The Darwin rapper’s historic victory was about more than winning a television competition. From performing his brother’s song to bringing his family and community onto the national stage, he made sure Australia heard the stories that mattered to him.

On Sunday night, 22-year-old rapper Yung Milla made history by becoming the first Indigenous artist and the first rapper to win The Voice Australia.

The Marranunggu artist from Darwin, whose real name is Levi Nichaloff, was crowned the winner of the 2026 season after being mentored by former Spice Girl Melanie C, taking home $100,000 and a recording and development package.

It is a pretty remarkable achievement for a young artist who came into the competition wanting to share his music and represent the people and community he comes from. And while winning a show like The Voice is obviously a huge moment for any emerging musician, what makes Yung Milla’s victory particularly interesting is the journey that led him there.

If you have watched these competitions over the years, you would know that they generally favour singers with powerful voices, impressive vocal ranges and the ability to deliver those big moments that get everyone out of their seats.

Yung Milla came in as a rapper, and throughout the competition, he continued to approach music the way he always had, using it to tell stories about his life, his family and the experiences that shaped him.

He didn’t have to move away from hip-hop to win a mainstream singing competition, and I think that is one of the most interesting things about his victory.

His coach Melanie C also acknowledged how his journey had challenged the conventional understanding of what The Voice represents, recognising that having a voice isn’t necessarily limited to how well someone can sing, but also how powerfully they can use it.

And when you look back at the performances that brought Yung Milla to the grand final, you begin to understand why that distinction matters.

He brought his family and community along for the journey

To understand Yung Milla’s journey, you have to go back to his blind audition, where he made a decision that probably tells you more about him than any introduction could have.

Instead of performing a familiar hit or choosing something that would immediately appeal to the coaches, he decided to perform “All My Life”, a song by his older brother, J-MILLA.

His brother had played an important role in his musical development, and now that Yung Milla had an opportunity to perform in front of a national audience, he wanted to use that moment to share his brother’s music.

All four coaches turned their chairs during the performance, and J-MILLA was eventually invited onto the stage to perform alongside him.

It was a beautiful moment between two brothers, but looking back at it now, it also established something that would remain consistent throughout Yung Milla’s time on the show. He wasn’t interested in making the experience entirely about himself. Whenever he had the opportunity, he found ways to bring the people who mattered to him into it.

That became even more apparent during the semi-final, when he performed his own interpretation of Men at Work’s “Down Under”.

Now, “Down Under” is one of those songs that almost everyone in the world associated with Australia. It has been played at sporting events, celebrations and just about every occasion where people want to express a sense of Australian identity.

But Yung Milla approached it from a completely different perspective.

He incorporated his own rap verses, didgeridoo and a choir, using the familiar composition to tell stories about his upbringing, his family and the experiences that shaped him. His mother also joined him on stage towards the end of the performance.

And I think this was one of the most interesting moments of his entire journey.

Here was a young Aboriginal rapper taking one of Australia’s most recognisable songs and using it to tell a story about his own Australia. The one he grew up in, the people who raised him and the experiences that shaped his understanding of home.

It reminded me of what I love about hip-hop in the first place. Artists have been taking existing compositions, reinterpreting them and using them to communicate entirely different experiences for decades.

Yung Milla didn’t need to completely change “Down Under” to make it his own. He brought his own perspective into it, and by the time his mother appeared on stage, the performance had become as much about his family and community as it was about the music.

Then came the grand final, where he chose to perform Tupac’s “Changes”.

For anyone familiar with Tupac’s music, “Changes” is one of those records that has remained relevant long after its release because of the social issues it addresses. It explores racism, inequality, poverty and the struggles faced by communities, while questioning why meaningful change can be so difficult to achieve.

Yung Milla has spoken about how the song represents what he stands for, and knowing a little about his life outside music makes that decision particularly meaningful.

Alongside his work as an artist, he has been involved in mentoring and supporting young Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory, including young people involved in the youth justice system. He has spoken about wanting to become the kind of person he needed when he was younger.

So when he chose to perform “Changes” on one of the biggest stages of his career, it felt like a natural continuation of everything he had been sharing throughout the competition.

What this victory means for First Nations music

Yung Milla’s victory is a historic moment for The Voice Australia, but it is also worth looking at what happened across the competition more broadly.

He wasn’t the only First Nations artist to reach the grand final this year. Fifteen-year-old Torres Strait Islander singer Daisha Auda, from Logan in Queensland, also made it to the final four after an impressive journey that included her performance of Andra Day’s “Rise Up” in the semi-final.

Daisha had previously been eliminated before receiving another opportunity in the competition, eventually making it all the way to the grand final while continuing her Year 11 studies.

Having two First Nations artists reach the final, with one ultimately winning the competition, is something worth recognising, particularly considering the national audience a show like The Voice attracts.

But I also think it is important that we don’t look at Yung Milla’s victory as though First Nations music has suddenly arrived in the Australian mainstream.

Artists such as Archie Roach, Yothu Yindi, Briggs and Baker Boy, alongside countless others, have been making important contributions to Australian music for generations. Their work has helped shape the country’s musical identity while telling stories about culture, community, history and experiences that haven’t always received the attention they deserve.

And beyond the artists who have achieved national recognition, there are incredible musicians across regional and remote communities who continue creating music and developing their own sounds.

Yung Milla’s victory adds another chapter to that history, but what makes it particularly valuable is the opportunity it creates for people to discover music they might not otherwise have encountered.

Someone who watched The Voice and connected with his performances might now go and listen to his original music, discover his brother J-MILLA or begin exploring the wider hip-hop scene coming out of the Northern Territory.

And that is something I would love to see happen more often.

Because while mainstream exposure can introduce an artist to a much larger audience, it can also become an introduction to the musical community that helped shape them.

Yung Milla has been open about wanting to use his music and the opportunities available to him to support younger generations. Now, with the prize money, recording resources and national attention that come with winning The Voice, he has an opportunity to continue building on the work he was already doing before the competition.

Of course, winning a television show doesn’t automatically translate into a lasting music career, and it will be interesting to see how he develops as an artist from here.

I’ve only been living in Melbourne for a few months, but one of the things I’ve really enjoyed about being here is how easy it is to find live music. You can be walking through Fitzroy or Brunswick on a random evening, see a band playing at a pub, and end up discovering someone you had absolutely no intention of seeing that night.

And I think that’s a pretty special thing to have in a city.

Before moving here, I obviously knew Melbourne had a reputation for its music. You hear about the legendary venues, the artists who came out of the scene, the festivals, the record stores and everything else that has made it such an important part of Australian music history.

But actually living here and slowly getting to know the scene through Sound Under has made me appreciate just how much of that reputation comes from the smaller places and communities that don’t necessarily get talked about outside Melbourne.

It’s also made me think about how easily we can take something like that for granted.

Because while Melbourne has spent decades building its identity as a music city, the industry behind that reputation is going through a pretty difficult period. Venues are dealing with rising operating costs, artists are finding it harder to make a sustainable living, and the number of places presenting regular live music across Victoria has declined considerably over the last few years.

And with the Victorian Government announcing a new set of commitments to support live music earlier this week, it feels like a good time to look at what is actually happening and what it might take to keep Melbourne’s music culture alive.

One of the things that makes Melbourne’s music history so interesting is that so much of it has developed around actual places.

You can trace different periods of Australian music through its pubs, clubs, bandrooms and the communities that formed around them. Places where artists could play regularly, meet other musicians, experiment with their sound and gradually build an audience.

The Tote in Collingwood is probably one of the most recognisable examples of that culture, having been associated with Melbourne’s independent music scene for decades. Then there are places like The Old Bar, The Evelyn and The Night Cat, each contributing something different to the city’s musical identity.

What I find particularly interesting about these places is that their importance isn’t necessarily tied to how many famous artists have performed there.

It’s everything that happens before an artist becomes famous.

I was reminded of this when I attended Marthouse Records’ farewell show at Brunswick Ballroom earlier this year. I had been following Dr Sure’s Unusual Practice and was keen to see them live, but what stayed with me from that evening was much bigger than any individual performance.

There was this genuine sense of community in the room. Artists who had worked together over the years, people who had supported the label, friends, family and an audience that seemed to understand how much Marthouse had meant to everyone involved.

Watching Dougal Shaw perform with his father on stage was one of those moments that made the evening feel particularly personal. And while Marthouse was a record label rather than a venue, the farewell reminded me how much independent music depends on people building things together over time.

When something like that comes to an end, you don’t just lose a name or a business. You lose a little part of the community that formed around it.

The same is true for live music venues, which is why the latest figures coming out of Victoria deserve some attention.

The numbers behind Melbourne’s music reputation

In February this year, Music Victoria released its 2025 Victorian Live Music Venue Audit, commissioned by Creative Victoria, which looked at the state of live music venues across Victoria.

The report identified 2,441 venues statewide, which is a substantial number and gives you some idea of just how deeply live music is embedded in Victoria’s cultural landscape.

But there was another finding that stood out to me.

In 2019, there were 813 venues across Victoria presenting at least one gig every week. By 2024, that number had fallen to 655, representing a decline of 19.4 per cent.

Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean all those venues have closed. Some may still be operating but hosting live music less frequently, while others have changed how they use their spaces. The report also identifies factors such as the pandemic, rising costs, labour shortages and changing audience behaviour as contributors to the decline.

But even when a venue remains open, hosting fewer gigs has consequences.

Think about an emerging artist who is trying to build an audience and needs places to perform regularly. Or a band that has just released its first EP and wants to start playing around Melbourne. Fewer regular gigs mean fewer opportunities for those artists to get their music in front of people.

And it’s not just musicians who are affected.

Music Victoria estimates that an average gig involves 29 different job roles, 43 people and more than 140 hours of work. That includes everyone from sound engineers and venue staff to promoters, managers, security and production crews.

I think we sometimes forget just how many people are involved in making a live performance happen, especially when we’re standing in the audience enjoying the music.

For us, it might be a couple of hours watching a band. For the people involved, it can represent days of preparation and an important part of how they earn their living.

So when regular live music activity starts declining, the impact reaches much further than the stage itself.

Another interesting part of Melbourne’s live music story is how closely it is connected to the city’s changing neighbourhoods.

Fitzroy, Collingwood and Brunswick are all places people associate with music, nightlife and creative culture. But they’re also increasingly desirable places to live, which brings new developments, apartments and residents into areas where venues have sometimes been operating for decades.

And this is where things can get complicated.

Someone moving into an apartment near an established music venue obviously has a right to reasonable living conditions, just as a venue has a legitimate interest in continuing to operate within its approved conditions.

But what happens when the expectations of a residential neighbourhood begin to conflict with the very music culture that helped make the area attractive in the first place?

The Night Cat in Fitzroy is an interesting example. In 2025, the venue became involved in a legal dispute with a nearby developer over noise and planning conditions, raising serious concerns about its future. The temporary orders threatening its operations were eventually cancelled in August, but the situation highlighted just how complicated things can become when new residential developments move into established live music areas.

And interestingly, just this week, The Night Cat announced plans to expand into the neighbouring building, with a second music room and public bar. The project still requires planning approval, and the venue is asking the community to support its application.

Here is a venue that has spent years contributing to Melbourne’s music culture and wants to create even more opportunities for artists, but whose ability to grow is still tied to navigating the city’s planning system.

And it isn’t simply a matter of choosing one side over the other.

A growing city needs housing, and residents shouldn’t have to accept unreasonable noise just because they live near a music venue. But equally, it seems strange that an established venue can find itself facing uncertainty because the surrounding area has changed.

If Melbourne wants to keep its live music culture, these are the kinds of issues it needs to work through rather than waiting until another venue is at risk.

So what is Victoria planning to do about it?

On September 23, the Victorian Labor Government announced a series of commitments aimed at supporting the state’s live music industry ahead of the November election.

Among the proposals are formally designated live music precincts in areas including Fitzroy, Collingwood, Geelong and Ballarat, changes to noise regulations, a permanent Live Music Desk and a $4 million funding package.

Part of that funding would support live performances, including all-ages events, while another portion would go towards activating underused spaces for music and the arts.

The proposed noise regulation changes are particularly interesting because they aim to give established venues greater certainty when dealing with complaints in designated live music areas.

Music Victoria has welcomed the commitments, many of which reflect priorities it has been advocating for through its Vote Victorian Music campaign.

But the organisation has also made the point that grants and planning reforms alone won’t resolve the industry’s longer-term financial pressures. It is continuing to advocate for a one per cent levy on stadium tickets to establish a permanent Victorian Music Trust, which would direct funding towards local artists, venues and the grassroots sector.

I think there’s an interesting conversation to be had around that idea.

Melbourne regularly hosts enormous international tours and major music events, and those shows are obviously an important part of the city’s music economy. Many of the artists performing at that level spent years developing their music through smaller venues, independent promoters and communities that supported them long before they were selling out arenas.

Finding ways for the success of major events to contribute to the wider music industry is worth exploring.

Of course, these are still commitments and proposals, and we’ll have to see what actually gets implemented and how effective the measures turn out to be.

But at least the conversation is happening around some of the underlying problems rather than simply celebrating Melbourne’s reputation.

Supporting local music has to go beyond telling people to buy tickets

There’s another part of this conversation that I find particularly important, especially as someone who spends a lot of time discovering and writing about emerging artists.

We often hear that people need to support local music, and I agree with that completely. It’s one of the reasons Sound Under exists in the first place.

But I also think the conversation can become a little too simplistic sometimes.

Telling people to buy tickets and support local artists is great, but audiences are dealing with rising living costs too. Going to a gig might involve paying for a ticket, transport, food and a couple of drinks, and suddenly what was supposed to be an affordable night out becomes something people have to think twice about.

At the same time, artists have their own expenses to deal with. Rehearsal spaces, recording, equipment, transport, promotion and touring all cost money, often long before there’s any meaningful income coming back.

And venues are trying to manage their own increasing costs while keeping ticket prices reasonable enough for people to actually turn up.

I don’t think there’s an easy answer to any of this. Audiences want affordable gigs, artists deserve to be paid properly, and venues need to make enough money to keep operating. Finding a balance between those things is becoming increasingly difficult, especially for smaller independent spaces.

I also wonder how much attention we’re giving to the next generation of audiences.

All-ages gigs might not seem like the most exciting part of a government funding announcement, but they’re important. For younger people who can’t access licensed venues, opportunities to experience live music can be limited.

And those early experiences can have a lasting impact.

Someone who discovers a local band at sixteen might become a lifelong fan, start making music themselves, or eventually become part of the industry in some other way.

If we want a healthy music scene ten or twenty years from now, we need to think about how people are being introduced to it today.

Laneway is one of those festivals that I had obviously known about for a long time, and if you follow Australian music even remotely closely, it is pretty difficult not to. Every year the lineup drops, everyone starts talking about who they want to see, there are inevitably a few names halfway down the poster that you have never heard of, and then a few months later you realise one of those artists is suddenly everywhere.

But when I actually started looking into the history of Laneway, what surprised me was just how literally the name describes where all of this came from.

Because before there were huge crowds across Australia and New Zealand, international artists flying in to play the festival and lineups that people now wait months for, there was genuinely just a little bar sitting in a dirty Melbourne laneway.

Jerome Borazio opened St Jerome’s Bar in Caledonian Lane in 2004, inside what had previously been a Swedish meatball shop. From everything you read about the place, it wasn’t exactly glamorous. It was small, there were bins and rats around the laneway and Borazio has spoken about originally wanting somewhere that he and his mates could basically hang out and drink.

Somewhere along the way, though, it started becoming a place where Melbourne’s music community wanted to hang out too.

Danny Rogers had returned to Australia after working as a band booker in New York and became involved with the bar, and the two eventually started putting on Sunday shows behind St Jerome’s as part of what became known as the Summer Series. The Avalanches were around the place, Architecture in Helsinki played there, The Presets played there, Clare Bowditch played there, and gradually this little bar started developing a reputation for music.

That eventually led to the fairly simple idea of taking over the laneway itself.

So in February 2005 they moved the bins, convinced some of the neighbouring restaurants to open their back doors and sell food, squeezed a stage into Caledonian Lane and held the first St Jerome’s Laneway Festival in front of roughly 1,400 people.

Apparently, they even forgot to put a roof on the stage.

I love that detail because when you know Laneway as this huge touring festival, it is easy to assume there must have been some ambitious plan behind it from the beginning. Maybe Borazio and Rogers had looked at the Australian festival market and figured out that there was room for something smaller and more alternative, and this was the first step towards building it.

But that doesn’t really seem to be how it happened at all. It feels much more like there was already a community forming around this little bar, they were already putting on artists they liked, people were turning up, and eventually somebody thought it would be fun to make the whole thing a bit bigger.

And then it just kept getting bigger and bigger.

Laneway expanded from Melbourne into Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth and Auckland, and at different points there were even editions in Singapore and Detroit. Eventually it became impossible for the festival to remain anything close to what it had been in Caledonian Lane, because once thousands and then tens of thousands of people want to come to your festival, you obviously can’t keep squeezing everyone behind a little bar in Melbourne.

Laneway wasn’t originally competing with Australia’s biggest festivals by trying to become another version of them. There were already festivals that could give you enormous stages, massive international headliners and tens of thousands of people.

What Laneway seemed to develop instead was this reputation for having really good taste.

And I don’t mean that in the slightly pretentious sense of someone telling you they listen to music you haven’t heard of yet. I mean that if you go back through old Laneway lineups now, there are genuinely some names sitting much lower on those posters than your brain is willing to accept knowing what those artists eventually became.

Tame Impala is probably my favourite example of this.

They played Laneway in 2009 when they were still very early in their career. Kevin Parker has since talked about how early their set was, to the point that they apparently started playing before the festival gates had properly opened.

Just imagine that for a second. There are people now who travel across countries to see Tame Impala headline festivals, and at Laneway in 2009 they were playing so early that some of the audience wasn’t even inside yet.

Billie Eilish played Laneway in 2018 when she was only 16. This was before her debut album, before “bad guy”, before the Grammys and before she became one of the biggest artists in the world.

Flume has an even funnier history with the festival because before he played Laneway as an artist, he was actually volunteering there. In 2010 he was apparently carrying water between stages and getting distracted watching The xx when he was supposed to be working. By 2013, he was on the lineup himself and his career was exploding.

