Carla dal Forno: ‘It’s not about confessing my sins, it’s about admitting things that are tricky to talk about.’ 

| gimmiezine
Original photo: Sanjay Fernandes / handmade mixed-media collage by B.

There’s a sense of quiet clarity running through Confession, the latest album from Carla dal Forno. Written over a year or so, her third full-length record traces shifting emotional states, relationships, and the process of turning inward. It’s a deeply personal work, but one that leaves space for listeners to find themselves in it. Carla spoke to Gimmie about the making of the album, creative doubt, independence, what it means to feel settled, and of finding your people.

CARLA: Life’s been busy. Being a musician, there are these distinct parts where you’re by yourself for a long time when you’re writing the album, and then you get towards releasing it and you’re working with more people.

At the moment, I’m pretty busy, but a lot of it is just administrative stuff and getting ready to play shows — so rehearsal on that. It feels full and exciting. I’m looking forward to releasing my album next week, but also looking forward to getting back into the studio and writing some more music.

Your album Confession is coming out in a week’s time; how do you feel about it now? 

C: I feel really excited and a bit nervous, a bit scared. Are people going to like it? It’s hard to avoid feeling like that, but I’m really happy with it, honestly. I’m just excited for people to hear it.

Are there any particular feelings that you cycle through each time you put an album out?

C: All the feelings [laughs]. There’s lots of distraction, so I guess that’s good. I’m not just sitting in my room at home wondering how it’s going to go down. All the distractions and things I’m doing to get ready for the shows are helping. I also have family up here, so just living day-to-day life is a distraction and helps you keep an even keel.

Where are you now?

C: I’m in Castlemaine, it’s an hour and a half out of Melbourne, Victoria. I think the population is like 5,000, so it’s a small country town. 

Now that you’ve completed the album, is there anything that’s stayed with you since finishing it?

C: This album was hard to write at times, but looking back on it, I feel like the album’s called Confession, and it’s not about confessing my sins as much as admitting to myself, or someone else, feelings, things that are tricky to talk about.

For me, the album, and I think you can hear it sonically, is like when you say something and it feels like a weight off your chest. There’s a lightness afterwards. I think that’s what has stayed with me.

You’ve said that you didn’t intend to make an album like the one you made. I was wondering, going in, what did you intend? What did you think you were going to make?

C: I was listening to a lot of Broadcast at the time before I started the album. I’ve been obsessed with them for, I don’t know, maybe decades, a really long time.

I was reading about how they wrote their last album, Tender Buttons, and how they cut up words and rearranged them. They used this collaging technique and were trying to get away from self-revelation and that kind of thing.

At the time, I was like, talking about my interpersonal relationships is too much hard work. I’m just going to see if I can do something like Broadcast, keep it more abstract.

It just didn’t work for me, though. I couldn’t force it. I just wasn’t connecting with anything I was creating.

What do you feel like is the emotional core of Confession? 

C: There’s a lot of duality in it. I think there’s wanting closeness and wanting distance. There’s a mix of emotions in there, and it’s talking about how, for most of us, we’re constantly moving between different emotional states. That’s what the album represents to me. That movement between fantasy and the mundane and ordinary is mixed into this album. Those two things coexist all the time.

Totally. I think people often think we have to be this or that but things are more nuanced then that and complex and as you mentioned, two opposing things can exist at the same time. I really love the instrumental ‘Drip Drop’.

C: Cheers! I have a DX7 synthesiser that has a really good “drip drop” sound on it and that’s why I named it that. 

There’s four instrumentals on Confession that feel like a bit of a breath or transition. 

C: I saw them as being helpful in that the songs felt like emotional snapshots in time, and the instrumentals could offer a breath in between, or reframe the story to a different time period. Like when you’re watching a movie and there are those montages of landscapes or a change of scenery. I feel like that’s how I wanted the instrumentals to function.

When I was listening to ‘Drip Drop’ it conjured images of standing at the kitchen sink doing dishes or something domestic.

C: It leads nicely into ‘Under the Covers’ which is really about home life. It’s interesting because ‘Going Out’ is almost the opposite of that. It’s like, I want to get out there. But then, like you were saying, ‘Under the Covers’ is more about stability and routine.

I’ve noticed that often when people talk about your music, they mention melancholy but I feel there’s also a bit of humour in there that often flies under the radar. There’s often really funny lyrics that make me smile.

C: I like to think of it like that too. I like songs that have that kind of tongue-in-cheek quality, and I think I found it to be particularly prevalent in Australian music, Australian DIY music, bands like The Cannanes and The Garbage & the Flowers. I’ve listened to that stuff for a long time and kind of tried to imitate it. I really love it. I want to amuse myself when I’m writing a song as well.

Your delivery on song ‘Confession’ seems like you’re amused.

C: I wrote that song and had the vocal melodies, and had no lyrics for a while. That doesn’t always work like that, sometimes the lyrics come straight away.

That one was kind of hard to write the lyrics for. I had this lilting vocal melody that I really enjoyed, but I didn’t know what the song was about.

I was giving my kids a bath one night, and those words came into my head. I thought, oh, this is funny. “Confession” is kind of a very loaded word, and I really enjoyed using that and playing around with it.

I love when fun creative ideas often come when we’re doing ordinary everyday tasks. I find I get that when I’m driving. 

C: I have read somewhere that driving is particularly good, going for a walk, anything where you’re in motion. It connects with that flow state, where you’re already in motion, literally in a car or walking, and it taps into a different part of your brain.

I agree with you. I’ve had some of my best ideas when I’m just moving around the house, not sitting down and taking myself too seriously as an artist, for example.

One of the songs on the new album came to you when you were out painting?

C: ‘I Go Back’ is the first song I’ve come up with in that kind of environment, and it just felt really nice. It felt like I was enjoying being outdoors.

I’d written the rest of the album and felt some sort of resolution internally, with all of these different relationships I’d been talking about in the music. It felt like a good time to be reflecting on where I was at.

Where did the title for that one come from?

C: Those lyrics, I wrote them really easily. They just seemed to come to me. It’s a bit ambiguous, even to myself, why I’m saying “I go back.” I think it’s kind of like sometimes you go out looking to other people, to relationships, to give you something, and then when you go back to yourself, you can discover that what you need is already there. It sounds a bit cliché, but I feel like that was the intention.

The record centres on friendship and that becoming a little bit more complex. What sparked that theme? 

C: When I first started the record, I didn’t want to write about my personal life, and I just wasn’t writing anything I was happy with. I think when I started to write about my relationships, I felt like I had something to say. It wasn’t necessarily something I wanted to do, but I found that I liked the work I was creating when I focused on those themes, so it became exciting and motivating.

Are you the kind of person who writes through their feelings when they’re happening? Or do you need distance from that? 

C: Both. Some of these songs were written whilst I was very much caught up in the feelings that they evoke.

The record took over a year to make?

C: The bulk of it was probably done in two years, between two and three years. I just really wanted to give myself space this time to write a record where I was really happy with every single track, and it felt cohesive. So I just did that. I didn’t worry about deadlines. I self-release, so there’s no one there pressuring me except myself.

Do you self-release because you don’t enjoy how the industry does things? 

C:  I like having control. I think that’s why I’m a solo artist as well, because I can get really focused on all of the details, and having it all within my control feels good to me, even though it can be time-consuming.

I definitely think there’s a lack of transparency in the music industry, working with labels and stuff. But I was really lucky that my partner worked for the label I was on for my first release. When that label closed down, it was his suggestion to self-release, and he helps me run it and does all the administrative tasks behind it.

It’s hard to know what a major label or a larger indie label would have done for my career, but I’m happy to be able to do things on my own terms and when I want to.

It feels like a rejection of the capitalist model as well. I mean, that’s a big statement, maybe, but this stuff that we do that we love, doesn’t have to have heaps of money thrown at it all the time and then be commodified. I don’t want to be a content creator.

What part of the creative process do you enjoy the most? 

C: I enjoy the process most when I’ve got a few tracks under my belt and I have faith in the project I’m working on. I find starting with a clean slate really tough, that self-doubt that creeps in. Am I going to be able to write a good song again? Am I going to be able to make another album?

So, the stage where I’m happy with a number of things and I can see the finish line, that feels like a really nice place to be.

Before music, you were doing fine art. I’ve read that it wasn’t until you started making music that you felt more confident and able to express yourself. I was wondering, how did music give you that confidence? What was it about music that allowed that shift?

C: When I started going to see bands in Melbourne and making friends with people in bands, it all felt very inclusive and accepting of different abilities and interests. That felt really different to art school and the art world.

When I said to a friend, “Hey, do you want to start a band?” I didn’t really know how to play guitar beyond a couple of chords. He was like, “Yeah, absolutely,” and we just started it with another person. They were so encouraging of my first attempts at this kind of project.

Labels were interested as well. My first song came out on a seven-inch, and I was like, oh, great, this is wonderful. I can just keep doing this. There’s a tiny audience, but people are encouraging and supportive.

I’ve written for an art magazine for over a decade so I know the art world can be a bit hard. There’s a lot of bougieness. 

C: Yeah, I think I found it a challenge. I’m sure other people have different experiences but that was mine. It’s a weird place, lots of politics. I was pretty young when I was there and naïve, and I don’t think I really understood the environment I was in. At art school, it was like, “Hey, we’re not going to teach you how to do any art.” That was the vibe.

By the way, I really love your paintings Looking at them makes me feel calm.

C: Oh, that’s great. I hope to capture that, something kind of distilled. 

I love the landscapes, and especially the clouds, you paint. Your colour choices are divine.

C: I live in the country now, so I see the sunset every day. We live on top of a hill, and all you can see is clouds, sunsets and the bush. It’s definitely been great for getting back into painting.

You made your film clip for ‘Going Out’ near where you live? 

C: Yeah, Guildford. It’s a little town just outside of Castlemaine, much smaller though.

I just stomped around the fields there with a friend of mine [Hanna Chetwin] who lives in town. She’s a filmmaker, she’s my best friend, so it was really fun. We hung out for the day, took a thermos, had a cup of tea and a biscuit. She was like, “Why don’t you try this?” and I was like, “Yeah, sure, I’ll try that.”

It’s been really nice. It felt nice to make film clips with local artists and people I know for this album cycle as well, because the themes of the album are so much about friendship and relationships.

The album was recorded in a 1930s, partially decommissioned, hospital space?

C: Yeah, well I’m in it now. This is my studio in the hospital. It’s a strange place. It’s a great place for artists and self-employed practitioners. There are so many little rooms all over the hospital being used by different people, but it has this weird vibe. It was decommissioned 30 years ago and hasn’t been updated since. It’s a crazy place.

Previously, you’ve talked about how different new environments often help shape your work. How did the hospital space help shape things?

C: There’s lots of space and eerie little pockets, but it’s kind of like you feel like a small child wandering around. It’s almost like creeping into a building you shouldn’t really be in, and that can feel playful as well. I didn’t intentionally set out to make a record that reflected this space, but when I got to the end of it, I could draw connections.

Was there anything that was a struggle making the album?

