfelt single, apparently recorded in a disused apple cool room. You can almost hear the crispness.
For more: 7-inch Friendly Neighbour / If I Was A Man is out now.