Now obviously Laneway isn’t responsible for making all of these artists famous. Billie Eilish was going to become Billie Eilish whether she played Laneway or not, and the same is true for plenty of these names.

But I don’t think that’s really the point. What is interesting is how often Laneway seems to have caught artists during that little window where the music was already there, the potential was already there and the people paying really close attention probably already knew, but the size of the audience hadn’t quite caught up yet.

There is something really enjoyable about going to a festival where you don’t know everyone on the lineup. You obviously want enough artists you already love to justify buying the ticket, but some of my favourite festival experiences have been the completely unplanned ones. You have an hour to kill before the next artist you want to see, you hear something coming from another stage, walk over to see what is happening and suddenly you have discovered someone.

Laneway seems to understand that feeling really well.

It is almost like the big names get you through the gates, but the rest of the lineup is where the festival gets to show you what it thinks you should be listening to.

And that is probably where its importance to Australian music becomes bigger than simply being a successful festival.

We talk a lot about supporting Australian music, especially now when there is so much conversation around how difficult it has become for local artists to break through in their own country, but before anyone can support an artist, they have to actually hear them.

And festivals are still one of the best places for that to happen naturally.

You might buy a Laneway ticket because there are two international artists you really want to see, but you’re there for the whole day, so you end up watching an Australian artist you had never heard of because they happen to be playing on the stage next to you. If they’re good enough, maybe you look them up afterwards, listen to their album on the way home and the next time they come through your city, you’re buying a ticket specifically to see them.

That doesn’t mean I want to romanticise Laneway as though it is still some little underground festival operating behind a Melbourne bar, because it obviously isn’t. Laneway today is a major festival with huge international artists, enormous crowds and an operation that probably bears very little resemblance to what Borazio and Rogers were doing in Caledonian Lane in 2005.

The music has changed too. Laneway was once much more closely associated with a certain era of indie music, whereas now you can move between indie, pop, hip-hop and electronic music across the same day. For people who grew up with an older version of the festival, I can understand why that might feel like Laneway becoming more mainstream, but I also think it would be strange if a festival built around finding interesting new music still sounded exactly like it did 15 years ago.

Music doesn’t work like that, and neither does discovery.

What probably matters more is whether you can still look halfway down a Laneway poster and find artists that make you curious. In 2024, around a third of the lineup was reportedly making its Australian debut, which suggests that even as the festival has become much bigger, there is still some willingness to ask its audience to take a chance on something they haven’t seen before.

And that willingness might become increasingly important because Laneway is now trying to survive in a very different Australian festival landscape from the one it grew up in.

We have watched festivals disappear, pause or struggle over the last few years as touring, production and artist costs have increased while audiences themselves have less money to spend. Laneway has survived all of that so far, but it isn’t immune to it either.

For 2027, Adelaide and Perth are being paused, leaving Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne and Auckland on the festival run. Organisers have spoken about how difficult it has become to move artists and crews across so many cities in such a short period, and while they have said this isn’t necessarily goodbye to Adelaide and Perth, it does make you wonder what the next version of Laneway looks like.

Every now and then you hear a cover of a song you have known for years and for those few minutes you almost forget the original exists.

It doesn’t happen very often, especially when the song being covered is as iconic as Phil Collins’ ‘In the Air Tonight’, but watching ONEFOUR perform it for triple j’s Like A Version alongside Jimmy Barnes and Jessica Mauboy genuinely felt like that.

There are probably easier songs to cover than this one. ‘In the Air Tonight’ has been around for more than 45 years and there are parts of it that are so deeply ingrained in popular culture that even people who couldn’t name a Phil Collins album probably know exactly what is coming when they hear those opening sounds.

And then, of course, there is the drum fill.

But what I loved about this version is that ONEFOUR didn’t really seem interested in recreating the original just for the sake of paying tribute to it. They basically took the song apart and figured out what it could sound like if it belonged to them instead.

Before getting into why that works so well though, it is worth going back to the original, because the story behind ‘In the Air Tonight’ makes this version even more interesting.

Phil Collins wrote the song during one of the most difficult periods of his life. His first marriage was falling apart, Genesis had taken some time away from touring, and Collins suddenly found himself spending a lot more time at home. He started experimenting with a drum machine and a Prophet-5 synthesiser, eventually coming up with the foundations of what would become ‘In the Air Tonight’.

There have been all sorts of stories attached to the song since then. The most famous one is probably the urban legend that Collins witnessed someone drowning while another person refused to help, and then somehow tracked that person down years later and confronted them through the song.

It is a great story, but it is also completely made up.

Collins himself has spoken about how he doesn’t really know exactly what the song is about in a literal sense because a lot of the lyrics came from improvising while he was recording. What he does remember is what he was feeling at the time, and when you know what was happening in his life, suddenly the song makes a lot more sense.

There is anger in it, but it doesn’t explode straightaway. The music is sparse, Collins sounds almost distant at times and the whole song feels like it is slowly building towards something without telling you exactly when that something is going to arrive. Which is why that drum fill works as well as it does.

It is funny when you think about it because the most famous part of the song lasts only a few seconds. But those few seconds wouldn’t mean nearly as much without everything that happens before them.

And I think that is also part of what ONEFOUR understood so well with their version.

They didn’t need to keep every lyric or follow exactly what Collins did because that isn’t necessarily what makes the song special. Instead, they kept enough of its DNA that you immediately know what you are listening to and then started building their own song around it.

J Emz, Spenny and Celly write their own verses rather than performing Collins’ original ones, and that completely changes the relationship they have with the song. They aren’t rappers who have been invited onto a Phil Collins cover to give it a modern section somewhere in the middle. For large parts of the performance, it genuinely feels like a ONEFOUR song.

Then the chorus arrives and suddenly you remember exactly where all of this came from.

Jessica Mauboy sounds incredible on it, Jimmy Barnes brings a completely different weight to the record, and somehow none of these different musical worlds feel like they are fighting each other.

You have one of the defining voices of Australian rock, one of Australia’s biggest pop and R&B singers and a group from Mount Druitt who helped put Australian drill in front of an international audience, all meeting inside a song written by Phil Collins in England more than four decades ago.

On paper, that sounds like someone has just thrown four completely different musical worlds together to see what happens.

Jimmy Barnes spoke to triple j about that connection as well, saying that they came from similar backgrounds and had both had to fight to make themselves heard. That feels particularly relevant when ONEFOUR are involved because their journey in Australian music has been anything but straightforward.

For years, they became almost as well known for the shows they weren’t allowed to play as the music they were making. Police pressure and venue cancellations followed them while their music continued travelling around Australia and overseas, and somehow a group that had become one of Australia’s most recognisable rap exports struggled to simply perform in their own city.

That context makes seeing them here feel significant in a way that goes beyond whether the cover sounds good.

Here they are on Like A Version, one of Australian music’s biggest platforms, standing alongside Jimmy Barnes and Jessica Mauboy and taking one of the most recognisable songs of the last 50 years and reshaping it around the music they make.

And maybe that is also why this version made me think about what actually makes a great cover.

Johnny Cash didn’t make ‘Hurt’ memorable because he sounded like Trent Reznor. Jimi Hendrix didn’t turn ‘All Along the Watchtower’ into one of the most famous covers ever by trying to sound like Bob Dylan. They found something inside those songs that made sense for who they were and took them somewhere else.

Obviously I am not saying one Like A Version suddenly belongs in that conversation historically, but the same idea is there.

ONEFOUR could have rapped Phil Collins’ words. They could have kept most of the arrangement, added a verse and made a very good version of ‘In the Air Tonight’.

Instead, they kept what they needed and changed almost everything else. And somehow that makes the original feel more present rather than less.

Maybe that is what I loved most about this version. It never felt like they were trying to remind us how great ‘In the Air Tonight’ is. We already know that. The song has had more than four decades to establish that.

They gave us a reason to hear it differently.

And for a song that has been heard, covered, referenced and replayed as many times as ‘In the Air Tonight’ has, that might be the hardest thing a cover can do.

There are some gigs you walk away from talking about the songs, others where you can’t stop thinking about a particular performance, and then there are nights that stay with you because they remind you why you fell in love with live music in the first place. The final Marthouse Records show at Brunswick Ballroom was one of those nights.

On paper, it was a farewell party. After ten years, Marthouse Records was wrapping up with one final celebration featuring artists who had been part of the label’s story. But by the time it was over, it felt like it had become something much bigger than simply saying goodbye to a record label.

If you’ve followed Dougal Shaw for any amount of time, you’ll know he has never been interested in taking the easy path.

Whether it’s speaking openly about the realities of streaming, standing up for causes he believes in, or making music that refuses to fit neatly into expectations, he’s built a reputation for saying exactly what he thinks. You don’t have to agree with every opinion he holds to recognise that consistency because, in an industry where artists are constantly encouraged to chase trends or soften their edges, Dougal has always seemed far more interested in staying true to himself.

Looking back over Marthouse’s ten-year run, that’s probably what stands out the most. It never felt like the label was trying to become something it wasn’t. There wasn’t a moment where it suddenly pivoted towards whatever sound happened to be popular or started making decisions purely because they made commercial sense.