C: The beginning was really hard when I was trying to do something that wasn’t fitting, that wasn’t working. Once I wrote ‘Going Out’ which was the first track I wrote for the album, and I had something I was really happy with, it got a bit easier. I felt like I was on the path.

But beginnings are always hard because you feel like there’s such a mountain of work that still needs to be done, and you have no idea what it’s going to be like.

What about the end of the project? I often hear people say that the last 10% of finishing something is hard. 

C: When I know what I have to do, I’m okay. I’m pretty good at slogging on. For me, definitely it’s the beginning of the album that’s a struggle. The end, I can get through it.

Was there a song where things really started to come together for you?

C: ‘Under the Covers’ was a really nice moment to land on, because I had written — it’s hard to remember — but I think I’d written ‘Going Out’ and ‘Blue Skies’ and ‘Confession’.

‘Under the Covers’ felt like a slightly different angle, a change of pace and a change of mood. I liked those polar opposites between feelings of chasing someone and being content with someone.

When making your last album, Come Around, you were balancing having a young child with being creative and you felt pressed for time and finding space to create. Has your relationship to time and having a creative space changed since then?

C: Yeah, I now have a studio off-site, so that’s been good. It gives you the space to just focus on my work, rather than being in a family space.

I’ve really liked that. I’d say this album isn’t about my kids or having kids, but I think I decided I really needed to look at myself and what my issues were when I had kids. I started going to therapy, and I think that has influenced the themes of the record. There’s a lot of self-examination and pulling apart why I’m feeling certain ways.

Do you find it hard to really look at yourself sometimes? 

C: Yeah, I think we all do, really. We’re always going to be a bit of a mystery to ourselves, why we respond to certain events or certain people in certain ways.

I find it interesting. Some people might say it’s just navel-gazing, constantly looking inwards and thinking about how you’re feeling. But being vulnerable and showing those struggles to other people, that’s the kind of work I respond to. I feel like I’ve learned something about myself through someone else talking about their own experiences.

Is there anything you learned about yourself for making the record? 

C: Lots! What I’m getting better at is observing and saying, okay, I’m having this feeling or I’m having this experience, and I’m acknowledging it, but action isn’t necessarily required. It’s a really healthy thing to aim for. 

Is there anything you do to kind of step away and recharge for yourself? 

C: I like gardening. I like going for a run in the morning and painting, sometimes. I do a bit of painting, when music’s getting hard and I do music when painting’s getting hard [laughs].

Are they two different or similar things for you? 

C: They’re pretty different. I feel way more confident as a musician. I feel like my professional level and my skill set are high. With painting, I still feel like a real novice, and I like having that as well. It’s good to feel like you don’t know what you’re doing.

Yeah, and no matter how good you are at something, I feel there’s always so much more you can still learn from whatever you’re doing. The goal is to, hopefully, keep learning forever. 

C: For sure. It’s the joy of it as well, isn’t it? 

Absolutely!

C: The sensory overload of having small kids at home, it’s a lot, so going to the studio is definitely that as well for me, the kind of stillness is really valuable. 

What’s something that’s just made you really, really joyful and happy, lately?

C: This album, part of it is about moving to a small country town, having friends, and figuring out if they’re the right friends for me, and what I value in friendship and in relationships.

By the end of it, when I finished writing the album, I felt like I had found my people in a way. Last week, I went away for a night with two friends. We stayed at a little remote wood cottage, cooked dinner together, played cards, and hung out and chatted.

I was so happy for the entirety of that trip. It made me feel really joyful to have found these people.

That sounds perfect. What do you value in friendships? 

C: I value people who are self-aware and can be vulnerable with others, and who can also self-manage. They don’t need you to manage their anxieties or their issues, but they’re generous. This is a massive list, isn’t it? [laughs]. They’re there for you as well if you need.

That’s so lovely.Is there anything that you hope people listening to your new record?

G: I’m hoping people bring their own stories to the record, that they can relate to it, and also just enjoy it as a collection of good songs.

What made you choose to cover the Sunnyboys’ song ‘Alone With You’? 

C:I’ve been listening to that since I was a child. My dad was in a band, and his band used to play support for Sunnyboys a really long time ago, in the ’80s. I’ve grown up with it, and I just really love that band and their music. I relate to those feelings of excitement, but also that unsure quality of being essentially alone but together.

FIND more of Carla’s music HERE. Confession out now via Kallista Records. Catch her live on her Australian tour – tickets HERE. Follow her: @cd__player.

Daily Toll’s kata szász-komlós: “Hope is something that I need…”

| gimmiezine
Original photo: Jhonny Russell / handmade mixed-media collage by B

Daily Toll’s debut album A Profound Non-Event was one of the most beautiful records we heard in 2025. The Sydney band resists easy categorisation, shifting between tenderness, tension and experimentation, both intimate and expansive. 

At its core is the creative partnership of kata szász-komlós and Jasper Craig-Adams, a project that has grown out of shared trust, intuition and a commitment to making things on their own terms.

In this in-depth conversation with Gimmie, Kata reflects on the album as a collective process, grounded in vulnerability, communication and the act of listening. What emerges is not just a portrait of a band becoming, but a way of thinking about art as relational and deeply human.

KATA: Life lately has been good. It was a huge year for us last year. The UK tour, after releasing our debut album, A Profound Non-Event, was just wild. The 16-year-old in me was so stoked. I could feel that younger version of myself living out this dream. It was really fulfilling, and kind of surreal.

On the back of that, lately I’ve been feeling pretty creatively inspired. I feel curious again—about the guitar, and about how to experiment with it as a tool. I’m also trying to find more ways to align my creativity with my social activism.

I’ve been spending a lot of time with my nephew and my family, too. That side of things has been feeling really great with family and friends, just being grounded in that.

And I’ve been writing new stuff with Jasper for Daily Toll. We’ve got some awesome things happening this year. It feels like a mix of creative rejuvenation and creative dreaming.

I love that!

K: Yeah, it’s feeling so good at the moment. 

When we first corresponded about chatting, about a year ago, when you were still in the planning stages of your album release, you mentioned you were coming out of a really dark couple of months. You said you were slowly starting to feel re-inspired by art, community and music again.

K: I wasn’t feeling great about my songwriting or about working in spaces where there wasn’t that alignment. But now I feel like I’m coming out of that. I feel free again. I feel like I’ve come back to where I was when I first started writing music, teaching myself guitar, just figuring it out as I went. There’s this kind of fumbling freedom I’m feeling at the moment, and I’m really leaning into that. I’m loving being there. 

I have an inherent discomfort with creativity and art being commodified in the way it is under colonial capitalism. These things feel sacred to me. If you trace any of our ancestry back far enough, everyone was singing, everyone was making things. Creativity is inherent to how we exist as human beings.

It’s been challenging at times, especially releasing this album and coming up against the music industry, and the different ways people think about what it means to be a musician or to put work into the world. Even in the UK, we encountered perspectives that felt really different to our own.

What struck me most is how differently people relate to their craft. And I do love that difference. I would hate for everything to become homogenised. But it is interesting when you’re confronted with something that sits so far outside your own understanding. There’s something almost comical about it, in a kind of cosmic way.

Right now, Daily Toll is me, Jasper, our friend Milo from Giant Hammer, and our friend David on trumpet. It’s a new formation, which I’m really excited about. It just feels really good. Three of us are gender non-conforming or non-binary, a lot of us are queer, and those identity markers don’t feel like labels so much as part of a shared experience. It feels like our values, and the way we move through the world outside of music, are really aligned.

That can only help a project. Being in a space where you feel like you can truly be yourself, where there’s love, understanding, and a genuine desire to understand one another, it makes everything stronger.

K: It’s really hard dealing with band tensions. It’s painful, and it’s sad. You’re working on something so intimate and vulnerable that it can feel like a breakup at times.

We had people saying, “Just ride it out. Daily Toll is going somewhere. Don’t change it. Just deal with how bad it feels.” And I remember thinking, is everyone completely off? That’s not why I joined a band. I’m not here to cater to someone else’s insecurity.

Lately, though, it’s actually been feeling good to advocate for myself and for my craft. To move through that discomfort and think, okay, that sucked, but what does it open up? What does it make space for?

I feel like I’m moving back into alignment with my values, both relationally and musically. There’s this really invigorating sense of freedom, like I’m going to do what I want to do, and I’m going to do it with people I love and care about. People who will hold me when I need it, and who I’ll show up for in return. That, to me, is the foundation of any kind of relational work.

What are the things that you do value? 

K: Through this project, I’ve really learned how important communication is for me. It’s become a core value. Singing has also played a big part in that. I was never really a singer growing up, and there were times when I would go almost non-verbal, completely in my head. People would be talking to me, and I just couldn’t respond. That happened quite a lot.

So there’s something about singing that feels like a stepping into my voice. I don’t want to overstate it, but it does feel like a kind of owning of that space. Early on in the band, there were times when I couldn’t communicate what I needed to, and it didn’t end well. Now, I really value being able to speak openly, and to know that the people in my life feel they can do the same with me. That there’s trust, openness, and a willingness to learn alongside each other.

That kind of communication is something we need more of in the world as well. The ability to truly listen, to hear each other, and to express our own experiences honestly. Trust is built over time, through how we show up. Integrity is a big one for me. I find it really difficult when someone’s beliefs don’t align with their actions. That kind of disconnect can sit with me for a long time.

At the same time, I’m learning that things aren’t always black and white. There’s nuance in every relationship and every experience. But it’s still important to me to work with people who care about the world, who are paying attention, and who are thinking about the systems we’re all living within and how they shape our lives.

Yes. Sometimes I get so burnt out thinking about these systems and all that’s happening in the world.

K: And that burnout is painful, but also can be a beautiful thing. I’m reminded that it means that we’re in touch with our humanity in a way that a lot of people aren’t. People can scroll past this or move past that very quickly and not be affected. That pain of witnessing what’s occurring in the world is ultimately a really beautiful and important thing to be in touch with.

I keep coming back to what our role is as artists and musicians. I’ve been thinking about this in the art world for a while. I opened up a gallery in my garage in 2019, and a lot of that was about redirecting funds to First Nations organisations and mutual aid funds, instead of it going into the pockets of commercial art galleries here in Sydney, which are incredibly inaccessible. It’s definitely financially inaccessible, and it also relies a lot on a kind of social clout currency.

Since then, and even before, I’ve been thinking about what our role is as artists in a time like this. There’s no clear-cut answer, and I’m learning to get used to that. As much as I want to find one, it just isn’t there.

There are people and artists who are trying really hard, and who will do whatever they can with any opportunity to shed light, redistribute funds, or move towards solidarity in whatever way they can. And I think anyone who’s trying to make their corner of the world a better place for others is ultimately doing the best they can.

Did you grow up with activism or talk of politics in your household or is that something you came to yourself? 

K: I’m Hungarian, my family’s Hungarian, and we’re very passionate people. I found it really interesting growing up in Australia, because I always felt like there was this cultural difference. I’m talking about white Anglo Australians, this desire to sweep everything under the rug. Whereas I remember my family talking about everything all the time, politics, heavy topics, big opinions, and those big opinions being okay.

