This week for Playing Melbourne, we’re taking a detour up the East Coast of Australia to Queensland, where 3-piece band The Disgruntled Taxpayers are based in the capital city, Brisbane. We’re taking this long, humid and scenic trip because...
Raven Mahon doesn’t do predictable. The mixed-media designer is also a musician, currently half of The Green Child with Mikey Young (of Eddy Current Suppression Ring and Total Control). The duo started out as a long-distance collaboration, but Mahon...
Born and raised in Melbourne’s Eastern suburbs, Taylah Carroll recalls entertaining her family and friends with musical performances from an early age, often until her audience relented and sought escape. It was never Carroll who ended a performance. Now,...
January is not necessarily going to be the big refreshing escape from the year we’ve had, going by the news and the pandemic numbers. It won’t be the celebratory holidays we may have anticipated months ago. But what hasn’t...
In the 1930s, as the world sunk into an unprecedented economic depression, Ted Koehler and Harold Arlen’s song “Get Happy” prompted the American public to “forget your troubles,” “shout Hallelujah” and “chase all your cares away.” The simplicity of...
Twenty-five years ago, the Smashing Pumpkins released Mellon Collie and The Infinite Sadness, an epic double album packed with ferocious industrial-style rock like “Zero” and “Bullet With Butterfly Wings” but also with nostalgic, sentimental tracks, fuzzy with youthful romance,...
Noelani Petero is on a mission to bring back early the iconic 2000s R&B sound. The Melbourne-based singer-songwriter is unabashedly old-school in her approach to hip-hop and super-smooth R&B in the vein of Janet Jackson, Lauryn Hill and Aaliyah....
Elle Graham is a Melbourne transplant, having moved with her piano from Townsville, in regional Queensland, to the hub of Australian indie music. Best known as Woodes, she released her debut album Crystal Ball on November 13 – an...
Something For Kate is, like black coffee and rooftop beer gardens, fundamentally part of Melbourne. The trio – guitarist/keyboardist/vocalist Paul Dempsey, drummer Clint Hyndman and bassist Stephanie Ashworth – have been performing and releasing albums since the mid-1990s. Their...
Katie Wighton, the Melbourne-based singer/songwriter best known for fronting All Our Exes Live in Texas, was feeling sentimental, so she started going through old videos on her phone – some from a decade ago, others from the “Zoom era”...
What is Australian music? Does it have a signature sound? Ask anyone from Arnhem Land to Arakoola, Melbourne to Mungo, and you’ll get a different response. What can’t be denied is that the original owners of Australian land had...
Zoe Randell and Steve Hassett of Luluc (pronounced “Loo-Luke”) have been riding the rollercoaster of pandemic feels, just like the rest of us. While it wasn’t in their plans to be back in Australia for the indeterminate future, the...
For those who have carved their career as artists, music journalists, publicists, label founders or roadies, there is no question of living, breathing – and working in – music. One woman who knows there is no other endeavour so...
A.A. Williams is a classically trained pianist and cellist, a multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, and vocalist. Her beautiful, dark debut album Forever Blue was recorded in the two-bedroom North London apartment she shares with her husband, bassist Thomas Williams. Released in...
Ghostgirl has just released “Clouds,” a gothic, synth-soaked ballad that channels Massive Attack and Siouxsie and The Banshees. Inspired by living in Reykjavík last year, she wanted to capture the enormity of the landscape and the energy within the...
Thibault may be the best ’90s band that isn’t actually a ’90s band. Nicole Thibault, formerly of experimental jazz band Minimum Chips, has just released her debut album with collaborators Rebecca Liston (of Parsnip), The Ocean Party’s Lachlan Denton,...
Last month, the National Indigenous Music Awards honored dozens of Australian musicians despite pandemic restrictions, as the ceremony was broadcast from Darwin in the Northern Territory to participants and audiences around the entire country. Top honors of the night...
Following the wave of critical acclaim unleashed by three LPs – I Believe You Liar (2010), Insomnia (2011), and There There (2014) – Megan Washington, who performs mononymously as Washington, has returned nearly a decade since her debut with...
A classically trained flautist with an insatiable love for clubbing, it seemed destined that Tamara Kiti would end up behind the decks at some of Australia’s biggest club nights. Melbourne born and raised, Kiti has not only DJ’ed at...
DJ Tigerlily, much like her exotic botanical namesake, is colourful, bold and born to attract excitement wherever she goes. And the Melbourne-born DJ has gone a lot of places in her 28 years, powered by her skills and love...
Bananagun kick off their debut tropicalia-afrobeat-jungle safari mashup album, The True Story of Bananagun, with the lyrics “There is nothing special about me, just another apple on the tree,” but nothing could be further from the truth. This five-piece...
Producer Alice Ivy (otherwise known as Annika Schmarsel) has become a name to know in the Melbourne music scene; her blend of ’90s house beats, lush layers of synths and raw instruments along with a voice sweetly attuned to...
Julia Wilson is a Melbourne success story in the music industry. From an early age, she was immersed in the scene, working in record stores as a teen and shooting for now defunct Melbourne street rag Inpress straight out...
Vivan Vo, aka Small FRY, is a Melbourne-based radio host and artist manager. She has a freshly minted radio show on community radio station 3RRR called Mooncake. The show is dedicated to the broad and colourful spectrum of pan-Asian...