Every release felt like it belonged there because somebody genuinely believed in it.

To me, that’s one of the greatest gifts an artist can give their audience. Not perfection or popularity, but honesty.

Music feels different when it’s made without constantly looking over its shoulder, wondering how it’ll perform on playlists or social media. Marthouse always gave me that feeling, and I think that’s why so many people connected with it.

I arrived at Brunswick Ballroom fairly early, before most of the crowd had filtered in, and one of the first things I saw was Dougal behind the merch table selling records himself. It was such a simple moment, but it summed up the night perfectly.

There wasn’t any separation between artist, label owner and audience. He was chatting with people, recommending records, signing records, catching up with familiar faces and doing what he’d probably been doing for the past decade: building a community around music he genuinely believed in.

The venue turned out to be the perfect place for a night like this. Brunswick Ballroom has a warmth to it that you don’t always find in larger venues. It feels intimate without feeling small, and as the room slowly filled throughout the evening, it became less like a concert and more like a community gathering.

Those are the kinds of spaces that remind you why live music matters. You’re not watching something from a distance. You’re part of it.

The support acts helped build that atmosphere from the very beginning. Tali and the Arms immediately caught my attention with one of the stronger opening sets I’ve seen since moving to Melbourne. Their guitarist, in particular, had a knack for lifting songs with little moments that never felt overplayed but always landed.

The It Thing followed with a set full of groove and energy. There were a few moments where I felt the heavy use of reverb made the vocals harder to follow than they needed to be, but the band’s chemistry was undeniable, and it’s easy to see why they’ve developed such a loyal following.

By the time Dr Sure’s Unusual Practice walked on stage, Brunswick Ballroom was packed, and what followed was exactly the kind of beautifully unpredictable performance that has made the band so beloved over the years.

Dougal has always had this wonderfully chaotic stage presence that somehow feels completely in control at the same time. One minute he’s on stage leading the band, the next he’s in the crowd singing alongside everyone else, before inviting people back onto the stage with him. It never felt like there was a line between performer and audience. Everyone in the room became part of the show.

One of the night’s most memorable moments came when Dougal invited his father onto the stage. The final Marthouse release is a mixtape built around recordings his father made decades ago with his own band in Brisbane, and seeing those two generations connected in that way felt like the perfect ending. Rather than closing the label with a grand statement, Marthouse ended by celebrating music that had simply meant something to the people who made it.

The night wasn’t over just yet, though. Vasco Era closed the evening, and their appearance carried its own quiet significance. Dougal has spoken before about them being one of the first bands he ever saw live in a proper venue, so having them play the final Marthouse show felt like one of those full-circle moments that only live music seems capable of creating.

Walking home afterwards, I realised I hadn’t really spent much time thinking about the fact that a record label had ended. What stayed with me instead was the feeling in the room.

The generosity between the bands, the audience and everyone involved reminded me that independent music has always been about far more than releases or streaming numbers. It’s about communities that form around shared ideas, artists who continue making work because they believe in it, and people who keep turning up simply because they care.

Maybe that’s why this farewell felt so significant. It wasn’t trying to convince anyone that Marthouse had changed Australian music forever, nor did it need to.

It simply celebrated ten years of doing things honestly, backing artists without compromise and creating a space where people could make the kind of music they genuinely wanted to make.

In a music industry that increasingly asks artists to optimise everything they do, that kind of honesty feels more valuable than ever. Marthouse Records may have reached the end of its journey, but if this farewell proved anything, it’s that the ideas it stood for are still very much alive. And perhaps that’s the best legacy any independent label could hope to leave behind.

Australian rock music is often represented by a handful of familiar names.

AC/DC. INXS. Midnight Oil. Powderfinger. Tame Impala.

And while those artists absolutely deserve their place in the conversation, they only tell part of the story.

The most interesting parts of Australian music have often existed slightly beneath the surface. In sweaty pub venues, underground scenes, community halls, independent labels, and bands that never quite became household names despite leaving fingerprints all over the artists that followed.

Some of these songs became cult classics. Others quietly shaped entire scenes. A few still feel just as vital today as the day they were released.

More importantly, every song on this list captures something that makes Australian music unique. A sense of place, a willingness to take risks, and an ability to sound deeply tied to a particular corner of the world while still speaking to people far beyond it.

These are not necessarily the biggest Australian rock songs ever recorded. They’re the songs that help explain why Australian music continues to feel different.

1. The Saints – “(I’m) Stranded” (1976)

If you spend enough time digging through Australian music history, you eventually end up at “(I’m) Stranded.”

Long before punk exploded into a global movement, Brisbane band The Saints were already making music that felt dangerous, urgent, and slightly out of control. The kind of song that sounds like it’s kicking the door open rather than politely asking to be let in.

What makes “(I’m) Stranded” so remarkable is that it still carries that energy today. Nearly fifty years later, it doesn’t feel like a historical artefact. It still sounds fresh, restless, and completely alive.

2. Radio Birdman – “Aloha Steve and Danno” (1977)

Radio Birdman are one of those bands whose influence becomes impossible to ignore once you start following the threads of Australian rock history.

“Aloha Steve and Danno” captures everything that made them special. Sharp guitars, relentless momentum, and a complete refusal to follow convention.

The band never achieved mainstream success on the scale of some of their contemporaries, but their influence can still be heard across Australian punk, garage rock, and alternative music today.

3. The Triffids – “Wide Open Road” (1986)

There are certain songs that seem impossible to separate from the place they came from, and “Wide Open Road” feels like one of them.

Written by David McComb, the track captures a feeling that will probably be familiar to anyone who has spent time travelling through Australia. The distances feel endless, the horizon never seems to stop moving, and somehow the landscape manages to feel both beautiful and lonely at the same time.

The first time you hear it, it feels less like a song and more like a journey unfolding in slow motion.

4. Yothu Yindi – “Treaty” (1991)

More than three decades after its release, “Treaty” still sounds unlike almost anything else in Australian music.

Released in 1991, the song emerged from frustration. Despite promises from the Australian government regarding a treaty with Indigenous Australians, little progress had been made. Rather than delivering a speech, Yothu Yindi turned that frustration into music.

Blending Yolngu language, traditional Indigenous music, rock, and contemporary production, the result felt both deeply rooted in culture and completely forward-looking at the same time.

What makes the song so important is that it manages to be both deeply specific and universally relevant. It speaks to questions of identity, recognition, and belonging while remaining unmistakably Australian.

5. You Am I – “Berlin Chair” (1993)

Australian alternative rock reached a new level during the 1990s, and few songs represent that era better than “Berlin Chair.”

Built around one of the most memorable guitar hooks in Australian music, the song helped cement You Am I as one of the country’s defining rock bands.

What makes it endure is the balance. Vulnerability without self-pity. Big melodies without losing edge. Confidence without excess.

There is a reason people still bring this song up whenever conversations turn to the greatest Australian guitar records.

6. Silverchair – “Israel’s Son” (1995)

When people talk about Silverchair, “Tomorrow” usually dominates the conversation. Spend enough time around Australian rock fans though, and eventually somebody will bring up “Israel’s Son.”

Heavy, aggressive, and astonishingly confident for a band whose members were still teenagers, the song showed there was far more to Silverchair than being labelled Australia’s answer to grunge.

It remains one of the most explosive moments in Australian rock history and a reminder of just how extraordinary the band’s early years really were.

7. The Vines – “Get Free” (2002)

In the early 2000s, it felt like The Vines were everywhere.

“Get Free” arrived during a period when Australian rock suddenly found itself back in the global conversation. Chaotic, explosive, and completely unconcerned with being polished, the song became one of the defining tracks of the garage-rock revival.

More than two decades later, it still feels unpredictable. Like it could fall apart at any moment, yet somehow never does.

8. Sticky Fingers – “Australia Street” (2013)

If you were introduced to Australian alternative music during the 2010s, there is a good chance “Australia Street” was part of that journey.

The song arrived during a period when Australian indie and alternative music was finding a new generation of listeners, and somehow managed to feel instantly familiar while sounding unlike much else around it.

Blending indie rock, reggae, and laid-back storytelling, Sticky Fingers created something that felt distinctly Australian without relying on just clichés or nostalgia.

More than a decade later, it remains one of those songs that instantly transports people back to a particular moment in their lives.

9. Dr Sure’s Unusual Practice – “No Pigs” (2025)

The first time we heard “No Pigs,” we weren’t entirely sure whether to laugh, feel uncomfortable, or immediately start another replay.

Dr Sure’s Unusual Practice have always had a talent for wrapping serious ideas inside songs that feel playful on the surface, and this might be one of the sharpest examples of that approach.

Beneath the driving energy and absurd imagery sits a song about power, surveillance, authority, and the systems that shape everyday life. What makes the track particularly interesting is that it never settles for a simple protest anthem. Instead, it feels paranoid, satirical, and deliberately exaggerated.

Pigs appear everywhere throughout the song: in basements, ceilings, webcams, and parliament. The image becomes less about individuals and more about the feeling of living inside structures that constantly watch, control, and influence the world around us.

That tension has always existed within Australian music. From artists questioning authority to musicians exploring inequality and institutional power, some of the country’s most compelling songs have emerged from asking uncomfortable questions.