My dad was a big influence for me. He was a really soft and gentle person. He really believed in the good in everyone, and he was more Buddhist-leaning in his understanding of the world, this idea that we’re given a body, it’s a gift, and what we can do to help others is what we’re here for, essentially.

He really struggled with addiction, his whole life and my whole life, and our relationship was pretty fraught. But he was so beautiful in the way that he saw the world, and I think that was a big influence on me.

And then my twin got into activism, maybe at like 16 or 17, and brought me into it. We were working for a youth organisation for a while, running workshops for young people to help them navigate their emotions, talk about their feelings, and be in touch with their creativity.

And I’m been big on First Nations solidarity. There’s a strong thread of social justice through my family, and definitely through me and my siblings.

Photo: Jhonny Russell

You mentioned, helping young people tap into their creativity and getting their feelings out; what do you do to help you do that?

K: I always knew that I wanted to be an artist, from a really, really young age. It was so clear to me that I just wanted to spend my time making things and helping others find their way to make things.

For me, painting is a huge one. I studied art, but I studied printmaking and analogue photography, mainly analogue camera-less photography. I was always painting and drawing for a very long time, since I was 10 or 11 or something, but I used to draw these really creepy things. My mum thought I was mentally ill because I was drawing quite spooky things, like these emaciated women. Kind of gothic, strange drawings.

She took me to see an art therapist when I was 16 or 17, and this woman just changed my life. She was this really young Irish art therapist with flaming red hair. And I was telling you before that I had issues expressing myself when I was younger, so the first three sessions I didn’t say anything at all to her. We just sat in silence for an hour.

Then by the fourth session, I came in, and I’d always come in with headphones. The first question she asked me was, “Oh, what are you listening to?” And it was the one thing that opened me up completely. No one had ever asked me that question before. No one had ever taken an interest in what I was listening to and why. So it opened up this huge door, which then became one of the greatest parts of my life. It was a huge healing moment for me to work with her, and it opened the door for art and music to be genuinely healing modalities.

Now I paint. I paint to think through things, or to be present with feelings. Or I’ll just sit and play guitar for hours. I’ll probably smoke a joint and play guitar for like four hours, and that’s its own kind of healing modality.

That’s what I’ve been doing lately, and I’m so grateful for it. I’m so grateful that I have these methods or avenues, because losing my dad, or seeing what’s going on in the world, I feel really lucky, and quite privileged, to have ways to navigate things that feel really overwhelming.

I also have a pretty consistent meditation practice, so that alongside music and art has changed my life. It’s really changed my life.

Meditation is such a key thing for me in life too. It’s a non-negotiable, essential. Do you remember what you were listening to when you went to see the therapist? 

K: I wish I could remember like what it was. 

What kinds of music were you listening to at that time? 

K: I was really overwhelmingly into The Cure, like The Cure is one of the best bands that’s ever existed. I was really into The Doors, and then I was madly in love with this skater in high school who would burn me CDs of skate video soundtracks and songs. Then I had this period where I got super into The Shins [laughs]. And Leonard Cohen, I remember being very into lyrics, and writing. Lyrics are such a fascinating aspect of songwriting.

I remember being really struck by how people were able to write so poignantly, or so specifically, about something that I felt only I was going through. You know, when you’re a teenager, you think no one else feels these things. Like no one else feels lonely, or no one else has experienced unrequited love, or that kind of eternal “who am I, what’s my purpose?” And then you start to listen to music that reminds you that this is just part of the human experience. This is what it means to be alive, to some degree.

My older sister was so obsessed with Nirvana. And so I was too. Then I got into Placebo like quite heavily.

My mum had three of us when she was 23, so really young. Which means, essentially, we were growing up while she was growing up as well. And she took us to so many gigs. I’ve seen Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds more times than I can count because she loves them so much. I saw the Pixies a couple of times.

The first time I greened out was at a Rodriguez concert, while he was playing ‘Sugar Man.’ She took us to see Leonard Cohen while he was still alive, in a vineyard in the Hunter Valley, which was a spiritual experience for me. That gig, by the end of it, everyone was helping each other pack up their rugs, helping each other out. It felt like I was watching the communal power of song and music in real time.

And The Cure actually came to Australia under a contract with Splendour in the Grass, where they weren’t allowed to play any side shows. So my mum took us to Splendour in the Grass so I could see them.

So yeah, she’s a big reason for my connection to music, and how I got into it. I guess she’s just a big part of why I am the way that I am. She’s always supported the art-punk in me.

Is there any lyricists that you’re super into at the moment? 

K: Ryan Davis. That’s the one that came to mind first. I haven’t listened much to the new album. I’ve been listening to the album before it, because it’s a cassette that I have in my car and I just play it endlessly, like actually endlessly. It’s so good. Fucking hell.

His way with words is just… at once I’m in awe, and then at times I’m just so strangely jealous. But you can tell he’s someone who’s extremely well read and very funny. 

I love Maxine Funke. She has a way of writing worlds, that’s just so utterly unique to her, and I think of her music and her words a lot like paintings.

I really like the Possible Humans album as well.

Before you started writing lyrics and doing music, you wrote poetry first? 

K: Yeah, poetry first. I’ve got a very long-standing journaling practice as well, so I’ve been writing every day. When I first started teaching myself guitar and writing songs, they all actually came from poems, because I would be reading the poems and thinking, oh, this has such a rhythm to it. Poems and words have their own kind of beat and colour and texture, and the way they feel in the mouth.

I started with the guitar and writing music because I was dating someone who was making really awesome music, and I must have just said to him one day, oh, I wish I could do that. And he was like, you can, what the hell? I was really into The Velvet Underground, The Stevens, The Shifters, Twerps, The Chills and Cool Sounds at the time, so he was like, all that music that you listen to, no one knows what the fuck they’re doing, just do it. Honestly, learn four chords, find different ways of playing them, you just have to start.

That was a huge kind of turning point. It made me think about how the guitar can be used to aid the inherent rhythm of poetry, and what the difference is between a song and a poem. I don’t think there is much.

Photo: Jhonny Russell

When did you first start playing guitar?

K: I was 24/25. I didn’t take lessons, and I didn’t want to go to YouTube or anything like that to learn. So many of the things I play are because I associate the finger shapes with animals. I’m like, oh cool, this is the bird chord; you know, different shapes.

It’s so funny, because we got an email after we released the album, someone being like, “Hey, I’m trying to learn ‘Bell Jar Convenience’ on the guitar. I think I’ve got it, but do you reckon you can send me…” and I was like, I actually don’t know what it is. I don’t know what to send you. It looks like a bird. It’s a bird on fret three, so go for it.

And that’s kind of fun. I’m at this point where I’m like, should I learn it more? Should I take lessons or something? And I’m kind of like, no, I don’t think so.

What I’m more interested in is reaching out to guitarists who practice a lot of different styles of guitar, and maybe even different melodic scales. Perhaps it’s like an Indian style of guitar or something, and then just sitting alongside them while they tell me what it is they like to play. It’s kind of like secondhand learning, getting knowledge from people who play it and think about it very differently to me. I’m curious about that. But I just love the fumbling. I love the figuring it out, and all the bum notes in between.

The nature of being an artist is that you have to believe that the way you see and hear the world is your craft. That transmuting of the way you experience the world, and turning it into your craft. It’s about how well you can listen to something that feels inherently like your experience, and then the next step is how you can produce something that is not only yours, but could speak to something bigger, or speak to someone else in a language they would understand.

I thought it was interesting that you called your album, A Profound Non-Event.

K: I just thought it was funny. Because that album is quite old for us, the songs are quite old. There’s a couple on there that are new, and there’s one song that I wrote the lyrics to the morning that we recorded it, but I’d had those songs for a while, and I’d had the album name for a while.

I was like, this album is going to mean so much to me. It is so profound to me, but it’s not happening in a specific event. It’s just happening outside of something that might occur.

I thought it was kind of funny that you can put something out into the world and call it a profound non-event. To me, it reminds me that the profound happens outside of events. All the things that occur outside of something are also profound. It’s the small moments, the small relational moments, or moments of connection.

What does the album mean for you? 

K: It means a lot of things. It’s a moment of who me and Jasper are, where we are in our musical journey. 

I’m really proud of myself also. Having anything on vinyl was literally a dream of mine since I was like 13. Designing it, and having one of my drawings on it!

And I think there’s something about believing in yourself. There are a lot of things I’ve believed to be true of myself, but that I’ve never enacted or taken steps towards. This feels like this object in the world is an accumulation of all the things that I’ve learned, and stepping into a kind of creative courage that I can feel more as I get older. This belief in myself, and in what I’m doing, that is blooming.

This feels like the first step towards fostering that. And to know that there is a place in the world for the things that I create… the connections that this album has elicited are more than I could have ever expected.

It means a lot of open doors, and a lot of relationships built and fostered. It means a step towards a kind of creative self-actualisation that is always in bloom, always changing, always growing, as I am.

And yeah, it’s kind of nice to have this album as the first step in something that feels like it will be, hopefully, a long lineage.

Is there a through thread for the album? 

K: My songs are always about relationships. It’s always about the relationship I have to the world, or the relationship I have to myself, or sometimes they’re just straight down the middle, like conversations that I didn’t have or couldn’t have. There’s a beauty in how different a lot of them are. So I’m not sure that there’s much of a sonic through line, or maybe I can’t hear it because it’s a bit closer to me. The bass lines that Jasper does are just fucking hectic and epic, so that’s a pretty good through line.

For me, songwriting-wise, it’s me working through things that I need to work through. And within that, there’s a palette where I’m using anger, or frustration, or confusion, or… one song I wrote when I was just fucked up, depressed, fleeting.

It feels like a kind of holistic expression of what it means for me to be human. What it means to be thinking and feeling and figuring things out for myself. Some of the songs are quite political.

So it’s been interesting review that was like, “Oh, they sing about the mundanity of life and the bric-a-brac,” and me and Jasper were kind of like, oh, that’s so interesting, because that’s not really how we see the album.

But, everything is valid. It’s just interesting when you have an idea of what the album is, and then it’s out in the world, and all of a sudden everyone else has their own idea of what it is.

Photo: Jhonny Russell

When I was listening to your record I got a sense of traveling, arriving, or almost arriving even, or a rejection of cynicism and stuff. It also felt kind of communal, but kind of not collective, if that makes sense.

K: Totally. The album starts with ‘Another World’. Maybe the through line is that I’m always kind of struggling between hope and a kind of despairing realism, and that’s an internal tension that I’m trying to figure out through song.

I don’t really want it ever to be just one or just the other, because I think both exist hand in hand. And I like the idea that some songs can be really pretty, and some songs don’t have to be.

These days there’s a lot of pressure for artists to specialise, to box themselves in, and to have a sound that’s very easy to explain in three sentences. I just don’t really like that. It’s not how I want to do things. I really like the idea of fucking with people’s expectations of what it is and what it could be.

Is there something in the record that you relate to differently now than when you first wrote it? 

K: It’s just how I was feeling at the time. A lot of the things I still relate to, and I also know that, for whatever reason, they needed to come out in that way and in that song. So there might be a bit of distance from it, or distance from the intention, but I still think it’s valid.

