On 14 August 2026, Kayps dropped BUNUBA BABY, which is easily his best work so far and, if you have read our review of the album, you would know just how much we loved it.

Although the album is deeply personal to Kayps and tells his story through his experiences, family, identity and connection to where he comes from, it also feels much bigger than one person’s story. There are parts of the album that look at the history of his community, what previous generations went through and how those experiences continue to affect the generations that came after them.

That was one of the biggest reasons the album connected with us so much in the first place. Kayps is at the forefront of it, but it never feels like an album that is only about Kayps.

So when he announced the BUNUBA BABY tour with a Melbourne show, I was obviously eager to go and see how an album like this would translate live.

The gig took place at Open Bar in Fitzroy, with Squid the Kid opening the night, followed by Ricky Neil Jr. as co-headliner before Kayps eventually came out to perform.

This was also my first time going to a gig at Open Bar and honestly, the venue felt just right for the kind of show this was supposed to be. There weren’t too many people in the room, but sometimes that can actually make a gig better when everyone who is there genuinely wants to be there.

That was definitely the case on this night.

There was a really positive energy throughout the room, and whether it was Squid, Ricky or Kayps performing, people were actually paying attention, reacting to the songs and giving the artists something back. It didn’t feel like one of those shows where half the crowd is talking at the back waiting for the one artist or song they came to hear.

Everyone seemed invested in what was happening in front of them, and that ended up becoming one of my favourite things about the entire night.

Squid the Kid

First up was Squid the Kid, who seemed slightly nervous at times, which is completely understandable when you’re opening a show and trying to get a room warmed up.

But even with some of those nerves, he performed his songs well and you could hear the quality of the music underneath it because Squid already has some genuine bangers in his catalogue.

I think the performance side is something that will naturally get better the more he plays live. There are certain things you can only really learn by getting on stage again and again, figuring out how to command a room, how to move between songs and eventually reaching the point where everything becomes second nature.

As a songwriter though, he is already creating some incredible songs, and that is probably the harder part to learn.

A special shoutout also has to go to his drummer, who was excellent throughout the set and really helped make everything feel tighter and hit harder live.

Then we got Ricky Neil Jr., and this is where the night became a little ridiculous.

Ricky Neil Jr.

Where do I even start with this guy?

I had listened to Ricky’s music before, and based purely on that I was already expecting him to have this slightly over-the-top, theatrical and dramatic energy on stage. What I wasn’t expecting was just how good he would be at it.

Ricky is one of those performers who has something that is incredibly difficult to teach. There is a sense of mystery and charisma around him where even when he isn’t doing anything particularly huge, you still find yourself watching him because you want to see what he is going to do next.

I’ve been to a lot of gigs over the years and seen a lot of incredible performers, but there aren’t that many people who can completely hold an audience’s attention in the way Ricky did during this show.

This was also my first time seeing him live, so maybe people who have seen him multiple times already know exactly what I’m talking about, but if this is the level he performs at every time, I’m genuinely surprised he isn’t playing much bigger stages already.

After the show, I was talking to someone about how our generation never really got the opportunity to experience performers like Freddie Mercury or Elvis Presley live. Obviously we can watch footage of those performances, but watching something on a screen decades later is completely different from actually being in the room and feeling whatever made those people so captivating in the first place.

And I know this is going to sound like a massive comparison, but while watching Ricky I genuinely had this thought that if Freddie Mercury was Australian and playing in a small club in Fitzroy, maybe there would be something similar about the way it felt.

I’m not saying Ricky sounds like Freddie Mercury or that he is trying to perform like him, because that isn’t really what I mean. It’s more about that complete commitment to performing.

It isn’t only the way Ricky moves around the stage or the expressions on his face. It’s his entire body language, his vocals, knowing which word needs slightly more weight, where his pitch needs to rise, when he needs to pull something back and when he needs to completely let go.

Everything becomes part of the performance.

And when all of those things come together, you stop feeling like you’re simply watching someone sing their songs and start feeling like you’re watching an actual show.

I genuinely think Ricky Neil Jr. is someone you need to experience live to completely understand what I’m talking about, because videos can show you what he does, but they can’t necessarily recreate what it feels like when you’re standing a few metres away from him doing it.

He was easily one of the biggest surprises of the night for me and, without exaggerating it too much, one of the best live performers I’ve seen in a long time.

Then somehow Kayps had to follow that.

Kayps and Why BUNUBA BABY Matters

And then came the man of the moment, who had just released what we believe is one of the most important Australian hip-hop albums of all time.

Before getting into the performance itself, I think it’s worth briefly talking about why BUNUBA BABY matters so much, because that context completely changes what it feels like to hear these songs performed live.

When we reviewed the album, one of the things that stood out immediately was how much Kayps had grown as an artist. He was already a talented rapper before this record, but this album felt like the moment where he really understood what he wanted to do with that talent.

Throughout the project he talks about his Bunuba and Walmatjarri identity, his family, Fitzroy Crossing, racism, colonisation, stolen wages, people his community has lost and his own complicated relationship with culture.

But what makes the album special is the way all of those things connect.

A song like “765” can talk about stolen wages, land and generations of history while somehow still sounding like an anthem that people can scream along to. Then you have something like the “UNCLE JOHNNY” interlude, where Kayps almost completely removes himself and allows an older voice to recount memories of people locking arms in the river, police arriving and people being taken away one by one.

There isn’t a verse afterwards trying to explain what we just heard. The memory is allowed to stand by itself.