10. Drifting Clouds – “Rarrandharr” (2026)

One of the easiest mistakes people make when talking about Australian music is assuming the story begins and ends in the major cities.

“Rarrandharr” is a reminder that some of the country’s most fascinating music is being created far from Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane.

The first time we heard the song, it felt like the soundtrack to a character wandering through a forgotten desert town somewhere between a Clint Eastwood film and a 1970s disco fever dream.

Drifting Clouds, who proudly describe themselves as “the most chill band in Arnhem Land,” bring something completely different to Australian music. There is a warmth, looseness, and sense of place running throughout “Rarrandharr” that makes it feel unlike almost anything else we have heard recently.

Written by Terry Guyula while touring in Melbourne, thousands of kilometres away from home, the song reflects on the end of Rarrandharr, the hot dry season recognised within Yolngu culture. Yet beneath the seasonal imagery sits something deeper: distance, memory, family, and time.

Final Thoughts

One of the things we love most about Australian music is how difficult it is to pin down.

The songs on this list sound nothing alike. A punk classic from Brisbane, an Indigenous anthem, a garage-rock explosion, a protest song, and a track from Arnhem Land about changing seasons should not sit comfortably beside one another.

Yet somehow they do.

That diversity is part of what makes Australian music so fascinating. Every generation seems to find its own way of telling Australian stories, whether through loud guitars, sharp social commentary, or sounds that challenge expectations entirely.

These ten songs are only a small part of that story, but they are a good place to start if you want to understand why Australian music continues to feel different.

A lot of artists today jump from one band wagon to another depending on what is hot, just to seem like they care about things and get more followers along the way.

In a day and age where being seen and heard everywhere is what most musicians and bands are looking to get, there we have the Australian band Dr Sure’s Unusual Practice, the baby of frontman Dougal Shaw, who is not only standing up for what he believes in, but has shown that through actions again and again since the inception of the band in 2019.

Not too long ago in February 2026, all of their music was taken down from streaming platforms.

At a time where most artists are trying to get onto as many playlists as possible and constantly stay visible online, the move felt almost bizarre.

But the reasoning behind it was surprisingly simple. Shaw spoke about wanting to be more intentional with where the band’s music exists and what systems it supports. He talked about growing uncomfortable participating in platforms that reduce art into endlessly available content while artists themselves are expected to constantly feed algorithms just to survive.

Importantly, the decision was not framed as some dramatic moral statement. There was no “we are better than everyone else” energy around it. If anything, it felt more like somebody openly questioning the systems musicians have slowly accepted as normal over the last decade.

And the more you think about it, the harder it becomes to ignore how strange music culture has started to feel recently.

The music itself feels like a reaction to modern life

Part of what makes Dr Sure’s Unusual Practice so interesting in the middle of this whole conversation is that their music already sounds like it is reacting to the exact world that created AI music culture in the first place.

Their records are chaotic, funny, anxious, political and weirdly emotional all at once. Across their discography, the band jumps between post-punk, synth punk, art rock and new wave while constantly pulling apart modern Australian life in the process.

A lot of the band’s writing revolves around modern alienation, housing, capitalism, burnout, identity and the weird disconnect that comes from existing online all the time. There is frustration running through the music, but there is also humour and warmth sitting underneath it.

It never sounds like the band is trying to position themselves above everybody else or pretend they have everything figured out. If anything, the songs feel like people trying to make sense of the mess in real time.

That messiness is exactly what feels important now.

Because the more AI-generated music starts appearing online, the more noticeable it becomes when music actually sounds lived-in. AI can already imitate genres, structures and aesthetics pretty convincingly, but it still struggles to recreate the feeling of actual people bouncing off each other creatively. The strange chemistry that happens inside bands. The moments that probably should not work but somehow become the most memorable parts of a record.

Bands like Dr Sure’s Unusual Practice sound deeply personal because their music is full of tension, contradictions and unpredictability. Nothing about it feels designed purely for algorithms or passive listening.

Which is probably why their decision to pull their music from streaming platforms felt so connected to the art itself. The band has always sounded like they were questioning the systems surrounding modern life. Eventually that questioning moved beyond the lyrics and into real actions too.

Music discovery does not feel the same anymore

There was a time where finding a new band genuinely felt exciting. You would hear about artists through friends, zines, forums, community radio stations, opening acts at tiny gigs, or some badly recorded live video uploaded online years ago. Music discovery felt messy and personal.

People also listened differently, Albums were something you sat with properly. You learned tracklists, lyrics, artwork, weird transitions between songs, hidden details buried deep inside records. Sometimes albums took weeks or months to fully click, but that was part of the experience.

Now music often feels like it is designed to pass by as quickly as possible.

Streaming completely changed listening habits. Songs became shorter, hooks arrived quicker, and artists suddenly had to compete for attention every second. Instead of disappearing for two or three years to make a concept album, musicians are now expected to constantly release content just to remain visible.

Even the way people talk about music has changed, everything revolves around numbers now. Monthly listeners, streams, engagement, algorithm placement. The conversation around art increasingly feels tied to performance metrics rather than actual connection.

Music has become more accessible than ever before, yet somehow a lot of it feels less meaningful.

Album culture has not disappeared completely, but it definitely feels weaker than it once did. Fewer people seem to sit with records long enough to build relationships with them. Discovery feels less organic now, like music is being delivered to people rather than stumbled upon.

Then AI entered the conversation and pushed all of this even further.

But acting like AI is purely evil misses the point too

At the same time, reducing AI to some evil force destroying creativity feels far too simplistic. Music history is full of moments where new technology scared people. Synthesisers were criticised, Sampling was dismissed as stealing. Digital recording was blamed for ruining warmth and authenticity, but eventually artists found ways to use those tools creatively.

AI can absolutely become part of that evolution if it is used carefully.

For independent musicians especially, AI tools can remove barriers that previously made creating art far more difficult. Artists can use it to organise ideas, restore recordings, experiment with arrangements, create visuals, or speed up technical processes that would otherwise require money and resources they simply do not have.

The problem is not the technology itself, it is the culture surrounding it and more importantly how people and corporations are using it.

Right now most platforms reward speed, volume, and visibility over depth. AI is often being used to flood the internet with more disposable content rather than helping artists create more meaningful work. Instead of supporting creativity, it risks flattening music even further into background noise.

So where does music go from here?

That is what makes Dr Sure’s Unusual Practice removing their music from streaming platforms feel bigger than just one band making a personal choice.

Whether intentionally or not, it pushes back against this growing idea that music should always be instantly available, endlessly consumable, and constantly optimised for algorithms.

Maybe the answer is not rejecting technology entirely because realistically that is never going to happen. AI is here now and it will inevitably become part of music culture moving forward. But there is still a huge difference between using technology as a creative tool and allowing it to completely replace the personal side of art.

Because despite everything, people still crave that connection from music. You still see it when local scenes thrive, when genuinely great albums slowly build cult followings, or when songs become attached to specific moments in people’s lives for years afterward.

Maybe that is the thing worth protecting most. Not nostalgia for older ways of consuming music, but the idea that art should still feel connected to real people saying real things, rather than endless content generated to fill silence.

There’s a line from AC/DC’s It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ’n’ Roll) that has probably followed every touring band around the world for the last fifty years:

“If you think it’s easy doing one night stands, try playing in a rock ’n’ roll band.”

What’s interesting about that lyric is how little it has aged. If anything, it feels even more relevant now than it did in 1975.

The technology around music has changed completely, the ways artists release songs have evolved, and audiences consume music in fundamentally different ways, yet the core reality behind that line still remains untouched. Building a life around music is difficult, exhausting, financially unstable, and emotionally demanding in ways most people outside of it rarely fully see.

The strange thing about the current moment is that music exists in this constant contradiction. On one side, artists have more tools available to them than ever before. Someone can upload a song from their bedroom in Adelaide, Melbourne, or Perth and potentially have listeners from completely different parts of the world hearing it within hours.

There are fewer gatekeepers than there once were, and discovery itself has become far more democratic than the industry structures that existed twenty or thirty years ago.

At the same time though, actually sustaining a long-term career in music feels increasingly difficult, especially for artists who are trying to build something with depth and identity rather than simply reacting to trends.

This tension feels particularly visible in Australia right now. From the outside, the country still appears to have a thriving live music culture. Tours happen constantly, festivals continue to sell out, and there is never really a shortage of new artists emerging from different scenes around the country.

But underneath all of that, there has also been a growing sense of exhaustion across the industry over the last few years. Touring costs continue rising, smaller venues are disappearing, audiences are more fragmented than they once were, and artists are increasingly expected to function not only as musicians, but also as marketers, content creators, strategists, editors, and personalities online.

For bands especially, the pressure feels uniquely heavy because maintaining a band has always required a level of commitment that goes beyond the music itself.

It is multiple people trying to keep momentum moving in the same direction while balancing completely different personal lives, financial realities, emotional states, and long-term priorities. Even under ideal circumstances, that is difficult to sustain over a long enough period of time.

Which is partly why the indefinite hiatus of Bad//Dreems feels larger than simply another band deciding to step away for a while.

A Band That Always Felt Grounded in Something Real

Bad//Dreems were never just another band filling out festival lineups. Over the last decade, they became one of the defining voices in modern Australian pub rock, not because they reinvented the genre completely, but because they understood what made it resonate in the first place.