‘Fated to Pretend’ is one of our oldest songs. I wrote that about often being the only public school person at private school parties. I would invite my friends and we would raid their bathroom cabinets, and raid their rich parents’ cellars, and drink their fancy wine.

That song is obviously about class. It’s about class disparity, and it was something that I was experiencing, and even feeling weird about at that age. Just the questions I’d be asked at these parties, like whether people were getting stabbed at my school, or whether I was selling drugs.

At first, I remember being 16 or 17 and feeling offended, and then I would just play into it. I would have so much fun knowing that there was such a divide, that these two different worlds existed. Largely based on the fact that their parents were rich, and that they were going to inherit more money and land and houses and whatever else, and that they were different from me.

Was there any song on the album that felt really vulnerable writing and putting it out there? 

K: I feel that way about ‘Killincs’. That’s the emotional hinge. It’s like trying to put into words something that I felt for a really, really long time, which I know is a common feeling amongst people on the spectrum and different kinds of neurodiverse experiences. That sense of always feeling on the outside.

Like, how do I try and put words to this feeling where it feels like I’ve been living in a fishbowl my whole life, watching people experience life. I always felt like people were in on a joke, or in on a reality that I wasn’t aware of for a really long time, or that I’m still not.

Again, that was a poem, quite a long poem, just navigating my experience of being alive, and being Hungarian, and growing up in Australia, and growing up with a dad who loved me but wasn’t around a lot, who was caught up in his own stuff. So, that one was kind of gnarly.

And then there’s a song on the first EP called ‘The Hunt’, which for a while I actually couldn’t even play live, because it just felt too hectic. Too emotional.

Were both songs about similar things at home? 

K: Yeah, it was about my dad as well. I was having pretty crazy nightmares at the time, so it’s about these kinds of recurring nightmares.

Some people see this album as a very hopeful album, and sometimes I wonder whether it’s perceived as this kind of very happy, pretty album. I’ve been thinking about why I sometimes have a discomfort with being viewed that way. Because in a lot of ways I do associate with that, but I associate with it from having gone through so much darkness that I actually need the light. Otherwise I’m worried about what might occur.

I’ve dealt with a lot of suicidal ideation for a very, very long time, and so hope is a part of the album, but to me it’s quite a powerful hope. It’s not something that feels flimsy. Hope is something that I need to maintain my survival.

So I think ‘A Light’ is also one on the album that feels really emotional. It’s just a mantra song about not killing yourself. That’s how I see it.

And then people will hear that and hear it very differently, and it’s a beautiful song to play in a crowd. We say, if you want to sing along, go for it, because it’s just the same thing over and over again.

Music means different things to everyone, but I think the connection you make with an audience is determined by your willingness to be vulnerable, and to give yourself over to the thing that is being asked in the song.

Yeah, I find in my own life, when I’ve been the most vulnerable, whether it’s creating something or whatever, that tends to resonate more with people. I guess it’s because it’s coming from a real place, and you’re saying things that other people are also experiencing. Alot of creative people I talk to just feel so, so much. But that’s good, because then they channel that into their art, hopefully.

K: It’s true. 

Daily Toll recorded the album in three days? 

K: Three days of recording and one day of mixing. 

All analog? 

K: Yeah, such a cool process. 

I love how you described the processes as “candlelight and creative camaraderie”. 

K: I’ve got a candle man here in Newtown who’s just an absolute legend, so I always buy his handmade candles. I brought some candles with me, and we were just cooking dinner  in the cottage every night, me and Jasper. We’d light a candle and bring them into the studio as well. It was a really beautiful experience.

When I was listening to A Profound Non-Event, it almost gave me a sense of moving from the afternoon to night.

K: I’ve thought that. 

The second half of the album felt more quieter and more interior maybe. Was that your intention? 

K: Yeah, it felt like the first one was maybe navigating more of the darker feelings. Or setting that tone or that parameter. Then ‘My Sister’s Loom’ being a kind of palette cleanser between that and the other side, which just feels a bit softer, a bit more friendly, or a bit warmer.

I’m not sure if I thought about it too much. Not altogether intentional, but sometimes that beauty just makes itself known like that. The intention kind of reveals itself later. It’s like, oh yeah, true, that makes sense.

I love doing things via intuition. Trusting yourself is a big thing for me. In my life there have always been so many things outside of myself telling me “you’re not normal” and that “you’re an outsider” and “you’re not enough” or “your way is wrong” or whatever. By listening to yourself you kind of reclaim yourself, rather than being shaped by everything outside. You have agency and Sovereignty. 

K: Exactly. And that it is an act of listening to one’s own self and one’s own body. And that happens so much through this album, and so much through the tour.

I feel like the older… [pauses and reflect] …it’s not even age, actually, it’s just the more I’m learning to listen to myself, and listen to my body, and listen to what makes my heart feel excited, or what makes me feel glow-y and soft and warm, or if I tense up. All these sensations are information. It’s telling you something. It’s a language that permeates through the album, or through the thing that you’re creating.

I read a review of a Daily Toll live performance at Phoenix Central Park and it noted how much of the story was visible in how you all look at each other on stage. That non-verbal language you’re talking about.

K: And that only works when you’re working with people that you trust. Because I’m not a trained musician, a lot of what I do is just intuitive. It’s fun and experimental, and I get really shy if I’m working with people that I don’t trust or that I can’t be myself around.

That show was really special, because we just had so much fun. Everyone was so passionate and curious and silly, and wanting to make it a beautiful experience for each other. It was such a unique show for us, but a really fun one to try something different.

I love how it was described as “a modern folktale”. 

K: Yeah, huge. It’s like he climbed inside my brain and took out what the intention was.

The set started with a sound bite, I ripped a little bit from this Hungarian animation. In Hungarian it’s called Fehérlófia, but I think in English it’s The Son of the White Mare.

The sound design won heaps of awards because it’s one of the craziest sound designs. It’s that kind of Soviet-era, synth-driven, spooky stuff.

The horse is presenting the beginning of the story, and it starts with the Hungarian version of “Once upon a time. There was a young prince that…” And that’s how we came onto the stage.

Is there any kind of stories that really stuck with you from growing up? 

K: I grew up watching Hungarian folk animations, on DVD, and then we found out that someone put them all on YouTube, so it’s all there, which is amazing.

I don’t think that there’s one story. I’m more just fascinated by the idea of folk tales as being these kind of morally coded warnings for humanity. Folk tales are really powerful, and there’s a reason why they’ve persisted across every single culture on this planet, so-called Australia having one of the longest cultures of storytelling.

When we first started, we never had a drummer, we just had a typewriter. So it was me and Jasper and a typewriter, and people would come up and play the typewriter. I have a video from ages ago of one of our first gigs, of Buz from R.M.F.C. coming up and typewriting.

I’m always just surprised when anyone likes anything we do.

When did community start playing a big role in your creative life? 

K: Forever! But specifically music, me and Jasper were just going to so many gigs and seeing these people do something that we really admired, and they’re all lovely people.

I’ve been thinking about this lately, because I think it bleeds into everything. I’m a very communal person. Not to make that sound like I’m tooting my own horn or anything. That’s why I have such an inherent discomfort with the way the world is at the moment. There’s more than enough for everyone.

We’ve been put on this earth that has provided for people living in harmony with it for hundreds of thousands of years, and what’s lacking right now, is a ground-level communality. What are we really willing to give up for one another, and how can we really be there for one another, knowing that our lives are entwined in ways that we’ll never truly comprehend or understand?

That’s where my spiritualism leans into. We’ve been given this life, it’s a gift. It’s a magical gift. We’ve been given these bodies. It’s such a privilege, and it feels like such a waste to move through life only thinking about your own experience, because you miss out on the ways that we are so tethered to one another.

I know that someone in my community, their success means my success, and their loss is a loss for me. And if someone kills themselves, what does that mean for the community that we’ve created? What does that mean for us? Obviously that’s hella nuanced, and again, something that has no clear answer.

But I think I’m just governed by this idea that I was put on this earth for a reason. I’m here talking to you for a reason. I’m in this community for a reason. I released this album for a reason. Whether that reason makes itself known to me or not is not my business. I just have to trust that it serves a purpose that’s valid, even if it’s outside of my understanding.

Photo: Jhonny Russell

Is there anything that you felt feel like you had to let go of to write the songs and put the album out there?

K: I had to go over a lot of fear, and a lot of fear in trying to control the way people perceive me, or perceive the band, or perceive the songs. 

Me and Jasper have worked together for so long because we work really well together. We love each other. We care about one another’s visions. We understand where things are coming from, and there’s a kind of safety in riding with him and making with him. But then, as soon as it’s other people involved, that collaboration is a giving up, or a surrendering, of some control. Fear and control are the main ones. And also just letting go. You have to just do it sometimes.

Anything else you’d like to share with us?

K: A lot of Daily Toll is me and Jasper’s friendship, and what it means to be able to make art with someone that you can be yourself around, and push and support each other.

After this album came out, I kept getting questions about whether me and him were dating. People see someone that looks like us and assume that it has to be romantic. And I always thought that was kind of silly, and a bit of a shame, because he’s just my best friend, and that’s what it is.

I’ve learned so much from him, through music and through us figuring this whole thing out together. I wouldn’t be the musician I am, or Daily Toll wouldn’t be what it is without that. The album wouldn’t be what it is without Jasper, who’s not here talking with us today because he’s at work.

So shout out to Jasper. Shout out to friendship. Shout out to collaboration, and people doing the best they can in this small corner of the world.

Find more Daily Toll HERE. Follow @daily.toll. A Profound Non-Event out via Tough Love. WATCH Daily Toll live on our YouTube channel.

JERKFEST 2026: The Judges

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Original photo: Jhonny Russell / handmade collage by B

Following the release of their debut LP Judgement Day in November 2023, Melbourne/Naarm five-piece The Judges have kept the momentum rolling with their Guns 7”—a two-track release that captures the band’s sharp rock‘n’roll. Gimmie caught up with frontman Sam Hill to talk about skate vids, cooking, the crazy world we live in, and of new music on the horizon.

Who or what made you fall in love with music?

SAM: Skate video soundtracks, I guess. That’s where I first heard The Stooges and Bowie and the Velvets and all that. And then “punk rock” – probably largely because of the fashion and the incredibly naive attitude, which is quite appealing when you’re young. But even before that I would tape songs off the radio and stuff, so I guess there was always music around!

Photo: Jhonny Russell

Are you working on new songs or ideas that you’re excited about?

SAM: Yeah! Always working on stuff to some degree. Tinkering. With The Judges, with other groups, solo. The second Judges LP has been recorded for a minute now, we just gotta tweak it and polish it up and everything. 

Photo: Jhonny Russell

What’s something you care about deeply that might not necessarily show up in your songs?

SAM: Food. I don’t think any of the songs are about food? I like cooking and you gotta eat. Good meals are important. Especially eating them with friends. Celebrate all occasions. Oh and we gotta save our oceans.

Photo: Jhonny Russell

Which song do you like playing live the most and why?

SAM: I like playing them all. They usually all sound great, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes I forget the words and mumble. But it’s not really even about the music. It’s just fun to make noise. It’s a spectacle.

What’s your biggest non-musical obsession right now?

SAM: Aw man, I don’t know. I follow a lot of total psychos on Instagram that are pretty entertaining to keep up with. World War Three is pretty interesting so far. That and the convergence of “artificial intelligence” and religion and all the UFO bullshit. Things are getting weirder every day. Buckle up!

Follow @tha_judges + LISTEN to The Judges.

JERKFEST 2026: Krakatau

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Original photo: Larisa Papamanos / handmade collage by B

Melbourne/Naarm outfit Krakatau are playing this year’s JERKFEST. They have spent the past decade carving out a distinct space where jazz fusion, progressive rock and left-field experimentation collide. Formed by James Tom and Dylan Lieberman, the band’s sound has evolved from psychedelic roots into long-form, exploratory compositions that feel both deeply referential and unmistakably modern. With a new LP Terra Ignota on the horizon, Gimmie caught up with Tom to talk, instrumental storytelling, film obsessions and the challenge of making sense of an always-on world.

Who or what made you fall in love with music?

JAMES: The first song I fell in love with at a young age was ‘Hit the Road Jack’ by Ray Charles. I can’t recall why exactly, my guess is the immediacy of good songwriting!  

Are you working on new songs or ideas that you’re excited about?

JAMES: We have a forthcoming full length LP Terra Ignota coming out in May 2026 (which captures the long period between releases) and a few tunes that are in different stages of completion we have not yet recorded.

What’s something you care about deeply that might not necessarily show up in your songs?

JAMES: I don’t necessarily think any of what we care about as social issues really show up in direct ways in our music. These can be harder themes to express directly with instrumental music, but I would say the main thing I have been thinking about the past few years is the fractured experience of being connected to a mass of decentralised information and how I do not think humans are meant to be connected in this way at all times. 

Which song do you like playing live the most and why?

JAMES: We are playing some fun material written by artists we look up to and interchange this material between our own compositions. For example ‘Madagascar’ written by Richie Beirach (RIP 26.01.2026) for the John Abercrombie Quartet and their 1980 LP originally released on ECM Records has been a lot of fun.  

What’s your biggest non-musical obsession right now?

JAMES: I mean my second most consuming hobby has always been watching films. Some note worthy watches the last three months include: The Ice Storm (1997), The Long Good Friday (1980), Let It Ride (1989), The 4th Man (1983), Spetters (1980), Short Eyes (1977), Dreams (1990) & Shoot the Moon (1982).

Check out more Krakatau. Follow @krakatau.music.

Institute’s Moses Brown: ‘I’m always trying to push the boundaries.’

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Original photo: Jenna Beasley / handmade collage by B

Whether he’s fronting Institute, drumming in Glue or recording solo as Peace de Résistance, Moses Brown is always chasing the next creative idea. In this conversation the New York-based musician talks to Gimmie about skateboarding, Dada art, the Austin punk scene, writing songs under pressure, the new Institute’s 7-inch release on Anti Fade Records, his solo works, and of another project that’s so new it doesn’t have a name yet.

MOSES BROWN: I just got home from work. It snowed 18 inches two days ago. So it’s been kind of nasty here. I like being outside. Even if you’re in the city, you want to go hang out at the parks and do fun stuff. 

Is that your bicycle behind you?

MB: Yeah. I usually ride to work because it’s so much faster, and it’s nice. 

What do you do for work? 

MB: I work at a gallery, I’m an art handler. 

Cool. You do all the art for your band, Institute. Has art always been a big part of your life? 

MB: Not really. I’ve never really done visual art, except for bands. I used to do scenic painting and set design stuff in college. Then got into working in galleries through that. 

I know your inspired by the Dada movement. 

MB: Totally. You go back and look at some of that stuff and it’s obvious when you see the Sex Pistols and early punk culture pulling from it; their attitude on the world. Dada and Fluxus—it’s a very punk attitude. It looks so good too. 

For Institute stuff, I would pull from this guy, Kurt Schwitters. Go look at old Kurt Schwitters stuff, it looks like a punk tape, it’s crazy. 

We’re big fans of Dada too!

MB: I need to dive back in. Now that I’ve lived here in New York, I’ve been more into Fluxus stuff, which I would argue, is the continuation of Dada.

The anti-authoritarian stance, the challenging of traditional values, the humour and absurdity. And the commentary on what was going on in the world at the time.

MB: Yeah. I’m sure they were kind of going through similar things, right? Fascism.

You’re originally from Texas. What was it like growing up there for you? 

MB: All three of us in Institute grew up in Austin. Especially when we were kids, it was much more of a liberal bubble, like a small college town. It kind of insulated us from a lot of the stereotypical Texas. You definitely still had people who were super into football and competitive sports. It definitely had an air of toxic masculine and  patriarchy. But Austin was pretty sick, so I can’t complain too much. 

What were you into? 

MB: Me and Arak [Avakian], and I think everybody in the band, were big into skateboarding. I was probably eight or nine, playing soccer, and then figured out that I could ride a skateboard. I slowly got more skilled at it and would watch all these skate videos.

The Flip Sorry video, was a big one for me. At that time all those guys were rock stars, they were punk. You’d watch and be like, dude, this is I want to do! But I was not good at skateboarding then. But the skateboarding culture that I was exposed to really had a big effect.

One of my favourite skaters was a Flip skater, Geoff Rowley. He co-owned it too.

MB: Yeah. I would like all the music they would skate to. Through skate videos, you would hear The Stooges and Velvet Underground and Sex Pistols and Devo. It was all like a blueprint. This is great. 

My dad, he’s a huge music nerd, and I would watch a skate video and be like, Dad, what, what is this? Like, what’s, what is this song? Oh, that’s on the first Stooges record. Okay, can we go get it?

Can you remember one of the first songs you really obsessed over? 

MB: As a kid I was obsessed with The Beatles, until I was seven. It was the only thing I listened to. I remember thinking that so many of their songs were about love. I was like, can you write a song that’s not about love? [laughs]. I had a huge poster in my room and would watch the Yellow Submarine movie all the time.

Do you have any brothers or sisters? 

MB: I’m an only child. But my dad and my mom were big music heads. So just absorb things from them. 

Your dad really loved PiL, right?

MB: Oh yeah. I remember being in fourth grade and bringing a CD player out to my backyard where I had some skate ramps and just blasting Second Edition. I still love it.

But to me now, it’s more adult appreciation of it, and seeing the dub and Can influences in there. Something that I now aspire to do. I’m like, wow, these guys were really doing something.

It’s so funny to think about me being nine and being obsessed with them. Like, what was I getting out of this? [laughs].

I’ve always loved the groove they have, it goes on forever and becomes kind of hypnotic.

MB: Yeah. Obviously with Can, it’s a result of jamming for hours and editing after the fact, which is something that I’ve been trying to do with a new project that I’m working on. It’s been pretty fruitful. You play something for at least 20 to 45 minutes, maybe use three minutes of it.

But you find things after that 20-minute mark that you weren’t expecting to find. I feel like I would grow up and people would be like, “Do you want to jam?” It’s like, no, I don’t want to. I don’t want to just play music to play music. I want to write songs, I want to have something coherent to put forward. And now I’m finding, oh yeah, jamming is extremely productive. You figure out a lot of things.

It’s cool that after being more regimented with song writing you’re now more open to jamming and enjoying it. There’s a lot of different ways to make stuff and it’s good to try new ones, it keeps things interesting. 

MB: Yeah, it’s been nice. If I kept trying to write songs the other way, like I have been forever, you start to hit a brick wall and it’s not fun and you’re just going to get angry.

Totally. The new project you’re talking about, is it something other than Peace de Résistance or the Moses Brown stuff?

MB: Yeah, something totally new. My friend has a studio. He’s recording a new Peace… record. But then on top of that, me and a handful of friends have been going in there and jamming. Just pressing record and seeing what happens. Nobody’s in a rush. We know we won’t play a show so it’s like, dude, we can take as much time as we want to. 

Does it have a name yet? 

MB: No, we haven’t figured that out. We’re slowly getting artwork figured out. We don’t know exactly what we’re going to do. It’s too amorphous to really give a solid answer right now. 

Photo: courtesy of Anti Fade

I was reading an interview with Arak and he mentioned that when you guys were young, your dad had a little studio and with sick gear that you could use.

MB: He was a songwriter and made a handful of tapes in the ’90s. The house we lived in originally had a laundry room that he used as his studio. I remember being four or five and him closing the laundry room door while I heard him playing music in there.

Eventually, he wanted to build a kind of shed out the back in our backyard. He set it up as a studio for himself, but then he got too busy and developed carpal tunnel in his hands, so he had to stop playing guitar.

I’m sure that, in the back of his mind, he was thinking, If I leave this here, the kids are going to use it. And we certainly did. So many of those Austin bands wouldn’t have started if it wasn’t for him building that.

Wow. Your dad sounds like he’s pretty cool.

MB: Yeah. If you were in a band with me, you had a place that you could practice and didn’t have to worry about paying or having gear. So it was huge. 

It’s nice that you a Arak have known each other since you were 10. 

MB: We’ve been friends for probably 21 years now, 22 maybe. 

Do you remember your first impression of him? 

MB: Totally. We were at a skateboard camp and he was trying really hard. I thought he was super cool. I felt like he was a skater, but I could also tell he was a rocker, and I remember thinking, this guy seems very cool.

I had other friends who skated, but they didn’t take it that seriously. He was in a similar skill range to me and took it as seriously as I did. I remember thinking, I want to get to know this guy.

We met at skate camp and then, about a year later, found out we were going to the same middle school. That’s when we really became friends.

I don’t know many people who have friends with decades long history together. That’s really lovely.

MB: Yeah. I got a couple of them. It’s awesome. Dude, so many people I went to school with, from elementary through high school, also ended up moving here and getting involved in music and the arts. It feels like our little corner of Austin produced a lot of like-minded people who stayed in touch.

Arak said that he’d like to go out late and break into abandon buildings and things like that. But then you’d be more of a good kid and be like, I’m going home to get up early tomorrow. You guys seem a bit opposite.

MB: Yeah. He’s a boundary pusher and I’m a respect-the-line guy. He’s more whimsical and careless and I have so much crippling fear. Like, no, we can’t do that. I’ve been working on it and trying to cut myself more slack and being open to not having so much control. That’s a lot of what’s happening there with the fear.

Previously, you’ve talked about not letting yourself have much fun when you were younger. But I noticed that when we started the conversation, you were bummed out because of all the snow and not being able to go outside to have fun. I thought, that’s nice that you’re open to fun now.

MB: Yeah, I am. When I was younger, I used to impose these imaginary rules on myself. I’d do things in such a structured way that, looking back now, I’m like, what was I doing?

I was about thirteen and would wake up at eight in the morning on a Saturday, ride my bike to the skate park, and skate by myself for as long as I could until someone else showed up. Then I’d go back home. Why did I feel like I needed to do that? I could have been doing what everyone else was doing — smoking weed, sleeping over at friends’ houses — and honestly, that probably would have been sick.

The first band you had was called Lemonade Sten Syndicate, and your influences were The Hives and Dead Kennedys. That’s a pretty fun combo. 

MB: Yeah, the band was actually pretty good for a middle school band. 