Their music always felt grounded in something recognisable. There was humour in it, frustration in it, loneliness in it, and an understanding of suburban Australian life that never felt exaggerated or performative.

That honesty is what made albums like Dogs At Bay, Gutful, and HOO HA! connect with so many people over the years.

The band understood how to capture a very particular emotional texture within Australian life — the boredom, the distance, the dark humour people use to mask disappointment, and the feeling of wanting more while simultaneously feeling stuck in place. But underneath that was often something uglier as well: violence, repression, toxic masculinity, racism, generational frustration, and the emotional damage sitting quietly beneath a lot of Australian suburbia. Even at their loudest, there was always vulnerability underneath the surface of their music.

What made Bad//Dreems particularly important within the Australian landscape was that their songs were not trying to mythologise themselves into something larger than life. They felt closer to conversations overheard outside pubs at closing time, long drives through outer suburbs, or the strange emotional emptiness that can exist even inside loud rooms full of people.

That ability to capture ordinary life without romanticising or mocking it is much harder than it sounds, and it is also part of why the band’s music has aged so well.

Ultra Dundee Feels Like the End of a Circle

Listening to Ultra Dundee now, especially with the knowledge of the hiatus sitting quietly in the background, the emotional weight of the record becomes even more noticeable.

It almost feels like a circle being completed.

Before this album, Dogs At Bay probably felt like the Bad//Dreems record most deeply tied to Adelaide, not just geographically, but emotionally as well.

There was something about that album that captured the feeling of outer suburbs, pub carparks, dead-end jobs, strange local characters, and the kind of restless boredom that quietly sits underneath a lot of Australian life. More than anything, it introduced the emotional world the band would continue returning to over the next 15 years.

Now with Ultra Dundee, the band somehow returns to that same emotional landscape, except this time it feels older, stranger, heavier, and more reflective. There’s still humour throughout the album, still absurdity, still the surreal Australian imagery Bad//Dreems have always been brilliant at writing, but underneath it all there’s also a sense of reckoning with time, identity, memory, mortality, and place.

Even the opening track, “Slaughterhouse ’85”, immediately feels like someone revisiting fragments of their past while trying to understand what any of it actually meant. The song moves through Adelaide imagery almost like memories flashing past a car window — the Q.E.H., Croatian clubs, late-night drives, local fuel stations, knife fights, old ghosts — but none of it feels nostalgic in the traditional sense.

It feels more like someone emotionally tracing the map of where they came from while quietly realising how much time has already disappeared.

Throughout Ultra Dundee, people seem spiritually displaced from themselves, from each other, and sometimes even from the country surrounding them. Characters drift through deserts, pubs, highways, shadowlands, religious hallucinations, collapsing relationships, and strange visions of Australia that feel simultaneously grounded and mythological.

“Shadowland” might be one of the clearest examples of this thread running through the album. The repeated line, “I wake up every morning and forget myself / And the man in the mirror looks like someone else,” feels less like a personal confession and more like the emotional centre of the entire record. The album constantly returns to questions of identity, disconnection, and the uneasy feeling of no longer fully recognising the world around you.

What makes the album compelling is that Bad//Dreems never try to over-explain any of this. The songs feel intentionally fragmented at times, almost dreamlike in the way imagery appears and disappears. Characters emerge briefly before dissolving again. Places feel symbolic as much as physical. Religious references sit beside UFO sightings, highways, pubs, violence, death, and desert landscapes in ways that make Australia itself feel almost mythological and haunted.

That has always been one of Bad//Dreems’ greatest strengths as writers.

Their music rarely presents Australia in simplistic terms. There’s always beauty sitting beside ugliness, humour sitting beside violence, spirituality sitting beside emptiness. Their version of Australia feels deeply human because it allows contradictions to exist naturally rather than forcing neat conclusions.

Knowing the hiatus sits ahead of this album inevitably changes how certain lyrics and themes are interpreted. Songs about time, endings, memory, isolation, and transformation begin carrying extra emotional weight even if they were never written explicitly about the band itself.

The closing track “Afterlife” in particular almost feels like a quiet acceptance of change rather than a dramatic farewell.

What makes Ultra Dundee such a strong final statement (if it does end up becoming that) is that it feels like a band fully settling into themselves creatively and emotionally, trusting atmosphere and honesty more than anything else.

Which, in a strange way, is probably what made Bad//Dreems important in the first place.

The Bigger Problem Facing Australian Music

The difficult reality is that longevity itself has become harder to sustain. Many artists today are operating inside systems where the emotional, financial, and physical demands of maintaining a creative career continue growing while the actual rewards become increasingly unstable.

Touring, which was once one of the few reliable ways for artists to survive financially, has become significantly more expensive, while streaming rarely provides enough meaningful income unless artists reach enormous scale.

At the same time, audiences are consuming more music than ever before, but often in ways that encourage speed rather than deep engagement. Songs move quickly through timelines, playlists refresh constantly, and attention itself has become fragmented across platforms. Within that environment, building something slowly and organically becomes much harder, even for genuinely great artists.

For bands, these pressures often become even more intense because sustaining a group over a long period requires far more than simply continuing to write good songs.

That reality rarely gets discussed properly when conversations around music become overly focused on numbers, visibility, and momentum.

Because the truth is that many important artists are barely surviving long before audiences realise there is even a problem.

What Needs to Change?

This is why conversations around supporting music need to move beyond simply celebrating artists once they are already struggling or disappearing.

If independent music scenes are going to survive long-term, then the ecosystems around artists also need to become sustainable. Smaller venues matter because they give artists places to develop before larger audiences arrive. Independent media matters because scenes cannot survive purely through algorithms.

Audiences showing up consistently matters because music cultures are built through communities, not passive consumption.

There also needs to be a wider cultural shift in how audiences understand success within music. Not every artist is going to become globally massive, and honestly, that should not be the expectation in the first place.

Some of the most important bands within any country’s music culture are the ones that slowly build dedicated communities over years rather than exploding overnight.

But for that kind of artistic growth to survive, there needs to be enough structural support around it to make longevity possible.

Australia is still producing incredible bands. That has never really been the problem. The deeper issue is whether the structures surrounding artists actually allow them to keep creating long enough to fully evolve.

And maybe that is the uncomfortable feeling sitting underneath the hiatus of Bad//Dreems.

Not that a great band reached the end of its creative abilities, but that even for respected, culturally important artists, surviving within the modern music industry can slowly become harder than making the music itself.

But underneath all of that is one of the most influential and layered music scenes in the world.

This is a country that gave the world stadium rock giants, globally influential alternative bands, one of the oldest continuing musical cultures on Earth, and underground scenes that still survive through community radio, DIY venues, and relentless touring.

From Indigenous musical traditions and Australian punk history to psychedelic rock, Triple J, and pub culture, these stories reveal why Australian music has had a much bigger global impact than many people realise.

Here are 25 wild Australian music facts you probably didn’t know.

1) Indigenous Australian music traditions are part of one of the world’s oldest continuing cultures

Long before Australia had recording studios, festivals, or rock bands, Indigenous communities across the continent had already developed deeply spiritual musical traditions tied to storytelling, ceremony, dance, and connection to Country.

These traditions stretch back tens of thousands of years and remain central to Indigenous cultural life today.

2) AC/DC was formed in Sydney by two Scottish brothers

One of the biggest rock bands in history began after Malcolm and Angus Young migrated from Scotland to Australia with their family.

The band was formed in Sydney in 1973, and the name “AC/DC” famously came from the label on their sister’s sewing machine.

3) Australia developed one of the most distinctive pub rock circuits in the world

Before streaming and social media discovery, Australian bands survived by touring constantly through pubs and small venues.

That touring culture became a defining part of Australian music identity throughout the 70s and 80s, forcing artists to become incredible live performers or disappear quickly.

4) Silverchair became international stars while still in school

The members of Silverchair were teenagers from Newcastle when they entered a national demo competition under the name Innocent Criminals.

Soon after winning, their single “Tomorrow” exploded internationally and turned them into one of Australia’s biggest rock exports almost overnight.

5) Triple J helped shape generations of Australian music fans

For decades, Triple J has played a major role in introducing Australian listeners to alternative, independent, and emerging artists.

Its annual Hottest 100 countdown eventually became one of the country’s biggest music traditions.

6) The Bee Gees built much of their early career in Australia

Although many people associate the Bee Gees with the UK and later American disco culture, the brothers spent important formative years in Queensland after moving there as children during the late 1950s.

7) Australia’s live music culture became deeply tied to touring

Because of the country’s geography and relative isolation, touring has always been a major part of Australian music culture.

For many artists, live performance became essential not just creatively, but financially and culturally.

8) Tame Impala started largely as a bedroom recording project

Before becoming one of the defining names in modern psychedelic music, Kevin Parker was recording much of Tame Impala’s early material alone in Perth.

The project slowly evolved from a personal experimental outlet into a global phenomenon.

9) The Saints released one of punk’s most important early records

The Saints released “(I’m) Stranded” in 1976, before many legendary UK punk bands had even released their debut singles.

Today, the song is widely considered one of the foundational records of punk music.