In the old photo you used for the cover of your solo Stone Upon Stone album where you’re working on the house you grew up in, I saw that you’re wearing a Distillers shirt!

MB: That’s what I was all about. Skateboarding and Distillers shirts [laughs]. I was like—this is my shit. 

Stone Upon Stone was an interesting record. The idea was sparked from a novel [Wiesław Myśliwski’s novel of the same name] that you read? You wanted to soundtrack it?

MB: That was the initial idea. I was working on these songs, and they were quite repetitive but carried a lot of emotional weight. I started thinking that this style of music is often presented as a soundtrack to something (not always, but frequently) and it felt like a good way to frame the project.

Before the writing was finished, I decided to try making more songs and turn it into a soundtrack for something like a book or a movie. That idea was mostly inspired by talking to Owen from Straw Man Army, since they’d done their own score.

At first, I tried doing it for the book, but it didn’t really work. It was too hard to reread a book with the mindset of scoring it. You end up reading while constantly making notes like, oh, this could be a song… this could be a song, and I realised that’s not how I want to read. It felt frustrating.

So I decided it needed to be something from my own life, something more personal. That’s when I came up with the idea of making it a soundtrack to the construction of the house I grew up in, and that ended up fitting really well.

Do each of the musical projects you do fit a different function for you?

MB: Yeah, totally it’s all different parts of my musical brain.

What about Glue? 

MB: I don’t know how to write a Glue song. I know how to write a Glue drum part. Glue is just fun. I’m just me, playing. Drumming is a whole other section that definitely is an identity that is doing something for me. It satisfies the drummer thing. 

They often say the drummer is the heartbeat of the band, right?

MB: I think so. Bass and drums hold it down.

The engine that drives things. What about Institute? 

MB: Institute is great because I grew up doing so much punk music. Institute is the band where I get to create, sing and write music that probably has the most relevance to my 18-year-old self. I don’t think my 18-year-old self would really care about Peace de Résistance or the more recent Moses Brown records. So it’s cool to do something for that guy.

When you started Institute, you were recording on a 4-track. Were you writing all the songs initially? 

MB: Me and Adam [Cahoon] wrote all of the songs on the Demo. I was using a 4-track to demo the songs. But then what’s on the Demo, our friend Hans recorded it on quarter-inch or half-inch tape. I never liked using the 4-track, it was hard to use.

The lyrics that you write move between, social critique and more inward-looking stuff. Is songwriting ever a challenge for you? 

MB: Totally. I have to write lyrics for this new Peace… record. It’s taking a long time. It’s a little like pulling teeth. I’m not somebody who naturally writes a bunch of stuff. I’m writing words down on paper because I have to.

Institute was the first time I started a band and thought, this is it. I’m going to sing and write the lyrics. For years I was like, I don’t want to do that. That’s crazy. It sounds hard and scary.

What helped you overcome the scariness? 

MB: I was not very excited to record and sing, I just did it. 

Your live shows, I’ve seen in online vids, look pretty exciting!

MB: Oh, totally. Institute was a punk, kind of post-punk, anarcho rock band, but we were playing in Austin, which at that time was really dominated by hardcore. There were all these hardcore bands from North Texas coming through, so we ended up playing with a lot of hardcore bands. It was really funny.

All these kids in tall tees and Jordans were coming to the shows, and they were totally into it. When you look back now at some of those line-ups, it’s wild. It’d be Institute with Power Trip, Wiccans, Glue. It’s funny that we were so well accepted by that crowd.

Obviously a lot of us had played in hardcore bands before, so people were like, “Oh, those guys are doing this preachy band now.” But when Giddy Boys started happening, people were kind of like, “Okay… this is interesting.” And honestly, I’m here for it.

Cody and Harris from Glue, are more well-versed in hardcore. I feel like I absorbed some things about it from playing in Glue. But I did not grow up going to hardcore shows. I didn’t know who integrity or SSD or Antidote or anybody was until meeting those guys. I was doing my own thing. 

Institute have an Australian only release on Anti Fade for your tour here. What inspired that collection of songs? The songs seems connected in a way. 

MB: We were coming over and planning to just bring copies of the last record with us. Christina, who is helping book the shows, and Billy from Anti Fade were like, “It would be sick if you guys had a physical release to coincide with the tour.”

And I was like, okay… you’re kind of asking me to move mountains here [laughs]. Getting even one song out of this band is hard because everyone’s in different places. We can’t practice together and writing music from a distance is difficult. So I was like, I don’t know.

But that weekend I thought, okay, let me try to write a song. I wrote ‘The Shooter’ and texted it to Adam. Me and him are kind of the two guys who bring in the skeletons of songs, so I asked him, “Do you have any skeletons lying around?”

He sent me what became ‘Privilege’, and I was like, dude, this is great. Suddenly we had two songs and I liked them. Then I remembered this other funky jam I’d done in a practice space with Owen [D4MT Labs], and I thought, I’m pretty sure this could be an Institute song too. So we just smashed that in there.

We basically had these skeletons of songs, and then we showed up to record them. Nobody knew any parts. We had to learn them and record them on the same day, and write a bunch of parts as we went.

It was this burst of madness. The guys flew in, we had one day to write and record a 7-inch, and we also had to practice the set we were playing the next day.

Lyrically it was the same thing. Total pressure cooker. I was like, dude, I need to write some lyrics right now. I needed them yesterday.

And honestly, we’re just so consumed with political madness here that I thought, you know what, I’m sorry if everyone’s already bombarded with this stuff every day, but that’s what I’ve got. That’s what I’m thinking about. That’s what’s on my mind.

When you write lyrics, do you hand write them or do you type them on your phone or computer? 

MB: I’m doing it in a Word document on my computer. I’ve handwritten other ones. 

You mentioned you were working on a new Peace record right now; what themes are you exploring lyrically? 

MB: I’m trying to get more okay with things being a bit vague, with them making sense to me but maybe not to other people. I feel like the past couple of records have been all about very clear, concise message delivery. Right now I’m just like, dude, I don’t have it in me.

Peace de Résistance started during the pandemic.

MB: It started because I had this idea to do a band that was a combo of Templars and Chrissy Zebby Tembo. I felt like there was some crossover there that needed to be explored. That was the first idea.

But then people were like, “This kind of sounds like The Velvet Underground.” And I thought, okay, I want to try that now. That’s basically what led to the first LP.

For Peace you usually play all the instruments on the recording…

MB: On the new one that I’m working on that’s not the case but traditionally, yeah. 

Is there an instrument that you feel particularly at home with? 

MB: Playing bass is pretty comfortable. Guitar is fun, but my hands just… I don’t know. They don’t really know how to do things the right way, and I run into a lot of problems because of that.

With bass, you don’t have to worry about what your hands are doing as much. You’re mostly just using a finger or two.

And then drums were the first instrument I learned how to play, so I feel pretty at home with that. But I need to work on expanding my boundaries with the drums because, at this point, it’s become a pretty mundane instrument for me to play.

I’m like, dude, I don’t even know how long I’ve been doing this for. Maybe I need to make some kind of avant-jazz drum album or something just to get excited about it again.

That’d be cool. I read that Madonna’s ‘Ray Of Light’ was an inspiration. 

MB: Oh god, I love that song, yeah. 

I love it too. It’s one of my fav Madonna records. Have you heard the original song from where ‘Ray Of Light’ comes from? 

MB: No. 

Curtiss Maldoon, an English folk duo released the song ‘Sepheryn’ in, maybe, 1971.

MB: Interesting. I’ll check it out.

Why doesn’t Peace do shows?

MB: Being in Institute and Glue is enough for me. That scratches the itch of playing live. And honestly, half the fun of doing Peace songs is that I don’t have to figure out how to play them live.

The madness of trying to translate them into a live band just doesn’t sound like fun. I feel like I’d be pulling my hair out, and who knows if they’d even sound good with a full band.

I imagine it would just be me in a room with five people who’ve dedicated a lot of time to it, trying things out. We’d spend two hours learning a song, and at the end I’d be like, “You know what? Sorry, we’re not going to play this one. It doesn’t sound good.”

It’s just not a record that was written with live performance in mind. I mean, maybe at some point it could be fun to try, but I don’t really need that to happen right now.

What are the things that matter to you creatively? 

MB: Doing new things. There’s a song on the new Peace thing I’m working on that sounds exactly like what you’d expect a Peace song to sound like. And I’m like, dude, I should probably cut this one. Why do another song that just sounds like the band already sounds? Let me try something new. Otherwise it’s boring. I’m always trying to push the boundaries.

Is there anything that you haven’t done yet that you would just love to try? 

MB: Musically or anything?

Anything, it doesn’t have to be music-related.

MB: Oh my god, so much stuff. I like to play this game where I ask people: if you had to work 40 hours a week, but you could spend those 40 hours doing anything you wanted, what would it be?

People usually say things like gardening, or something quiet like that. But for me, I just want to try new activities. I want to go mountain biking. I want to do oil painting. I want to jump off a skyscraper with a parachute.

Honestly, I think everything is valid.

Photo: courtesy of Anti Fade

Yep. Have you been reading anything interesting lately? 

MB: Right now I’m reading Sergio De La Pava. The book’s called A Naked Singularity. It’s good. It’s this kind of weird postmodern novel.

De La Pava was a public defender in New York City, and the book really throws you into that world. Sometimes it’s conversations between characters, but a lot of it reads almost like raw court transcripts. You’re just dropped straight into the madness of being a public defender in New York City.

That sounds fascinating. What’s a book that’s had a real big impact on you? 

MB: My partner wanted to read a fiction book because she’d mostly been reading nonfiction. She asked me, “What should I read?”

And I was like, you have to read The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai. When I read that book I just thought, this is it. This is what I want a novel to do.

People in the literary world always call him the master of the apocalypse, and honestly I kind of agree. His books always feel like something terrible is about to happen, and everyone is scrambling to take stock of their lives. They’re interacting with each other in the middle of this vague crisis, and nobody really knows what’s going on.

In that book, a travelling circus brings a giant taxidermied whale into town, and somehow that triggers what feels like the end of the world. It sounds crazy, but it’s incredible.

You’ve totally sold me. I’m gonna go find a copy of it. 

MB: You should definitely read it. It’s awesome. 

What pushed you towards living in New York? 

MB: I’d visited here when I was a teenager and thought it was cool. Then I came back again as more of an adult and started meeting people. I realised, oh, I could actually live here.

From a work perspective it made sense too. In Austin I was working at galleries and museums, but there were maybe three places you could really work. Here there are hundreds.

So I thought, I could move here and actually make a living doing the same kind of work. It suddenly felt feasible.

If I’d been like, “I’m going to move to Portland and figure it out,” I probably wouldn’t have done it, because I’d have no idea what I’d do there. But here it felt like, okay, boom, you’re good to go.

Do you like your work that you do?

MB: I do like it, yeah. A lot of music people I know do it too. It’s actually great for creative people who need something semi-interesting to do that isn’t, coding or something. You’re working with your hands, you have to do a bit of math, and you’re constantly figuring things out.

A lot of the job is like, “Okay, how do we build a box for this sculpture that’s a giant snail?” You’re just solving problems like that all day.