10) Community radio still plays a huge role in Australian music discovery

Even in the streaming era, stations like PBS FM and RRR continue helping independent Australian artists reach new audiences.

For many local scenes, community radio still matters enormously.

11) INXS sold over 70 million records worldwide

What started as a Sydney pub band eventually became one of Australia’s biggest global success stories.

Throughout the 80s and early 90s, INXS became one of the world’s most recognisable rock bands.

12) Australian festivals helped shape entire generations of music fans

Festivals like Big Day Out became far more than concert events.

For many people, they were introductions to entirely new genres, scenes, subcultures, and artists.

13) Australia’s geographic isolation helped many artists develop unique sounds

Because Australia sits relatively far from major global music hubs, many artists ended up building strong local identities before international audiences discovered them.

That isolation often encouraged experimentation instead of trend-chasing.

14) Nick Cave emerged from Melbourne’s chaotic post-punk underground

Before becoming one of modern music’s most respected songwriters, Nick Cave performed with The Birthday Party, a group known for intense and unpredictable live performances.

15) Australia became one of modern psych-rock’s biggest creative hubs

From Tame Impala to King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, Australian artists played a major role in the global revival of psychedelic and experimental rock throughout the 2010s.

16) Gotye created one of the defining songs of the 2010s

“Somebody That I Used To Know” became a global phenomenon despite sounding very different from most mainstream pop songs at the time.

Its stripped-back production and emotional storytelling helped it stand out worldwide.

17) Australia’s heavy music scenes run far deeper than many people realise

Across cities like Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, and Adelaide, independent hardcore, punk, metal, and alternative scenes continue thriving through DIY venues, local promoters, and touring communities.

A huge part of that ecosystem still exists outside mainstream visibility.

18) Amyl and the Sniffers rose from pub shows to global stages

Their rise reflects a classic Australian pathway: relentless touring, chaotic live performances, and building momentum through word of mouth long before mainstream recognition arrived.

19) Australian radio censorship often made controversial songs even bigger

Throughout different periods of Australian music history, songs dealing with politics, explicit themes, or social controversy were sometimes restricted from radio play.

In many cases, the attention only made audiences more curious.

20) Melbourne is often considered Australia’s live music capital

The city has long been associated with independent venues, underground scenes, record stores, and strong support for live music culture.

For many Australian artists, Melbourne became a key creative hub.

21) Sia wrote massive global hits before becoming a solo superstar

Before dominating charts under her own name, Sia had already written major songs for artists including Rihanna, Beyoncé, and David Guetta.

22) Australian hip-hop took years to fully embrace local identity

For a long time, Australian hip-hop artists were criticised for sounding “too American.”

Over time, many artists stopped imitating American accents and instead embraced their own local stories, voices, and experiences — helping reshape the culture completely.

23) Many Australian independent artists still operate almost entirely DIY

A huge portion of Australia’s underground music ecosystem still survives through self-funded tours, independent merch, local communities, and artists balancing music alongside everyday jobs.

That DIY mentality remains central to Australian music culture.

24) King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard released five albums in a single year

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard released five albums in a single year—and they’ve done it twice (2017 and 2022).

Most artists struggle to finish one.

25) Australian music has always been far bigger than its stereotypes

For decades, global audiences often reduced Australian music to only a handful of mainstream acts.

But underneath that surface exists a massive ecosystem shaped by Indigenous storytelling, punk scenes, immigrant influences, experimental music, community radio, alternative culture, and generations of artists constantly redefining what Australian music can sound like.

And honestly, this barely scratches the surface.

Australia’s underground scenes have continued evolving far beyond the country’s mainstream exports — something we explored further in our deep dive into The History of Australian Music.

Australia’s music story is often reduced to a shortlist of exports: AC/DC, Kylie Minogue, INXS, Tame Impala, Sia. Big names, real achievements, global reach, but they only tell part of the story.

The fuller picture is messier, richer and far more revealing. It begins long before federation, before charts and record labels, in the living musical traditions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. It moves through bush ballads, dance halls, migrant influence, sweaty pub stages, pirate radio energy, suburban garages, community scenes and internet-born artists creating far from the traditional centres of culture.

Australia did not inherit one sound, it built one from influences from all over.

Because of geography, Australian artists have long worked with a strange tension: close enough to absorb global influence, far enough to reshape it. Styles often arrived from Britain, America or elsewhere, but rarely stayed unchanged.

Rock got rougher, pop leaned brighter (or just weirder), punk felt more unhinged, electronic music opened up and became more expansive, and hip-hop turned into a way of talking about migration, class and what modern Australia actually looks like.

Again and again, Australian music has turned distance into character.

Before the Nation: The First Music of the Land

Any serious history of Australian music must begin with the one of the oldest continuing cultures on Earth.

For tens of thousands of years, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have sustained musical traditions tied to ceremony, language, kinship, memory and Country. Music was a way of carrying knowledge, law, ancestry and relationship through generations.

Songlines connected land, navigation and story, while voice, rhythm and dance carried deep communal meaning. Instruments varied across regions — from clapsticks and drums in some Torres Strait Islander traditions to the yidaki, often called the didgeridoo in English, especially associated with Arnhem Land.

This isn’t a prelude to Australian music history, it’s the foundation of it.

Modern Australian music continues to be shaped by First Nations artists bringing language, truth-telling, humour, resistance and continuity into contemporary forms.

Bush Ballads, Folk Songs and a Colonial Identity

After British colonisation began in 1788, imported Irish, Scottish and English folk traditions met convict hardship, frontier violence, labour culture and the realities of distance.

Songs travelled through camps, settlements, shearing sheds and goldfields. Over time, bush ballads emerged as one of the first recognisably local popular forms: songs about workers, wanderers, injustice, drought, survival and irreverence toward authority.

No song became more symbolic than “Waltzing Matilda,” first published in the 1890s. It was not an official anthem, but it functioned like one for many people: proof that music could help imagine a national identity before the nation fully existed.

Australian music was already doing something it would keep doing for generations: mythologising itself while laughing at itself.

Cities, Dance Halls and the Radio Age

By the early twentieth century, Australia’s urban centres were increasingly plugged into international entertainment culture. Jazz, vaudeville, theatre orchestras and dance halls flourished in Sydney, Melbourne and beyond.

Broadcast music created shared listening across enormous distances. What happened in one city could now be heard nationally. It helped turn performers into household names and helped audiences develop a common cultural reference point.

American jazz and swing had major influence, but local scenes mattered too. Australia was no longer only consuming music, it was building an industry around it.

Rock ’n’ Roll and the Birth of Youth Culture

The arrival of rock ’n’ roll in the 1950s changed Australian culture in the same way it did elsewhere: teenagers suddenly had music that felt like theirs.

Johnny O’Keefe became one of the country’s first major rock stars, helping localise a genre born overseas. Television, introduced in 1956, accelerated the shift. Music was now visual as well as sonic.

By the 1960s, surf groups, beat bands and pop acts were thriving. Australia still looked heavily to Britain and America, but something important had changed: the infrastructure for a homegrown modern music culture now existed.

The Pub Rock Era: Australia Finds Its Volume

If one movement most clearly shaped modern Australian music identity, it was pub rock.

From the 1970s into the 1980s, an extensive circuit of hotels, pubs and clubs became one of the toughest live proving grounds in the world. Bands had to win audiences in real time.

You either had songs, stamina and presence, or you didn’t.

This environment helped produce acts such as:

• AC/DC

• Cold Chisel

• Midnight Oil

• The Angels

• Rose Tattoo

• Australian Crawl

• early INXS

Pub rock was physical music built for crowded rooms. Working and middle-class spaces turned live music into ritual: a release after work, a social language, a place where national temperament could be heard at full volume.

Australia did not just imitate rock music, it toughened it.

Punk, Post-Punk and the Outsiders

Not every artist belonged in the pub rock mould.

Brisbane’s The Saints were among the earliest great punk bands anywhere, releasing “(I’m) Stranded” in 1976. Their urgency arrived almost simultaneously with first-wave punk in the UK and US, a reminder that Australia was not always culturally behind.

Then came stranger forms.

Nick Cave and The Birthday Party turned chaos into theatre. Underground scenes in Melbourne and Sydney embraced noise, goth, experimental rock and outsider identity. These artists often benefited from distance. Removed from global trend centres, they could become harsher, weirder and less obedient.

That outsider streak would become one of Australia’s most valuable musical traits till date.

Country Music and Regional Australia

While urban scenes often dominate cultural narratives, country music has been one of Australia’s most enduring and commercially significant traditions.

Artists such as Slim Dusty helped define a distinctly Australian country voice rooted in roads, labour, humour and regional life. Later figures like John Williamson and Kasey Chambers carried the form into new eras.

This mattered because Australia has never only been a city story. Regional identity, rural mythology and life beyond metropolitan centres have always shaped national culture. Country music kept that perspective audible.

Pop Exports and International Success

By the late 1980s and 1990s, Australian artists were no longer just domestic stars or touring bands. They were global figures.

INXS became one of the era’s biggest bands. Kylie Minogue became an international pop institution. Savage Garden topped charts worldwide. Natalie Imbruglia’s “Torn” became one of the defining pop songs of its moment. The Bee Gees, though born in the UK, developed significantly in Australia before global fame.

Australia had entered the export era.

The significance was psychological as much as commercial. Australian artists no longer needed to leave identity behind to compete internationally.

Triple J and a National Taste Culture

Few institutions shaped contemporary Australian music more than triple j.

Originally launched in Sydney in 1975 before later expanding nationally, the youth broadcaster became a discovery engine, gatekeeper, community hub and launchpad for local talent. For many Australians, triple j was not just radio, it was a map.

Its annual Hottest 100 became a national ritual. Its support helped build careers across genres.

Through the 1990s and 2000s, artists such as:

• Silverchair

• Powderfinger

• Grinspoon

• Missy Higgins

• The Living End

• Hilltop Hoods

• Jet

• Wolfmother

all benefited from a culture where local music still had shared national pathways.

Streaming later fragmented this monoculture, but for decades triple j gave Australia something rare: a common soundtrack.

Women Who Reshaped the Story

No honest history of Australian music can treat women as side notes.

From Helen Reddy’s global impact in the 1970s to Kylie’s pop longevity, Tina Arena’s vocal legacy, Missy Higgins’ songwriting voice, Courtney Barnett’s indie sharpness, Sia’s global songwriting dominance, Amy Shark’s commercial rise, and countless others, women have repeatedly expanded what Australian music could be.

They have often done so while navigating industries slower to recognise them.

Today, many of the country’s most exciting scenes right now are being shaped by women and non-binary artists across indie, electronic, punk, R&B and pop.

Tame Impala and the New Global Cool

Kevin Parker’s Tame Impala marked another shift.

Emerging from Perth, far from eastern media centres, the project fused psychedelic rock with obsessive studio craft and pop instinct. What began as a celebrated psych act became one of the most influential modern bands anywhere.

The symbolism mattered more than people realise, it showed how an artist working from geographic distance can now shape global sound directly.

And, honestly that had always been Australia’s hidden advantage.

Hip-Hop, Migration and the New Australia

Australian hip-hop began as a niche movement but has become one of the clearest mirrors of contemporary national identity.

Early commercial breakthroughs included Hilltop Hoods and Bliss n Eso. Later generations widened the frame dramatically.

Artists from migrant communities, suburban scenes and First Nations backgrounds used rap to speak about race, policing, class, belonging, masculinity and ambition.

Acts such as A.B. Original, Briggs, Barkaa, OneFour, Genesis Owusu and many others helped move Australian hip-hop beyond imitation into something culturally specific and urgent.

First Nations Renaissance

Contemporary Australian music is increasingly unimaginable without First Nations leadership.

Archie Roach’s truth-telling, Gurrumul’s spiritual presence, Yothu Yindi’s historic crossover success, Baker Boy’s language-forward joy, Thelma Plum’s songwriting, King Stingray’s Yolŋu surf-rock energy and many more have reshaped the national soundscape.

Some of the most future-facing Australian music is also deeply connected to the oldest traditions.

That is what is really exciting about whats happening in the current scene.

What Australian Music Sounds Like Now

Today, Australian music is less unified and more alive than ever.

Streaming ended the old monoculture. Scenes now coexist rather than dominate.

• Melbourne continues to thrive as a live music city with punk, indie, jazz and underground energy.

• Sydney produces rap, pop and hybrid scenes shaped by migration and density.

• Perth maintains a reputation for left-field innovation.

• Brisbane and Adelaide sustain strong independent communities.

• Regional artists can now build audiences online without relocating first.

Genre boundaries matter less than they once did. A rapper may make punk songs, a country artist may use electronic production, or a rock band may think like bedroom producers.

The old question was: What does Australian music sound like?

The better question now is: How many Australian sounds can exist at once?

Moments That Defined the Sound

Throughout its history, Australian music hasn’t just evolved through genres — it has been shaped by moments. Breakthrough performances, political songs, global successes and underground movements that shifted perception. These moments remind us that the story of Australian music isn’t just gradual — it’s punctuated by impact.

AC/DC Breaks Through Globally (Late 1970s)
From Sydney pubs to global arenas, proving Australian rock could travel.

The Saints Release (I’m) Stranded (1976)
A foundational punk moment.

Yothu Yindi – Treaty (1991)
A defining political song in Australian music.

The Triple J Hottest 100 Era (1990s–2000s)
A cultural institution shaping national taste.

Flume Wins a Grammy (2017)
Australian electronic music reaching global dominance.

Australia never had one musical identity. It had many, often arguing with each other.

Its greatest artists have emerged from contradiction: isolation and ambition, roughness and craft, humour and melancholy, local scenes and global dreams.

That may be why Australian music continues to resonate.

It was never built from certainty. It was built by people far from the centre, trying to make something real — and discovering that the distance itself could become a strength.

The Queensland four-piece are building momentum quickly, but what stands out most is that the rise feels rooted in real songs, real energy, and a sense of identity people can connect to.

Every music scene has those moments where a band starts appearing everywhere at once.

You hear their name from one person, then see them on your feed a few days later, then notice clips from a live show, then finally sit down with the music and realise there is a reason they are cutting through. It is rarely one thing that causes that kind of movement. Usually it is timing meeting consistency, personality meeting songs, and a band figuring out how to make people feel like they want to be part of whatever is happening.

That is the sense around Vlads right now.

They have been building noticeable momentum over the last few months. Toward the end of 2024, they were sitting around 850 followers on Instagram. Two weeks later, that had reportedly jumped to 10,000. They are now past the 40,000 mark.

Those figures are not being mentioned here as some lazy measurement of worth. Numbers by themselves can be meaningless. But sometimes they help show that a shift is happening, that attention is gathering around something in real time.

And in Vlads’ case, once you spend time with the music, the rise feels understandable.

More Than Just Momentum

What immediately stands out is that they do not sound like a band trying to reverse-engineer coolness. A lot of modern acts, especially in the social media era, can feel as though the image arrived before the songs did. With Vlads, the songs seem to come first. There is personality in the presentation, sure, but it feels connected to something genuine rather than something assembled.

Their music carries a looseness that is often harder to create than polished perfection. It feels lived in. There is movement in it. There is sunshine in it, mischief in it, restless energy in it. The kind of music that sounds like it belongs outside rather than trapped in a screen.

That is probably why people are connecting.

World Domination and the Sound of Youth in Motion

Their latest EP World Domination is a good place to understand what they do well. It feels youthful without being immature, catchy without being empty, and easy to enjoy without becoming disposable. That balance matters.

Plenty of artists can write one infectious hook. Fewer can create songs that feel light on the surface while still carrying a bit of life underneath.

The opener Puppet Master sets the tone immediately. Even without overcomplicating it, the title alone suggests one of the recurring ideas many younger listeners know well: being pulled around by desire, by obsession, by someone else’s control, by wanting something that might not be good for you. It works as an entry point because it introduces movement and tension straight away.

Why “Suzuki” Says More Than It First Appears

Then comes Suzuki, one of the more revealing songs on the project.

At first listen, it glides by with the kind of easy charm that can make people miss what is actually being said. But the lyrics paint a recognisable picture of modern drift. A person glued to their phone, wasting hours, losing the day without meaning to, feeling time slip past in a haze of repetition.

“Glued to my phone all day long…”
“Wasted the day, it’s gone away…”

Drive the Suzuki into the ground. Find the surf before sundown. Leave town. Move. Do something.

There is something very Australian about that instinct. When things feel stagnant, get outside. Get moving. Put distance between yourself and whatever has trapped you.

Romance, Chaos and Sunlight

Cherry Lipstick moves into another familiar territory: infatuation intense enough to blur reason. The lyrics capture that rush where attraction becomes all-consuming, where someone takes over your thoughts and turns logic into decoration. It is playful on the surface, but beneath it is the old story of desire making people act slightly foolish.

Then Sunshine Love arrives with warmth and sincerity. There is no need to overthink why songs like this work. Sometimes melody, openness, and emotional directness are enough. The imagery of flowers, sunlight, honey, and wanting to see someone shine gives the track a brightness that feels uncomplicated in the best way.

That might be one of Vlads’ strengths overall. They do not seem afraid of enjoyment.

A lot of contemporary music can feel burdened by the need to appear detached, hyper-self-aware, ironic, or emotionally armoured. Vlads often sound like they are comfortable embracing fun, romance, longing, boredom, chaos, and all the less glamorous parts of being young without dressing it up as something deeper than it needs to be.

Ironically, that honesty can feel deeper than forced seriousness.

Why They’re Connecting Right Now

The other reason they seem to be rising is consistency. In the current climate, plenty of artists want moments. Fewer want the slow repetition required to build something real. Showing up online, showing up on stage, releasing music people return to, giving listeners a world they recognise, all of that compounds.

That appears to be what has happened here.

Australia has always had more depth in its independent scene than outsiders sometimes realise. Great bands emerge from coastal towns, suburbs, cities, and scenes that never receive the same global spotlight as larger markets. Some break through, some remain cult favourites, and some arrive at exactly the right time.

Vlads feel like a band arriving at the right time, with the right kind of energy.

Whether they become massive or simply become one of those names people look back on fondly, they already seem to understand something many acts miss: people are not only looking for songs. They are looking for feeling, identity, movement, and something they can attach a memory to.

Right now, Vlads are giving listeners all four.