That sounds so fun. Last question. What’s something lately that’s made you genuinely really happy? 

MB: We had two snowstorms back-to-back, about three weeks apart. The first one happened while my partner was out of town, so I had to deal with it by myself. I was basically stuck in the house for a day.

But when the second storm came through she was back, and I was like, “Oh my God, you’re going to be my snow buddy.” We were going to play Overcooked!, read books and take baths. I was really excited to have her home to hunker down in the snow with.

Get ‘The Shooter’ 7-inch via Anti Fade Records. Don’t miss the Australian tour shows presented by Blow Blood! TICKETS HERE.

✨ Wed 18 @ Oxford Arts Factory
Institute (USA)
R.M.F.C.
Negative Gears
Station Model Violence
The Horribles

✨ Thu 19 @ Marrickville Bowlo
Institute (USA)
TOY (BNE)
Gift Giver
Vasta Ruína

✨Fri 20 @ The Tote
Institute (USA)
Rapid Dye (SYD)
Station Model Violence (SYD)
Body Maintenance
MK Naomi

✨Sat 21 @ JERK FEST 11

✨Sun 22 @ Thornbury Bowlo *DAY SHOW*
Institute (USA)
Constant Mongrel
Possible Humans
Zipper

Check out more INSTITUTE.

JERKFEST 2026: The Blinds

| gimmiezine
Original photo: Jhonny Russell / handmade collage by B

We first saw Melbourne/Naarm band The Blinds live a few years ago at Nag Nag Nag Fest. Since releasing their self-titled cassette on Alex Macfarlane’s Hobbies Galore in 2017, and 7-inch Endless Fascination in 2022, the band have been building towards their long-awaited debut LP. Gimmie caught up with them ahead of their appearance at JERKFEST this weekend, to talk formative music memories, favourite songs to play live and a few unexpected obsessions.

Who or what made you fall in love with music?

LACH: ‘Getting the band back together’, which was jumping around playing a toy tambo in the loungeroom listening to the Beatles and Stones etc., with my dad after he’d no doubt had a few beers. I was 34.

CAL: Due to my dad being a fan, I loved Cream and idolised Jack Bruce. Other than that, I had a pretty loose grasp on music until Blinds band friend and recorder Alex loaned me 3 CDs every day for the best part of a year and blew my little world right open at the tender age of 16.

RORY: My mum used to buy me the newest So Fresh CDs, and it was then I knew I wanted to play rock and roll.

FUJ: Some definitive memories include listening to solo career Ozzy Osbourne and Dio tapes that belonged to my stepdad and some RATM and TOOL* CDs that Blinds band friend and recorder Alex lent to me in Year 7.

*REDACTED

Original photo: Jhonny Russell / handmade collage by B

Are you working on new songs or ideas that you’re excited about?

LACH: Yes. It’s taken us a long time, but we are like the turtle from The Tortoise and the Hare.

CAL: We’re finally getting ready for the elusive and coveted debut LP, which we’re very excited about!

RORY: I think we’re the most productive we’ve ever been right now, in our own way and by our own definition of productive.

FUJ: Ya! In our 10th year we have started working on a record ;()

Original photo: Jhonny Russell / handmade collage by B

What’s something you care about deeply that might not necessarily show up in your songs?

LACH: Fam & friends and the power of song.

CAL: Dolphins and the number 8.

RORY: A perfectly made tabouli.

FUJ: We are yet to utilise a crumhorn.

Which song do you like playing live the most and why?

LACH: One from our tape ‘Passenger Seat’ because it’s burnt into my skull and good to ease nerves early in a set.  Also ‘Hat’.

CAL: ‘Separation Street’ always feels good to play. It’s got a really fun bass line in the chorus that I often use for sound check because it kind of doubles as a nice little warm up.

RORY: I agree with Cal. ‘Separation Street’ has been a long time fave. Especially after introducing the intro on live performances. 

FUJ: I like a newer one called ‘Hat’ mostly because it’s called ‘Hat’.

Original photo: Jhonny Russell / handmade collage by B

What’s your biggest non-musical obsession right now?

LACH: This congee I ate in Thailand recently.

CAL: Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera.

RORY: Throwing back oysters at Queen Victoria Market.

FUJ: I’m pretty into the rice cooker that Rory convinced me to purchase.

Check out more of The Blinds.

Guitar Wolf’s Seiji: ‘Rock’n’roll is the path that makes me shine the brightest.’

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Photo: Jhonny Russell / handmade collage by B.

For Seiji of Guitar Wolf, rock’n’roll isn’t just music—it’s a way of life powered by pure “jet” energy. Since the late ’80s the iconic Japanese band has blasted audiences with their raw sound and wild mythology of motorcycles, leather jackets, wolves and cosmic-inspired rock’n’roll. We caught up with Seiji to talk haunted houses, night skies, beer, and movies.

You were born in Nagasaki. Do you have any memories of growing up there?

SEIJI: Memories? I started the engine of my memory, but my gas tank was filled up in Shimane. Nagasaki is where I was born, but it was the winds of Shimane that forged my soul. That’s where my jet-setting life began.

Previously, you’ve mentioned that if you weren’t a musician, you wanted to be a “haunted house builder”. Why are you drawn to haunted houses?

S: They’re full of surprises that make people say, “Wow!” They’re the best! The thrill of surprising people is the same as rock’n’roll. The basis of entertainment is getting your heart pumping.

Photo: Jhonny Russell

Why is music important to you?

S: Everyone’s trying to achieve the best life possible, right? Everyone wants to present themselves in the coolest light. For me, rock’n’roll is the path that makes me shine the brightest; the path that makes me look the coolest. That’s all there is to it!

When did you decide that rock’n’roll would be your life?

S: It wasn’t a matter of logic, it was the moment my soul screamed, “This is it!” When I found the place where I felt the coolest, my path was set.

How has music supported you through difficult times?

S: Difficulties? Not in my life! There are many people in the world who have it much tougher. My worries are a blessing. I’m sorry, but the word “difficult” is too good for me.

Photo: Jhonny Russell

What have you learned about yourself through years of touring?

S: I can drink a lot of beer! Hahaha! And also… I love cute girls, after all. Isn’t that a universal truth?

Guitar Wolf has a unique world and imagination; where did this creative spirit start for you?

S: It’s the night sky. I love looking up at it and letting all kinds of images flow. Also, the thrill of riding a motorcycle, and the bittersweet memories of my youth. All of those things fuel my imagination.

What themes or emotions were most important while writing your new album More Jet!?

S: Humans are going to die soon anyway. So I just use music that I think is cool and add my own lyrics. There is no fear whatsoever. That is the jet energy of this time.

How do you feel you’ve grown as a songwriter over the years?

S: ​I think I have acquired the best guitar techniques. ​Even if I cover a famous song, I’m so bad I can’t hear the song. ​This is my “ultimate original”! 

Photo: Jhonny Russell

We enjoyed Wild Zero. What films do you like most?

S: ​Back to the Future, Burn Dragon, Grease!—all of them are the best!

Is there anything that people would be surprised about about you?

S: I have wolves in my ancestry! Everyone in Australia, look up at the night sky and wait. Jet! rock’n’roll!

Check out the new album More Jet! Out now via Sorcerer Records (AUS) & Goner (US).

Don’t miss the Australian tour – tickets HERE via On the Loose.

More Guitar Wolf HERE.

Crafty Cuts with Annabel Blackman (Solo Career + Body Type)

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Handmade collage by B.

Annabel Blackman, the musical shapeshifter behind weirdo pop project Solo Career and member of Body Type, brings the same curiosity and coolness that defines her debut album Interior Delirium to this eclectic Crafty Cuts selection. Moving between oceanic calm, nostalgic pop reverence and hypnotic ambient drift, her picks reveal a listening world driven by feeling, humour and quiet obsession.

You’ll find a track that channels the cleansing power of a peaceful ocean swim; a song you just may have heard a gazillion times watching Gilmore Girls ; a confidence-boosting pop classic; a spontaneous, funky DIY gem from a friend whose brilliance feels effortless; a soaring spiritual love song from a hook-writing master; an iconic dance-floor hit that sparked a thrift-store pop deep dive; a jam from her favourite LA witch; smooth yacht-rock comfort with an outro built for kitchen bopping + more.

But first, check out the ultra-cool, Solo Career:

  1. Jordan Ireland – Swimming

I live on the South Coast of NSW and often rely heavily on the therapeutic powers of jumping in the ocean. If the conditions are right, and the water’s peaceful and clear, it can really strip you of any ick. This is off Jordan’s ‘Spirit Walking’ album, which is very dear to me on the whole but this track in particular hits me because it somehow summons that power of the mysterious big blue. 

2. Carole King – Feeling Sad Tonight

I never intended to get into Carole King, I don’t really know how it happened. I heard that one song on Gilmore Girls too many times and was never interested in listening to any more of her music but something flipped and I found myself listening to her album ‘Rhymes & Reasons’ on repeat. It’s groovy and there might even be bongos in the mix but it’s balanced with darker concerns / Carole wrestling with her troubles. This track has a resigned sense of drama – perfect for driving home from work. Or sitting in your car in the  driveway before you go inside.

3. T-Pain – I’m Sprung

I came across T-Pain’s NPR tiny desk performance and it was unexpectedly gut-wrenching. It got me hooked and now I listen to his music cos it pumps me up. The way he got torn down for his pioneering use of auto-tune was brutal (“You ruined music” – Usher) but when I listen to I’m Sprung, Bartender, Buy U a Drank, I smile because no one can deny nor destroy that talent. At work I’m the office DJ and I play a lot of ambient music / Severance vibraphone soundtrack stuff so when that’s over I need to strike out on a firm tangent and T-Pain is the answer. 

4. Boba Lego – I Might Dissolve

Rumour has it that Boba Lego aka Occy writes his lyrics on the spot. Whatever he’s channeling speaks to me through its simplicity and sweetness. And I’m kinda obsessed with his guitar manoeuvres but we’re friends so I try not to let the depth of my fandom show. Don’t read this Occy. Anyways this song and this album are hella funky but I recommend listening to Memorys of Newnes too.

5. Todd Rundgren – Healing Pt. 1

Been on a Todd tear for a while now and have yet to listen to everything he’s made cos there’s a lot, but have been particularly enjoying the Hermit of Mink Hollow and Healing, which this song is from. Todd is a pro at writing hooky love and heartbreak songs – it’s almost too easy for him so I think he likes busting out of the conventional hit box and writing soaring songs about spirituality and socioeconomics. He’s coming to Australia for the second year in a row this March so I’m making it my public internet wish that he play this one at the Sydney show.

6. Madonna – Into the Groove

This came on the radio a couple years ago when I was driving and it dawned on me how cool Madonna is, spawning an op shop CD collect-a-thon. At one point I had all Madonna CDs in my car’s 6 stack CD player, a high point in my life. You can’t go past the Immaculate Collection comp if you want a good time on a road trip, or in general. I love Madonna cos she’s outspoken and a self-proclaimed bitch and isn’t a perfect singer. 

7. Jessica Pratt – Life Is

When I heard the opening drums to this it blew my mind. They’re a reference to Glen Campbell’s ‘Guess I’m Dumb’ (I’m assuming) which I used to do a silly Solo Career cover of using a ripped youtube instrumental that’s exactly the same as what you hear in the O.G. song. It framed her whole new album ‘Here In the Pitch’ for me as a subtle Hollywood glamour affair. I love how her sound has changed over the last couple of records to accentuate her style without losing the magic of her earlier simple acoustic recordings. She’s my favourite LA witch. 

8. SWV – Rain

Just when I thought I’d heard the coolest rain sample on Erika De Casier’s song ‘Little Bit’, I came across this one by SWV which is far more drippy. I used to be scarred by the 90s R’n’B my sister pumped when I was a kid but now I’ve done a 180 flip and can’t get enough. SWV is my fave to cook dinner to and there’s a really good NTS compilation of their hits I like to rinse. 

9. Ned Doheny – If You Should Fall

As I’ve said I like groovy stuff and am probably some kind of blue eyed soul yacht rock tragic. I wholeheartedly love the Hard Candy album this song is from so the choice is almost irrelevant cos I just like listening to the whole thing, however the outro on this song deserves an honourable mention for high quality bopping value. Was very excited that Numero Group reissued this record and even more excited to come across it at Northside Records in Melb. Another fave to cook to, good chopping tempos.

10. Blue Divers – Part Way

Bookending this selection with another local coastal, Alec aka the Blue Divers cult leader revels in the powers of ambient guitar loop de loop, and this track is particularly hypnotic. I was lucky enough to be an imposter bean bag shaker on a short Blue Divers tour across New Zealand last year and it was super cool having a break from rock and roll rigmarole. The calmness of the music somehow imbued the whole tour with a sense of calm but maybe it was actually because a certain energetic Joe was running around TMing everything seamlessly. 

Follow @solo.career and @bodytypeband. Solo Career’s Interior Delirium out now on Dinosaur City Records.

Upchuck’s KT: ‘I surround myself with good times and good energy.’

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Original photo: Michael Tyrone Delaney / handmade collage art by B.

Atlanta punk band Upchuck occupy a space where fury meets vulnerability. Known for their explosive live sets and genre-blurring sound, the group have carved out a distinct voice within contemporary punk. Their latest album I’m Nice Now pushes that voice further, exploring grief, identity and unity with biting wit and emotional honesty. Ahead of their first Australian tour and new music, frontperson KT reflects on creative growth and community.

KT: We been busy writing the next album. Trying to spit out what we can and have it done before we go to Australia.

That’s exciting! Your latest album I’m Nice Now was one of my favourite punk records of 2025. What things have you been gravitating towards writing about lately? 

KT: I like write to write about whatever I’m feeling at the time. I’m growing as a person, as I should be, it’s shifting along that. Last year was a lot!

The album that came out last year was me in 2024. The one that’s about to come out this time, is even more vulnerable and more emotional. 

It seems like everyone I know had a rough year last year. 

KT: Exactly. Yeah. It was a lot for me in general. I was busy, we were touring a lot. And then with work and stuff, it’s hard to find a job that will keep me financially ok. Not to mention Trump America is not helping in any way. And just worldwide chaos. It was a lot to soak in, and try to maintain. I feel like it was a lot of chaos in every aspect of my life. I didn’t have it contained, but trying to do better on that this year. This year, I’m locking in. 

Why is music important for you? 

KT: It’s an expression. It has always been a means of communication in a way. Even before I started making music, it was kind of an escape at times. Depending on what I was listening to, it could also be a source of motivation. It’s shaped who I am today, for sure.

Everything that I’ve absorbed in my lifetime — my mum’s Trini and my dad’s Jamaican. So I grew up listening to soca, reggae and all that other stuff. I think that even shapes what I write about today, because reggae has a lot to do with the punk mentality. But yeah, it’s shaped my character, that’s for sure.

What was your coming of age soundtrack? 

KT: Oh geez [laughs]. A mixture — from Chief Keef to The Drums. I was listening to The Drums a lot. What else? I was into Fleet Foxes at one point, Florence and the Machine, and Santigold was up there for me. I was listening to a lot.

Same! I know that you used to play cello. What made you choose that instrument? 

KT: Honestly, I didn’t have a choice. My parents definitely just put me in there [laughs]. I feel like they literally heard on NPR one morning, “Kids in orchestra end up smarter and more successful in life.” So they were like, “Oh, shit, yeah, let’s put our kids in orchestra.” Shout out Miss O’Shea, though — she did teach me a lot when it comes to music and discipline and all that other stuff. It definitely helped in its own way, but it was a little too constricting for me at the time. So I had to wean off all the classical shit.

Photo: Ebru Yildiz

Before you were a vocalist, did you ever think of fronting a band one day? 

KT: Nah, that definitely wasn’t in my cards. But a lot of shit in my life wasn’t in my cards. Especially at the time, I’d just dropped out of Georgia State because I couldn’t afford my classes and shit. So I was just working and trying to pay rent. I didn’t expect to be where I am today, but I’m not complaining either. Now that I’m here, it feels right.

What were you studying? 

KT: I started in public health and then switched to biology, but I was like, I can’t do all that shit [laughs]. So I switched to social entrepreneurship and was like, yeah, I think I could do a nice little nonprofit that could help the community in some ways and give back to the people.

Totally. I feel that. Working in community is important to me too. I work with fellow First Nations and POC writers as a book editor. Being able to help my communities tell our stories in our ways means a lot.

KT: Yeah, that’s nice.

You mentioned that when you write songs they’re about what’s happening for you in real time. Do you ever surprise yourself when you look back at your songs and see your growth is mapped out across Upchuck’s records? 

KT: That actually is funny. I definitely surprise myself every time. Even when we write an album, it’s kind of crazy. It’s almost backwards because we just go into it writing songs and then look back over all the songs we put into one record. It’s like, oh wait, there’s a theme — damn. I didn’t even realise there was a theme happening, but there is a theme within each one. So yeah, it’s always surprising.

That’s the fun part of the writing process, figuring yourself out while writing. It’s crazy to go back to that first album and be like, damn, I really was just mad. I really was just edgy all the time.

Previously you’ve mentioned that Upchuck’s first album was a lot about taking up space. After being out there for a minute and touring and having a bunch of record’s out; has that changed for you?

KT: I think there are bigger problems at hand. The focus for me now is more on unity and spreading that unity. But it’s always been about unity. I feel like that’s the one common thread that’s existed across every Upchuck album. That’s the main thing.

Whenever I read anything about Upchuck, people always mention that you’re a really political band and they mention you’re angry and there’s a rage. But I also think there’s a lot of humour and a sarcasm as well that never gets talked about.

KT: I was actually just talking about that the other day about how we’re portrayed. How I’m supposedly this political, serious person. I’m like, I’m no politician, bro. At the end of the day, I’m just this punk motherfucker, you know? Shit’s too crazy not to have a laugh. It’s all very serious, but even with I’m Nice Now, that whole concept was like, bro, it’s almost so crazy that you have to smile to be sane. Take time to make yourself smile today, bro [laughs]. That’s really what that shit’s about.

I love the album cover, it’s so visually striking and really cheeky. 

KT: [Laughs] Yeah, for sure.

As a POC, I related to a lot of what you’re saying on song ‘Forgotten Token’. That feeling of being invisible or of being visible but being disposable. 

KT: Exactly! 

As women of colour we’re expected to carry history and grief and explain things to everybody. Those themes tie into the song ‘Tired’ as well. What sparked it? 

KT: With ‘Forgotten Token’ I had just lost my sister earlier that year. She was really a G.O.A.T. to me, literally a textbook older sister. On her shit. Don’t give no bullshit. Don’t take shit from nobody. Did it all by herself. Truly a role model for me.

She worked for this big fashion company, but she would always call me like, “Damn, they literally stole my shit and didn’t give me credit for it.” And all this other stuff. And not seeing one of those coworkers at her funeral, I was like, damn, y’all really just didn’t give a fuck. She just slaved for y’all for the past decade of her fucking life, and y’all really don’t give a fuck, but you want all of her creativity.

I feel like they kind of sucked the soul out of her, and that really resonated with me. I know it resonates with a lot of other women of colour. It rocked me and hit close. 

I’m so sorry. It’s so crazy how the world treats people like products, a commodity, and not as people. That’s where shit goes wrong.

KT: Exactly. That’s why it’s going wrong right now, literally. 

I really love the video for ‘Forgotten Token’. It also talks to gentrification, the dark side of it. And I thought it was cool that there’s cameos with your mum and your grandma and brothers in there. 

KT: We filmed it at my mom’s house, so it was really just chilling at the crib. If anything, it was strange to film the white family in the house I grew up in, so it felt trippy in those moments. I was like, damn, this is actually dark. Even my mom was like, I don’t know, that shit’s weird [laughs].

You totally captured that feeling. When I was watching it, it gave me that ick feeling too.

KT: [Laughs]. Yeah, like, what are you doing here, bro? You’re not supposed to be here. Get out. But yeah, it seemed like we were just chilling at the crib. You know, mom’s always gonna do the most. She was being funny during the shoot, like, “So what do you want me to do?” She’s just extra. She’s a certified Aries mom, like, “Oh, is the camera on me, right now?” And I was like, “Okay, mom, you’re doing too much, bro. Just chill.”

I really love the song ‘New Case’ and live the claymation clip for that too!

KT: Oh, yeah, Cissi [Efraimsson]. Yeah, she snapped, she went crazy, nah [laughs]. I think it took her a minute too.

That song reminds me of Santigold!

KT: That means a lot because literally that was my influence growing up.

Same!

KT: Her and MIA, literally G.O.A.T’s.

We’ve only got a few minutes left. We’ve spoken about anger and rage but I wanted to ask you; what are the moments where you feel soft? 

KT: Honestly, nine times out of 10, I’m really goo goo gaga as fuck [laughs]. That’s the craziest part. I was talking about it with someone the other day, and it’s almost kind of conflicting to feel like I’m being portrayed as, oh, I’m just this angry Black woman with rage. And I’m like, I’m really not.

Like, yeah, of course, every person of colour has a right to be upset, and it’s valid to feel that way given how everything has been going on for the past century and more. You know what I’m saying? So it’s like, I’m not out here just yelling at random people on the street and shit. I’m just, I don’t know… I have my qualms.

However, I find my peace. I have my friends, and I surround myself with good times and good energy. I am soft most times. I really am goofy as fuck. I feel like most people would be like, “Oh, that girl wasn’t even angry for real. She just be joking around half the time.” But yeah, most of the time I’m normally chilling.

What’s something that you’ve seen or experienced lately that’s been really beautiful or really joyous?

KT: Honestly, I guess it’s the growth I’m seeing within myself and all my closest homies. We’re all kind of on this lock-in growth journey rather than the usual debauchery we used to get into, and I think that’s really beautiful. It’s just us maturing and growing up. We’re getting older now. It’s sick that we’re all taking our time and appreciating the little things in life.

Check out more Upchuck HERE. Follow @_upchuck_. I’m Nice Now is out via Domino Records. Get tickets for their Australian tour HERE.