Then elsewhere on the album, Kayps turns those ideas back towards himself and starts asking questions about his own relationship with his culture, including the incredibly vulnerable line, “Am I an imposter in my own culture?”

That is what makes the record feel so much bigger than simply an album about one young artist’s life.

Kayps is telling his story, but that story exists because of the people who came before him, the community around him and the history they collectively carry. And despite how heavy some of that history is, the album never reduces his community to trauma either. There is humour, pride, family, confidence and celebration running through it as well.

That was the album we were now getting to hear live.

BUNUBA BABY Live

Kayps ended up performing the album from start to finish, which I think was probably the best way he could have approached this show.

This isn’t really an album where I would want him to pick five or six songs, move them around and fit them between older tracks just because those songs might get a bigger reaction.

The sequencing is such an important part of BUNUBA BABY because there is a story developing across the record, and performing it in order allowed us to experience that journey again in a completely different setting.

Kayps brought good energy throughout the performance and the band behind him was incredibly tight, which gave some of these songs a different kind of life compared with hearing them on the record.

But once again, what really made the performance work was the relationship between what was happening on stage and the people standing in front of it.

The crowd wasn’t huge, but every person in that room seemed to genuinely care about what they were witnessing. People were listening to the quieter moments, reacting to the bigger ones and giving Kayps the kind of energy back that these songs deserved.

And honestly, I would take that over a bigger room where half the people aren’t paying attention any day.

Kayps also performed a song that didn’t make the final version of BUNUBA BABY, which was interesting because although I thought the song itself was good, hearing it alongside everything else actually made me understand why it didn’t make the album.

It wasn’t really about the quality of the song. It just didn’t feel as necessary to the larger story.

When you have an album that is this focused and where almost every song seems to have a reason for existing exactly where it does, sometimes leaving a good song out is actually a better decision than forcing it onto the tracklist.

I would still love to see Kayps release it as a standalone single at some point though, because outside the context of the album, there is definitely something there.

The set eventually closed with “Black Fellah”, which Kayps has used as the closer for a lot of his shows and felt like a fitting way to finish this one too.

By the end of the night, what stayed with me wasn’t necessarily one particular song or moment, but just how much talent had been packed into this relatively small room in Fitzroy.

Squid the Kid is already writing some incredible songs and now needs the time and live experience to become as comfortable on stage as he sounds on record.

Ricky Neil Jr. completely caught me off guard and gave one of the most captivating live performances I’ve seen in a long time. I genuinely think he has the charisma and performance ability to command stages considerably bigger than the one we saw him on here.

And then there is Kayps.

When we reviewed BUNUBA BABY, one of the biggest things I took away from the album was that Kayps’ growth isn’t simply about becoming a better rapper. He was already good at that.

The growth is in understanding what he wants his music to say.

There were not hundreds of people standing inside Open Bar that night, and maybe a few years from now Kayps, Ricky and even Squid will be playing rooms considerably bigger than this one.

But there is something special about seeing artists at this stage, when the rooms are still small enough that the separation between the people making the music and the people supporting it almost disappears.

Because BUNUBA BABY was never really about how big the room could become.

As the album itself reminds us, money comes and goes, but your community is forever. And on this night in Fitzroy, the community showed up.

There is a moment on BUNUBA BABY where Kayps remembers seeing photographs of his Elders hanging when he was a child. He didn’t fully understand what he was looking at, so the question that entered his head was an innocent one: “Why is Uncle levitatin’?”

It is only one line on an album filled with difficult ones, but it says a lot about how far Kurrungaya Bieundurry has come as a songwriter.

Kayps has been making music since he was around 13, and for anyone who has followed his work, his ability has never really been in question. He can move between melodic hooks and rapid-fire flows with ridiculous ease, jump between genres without losing himself and, when he wants to, simply outrap the people around him. At 20, he already has the kind of technical confidence that usually comes much later.

What has changed on this album is what he is doing with it.

Released on 14 August, BUNUBA BABY feels like the first time everything around Kayps has been brought into the same place. His childhood, his Bunuba and Walmatjarri identity, Fitzroy Crossing, family, racism, colonisation, stolen wages, people he has lost, his years away from home and his own uncertainty about what that distance has done to him all become part of the record.

It would have been easy for an album carrying this much history to become overwhelmingly heavy, but Kayps understands that the place he is writing about cannot be represented through trauma alone. There is too much love there for that.

The first voice we hear isn’t even his.

Natalie Davey opens “Come Home” through Wangki Radio, welcoming listeners from across the Fitzroy Valley before introducing BUNUBA BABY. It gives the album an immediate sense of place, almost as though what we’re about to hear is being broadcast across the community it belongs to.

Kayps follows by giving us the kind of details that rarely appear when people talk about regional communities from the outside. Four-wheel drives, the heat, cigarette smoke outside a clinic, a drum kit in the meeting building, cousins fighting on the grass, the IGA, trying to heat up a feed when there’s no microwave around. There is nothing particularly grand about these images, which is precisely why they work.

The darker realities exist right beside them too. A booze ban, rehab and a cousin who died at 25 after Kayps had told him he’d see him soon.

“Sugar coating where I’m from could never make me hide away,” he says towards the end of the verse.

That refusal to simplify home becomes one of the most important ideas running through the album.

“CROCODILES” carries the same feeling forward, but with more warmth. Kayps writes about returning northwest, fishing after the rain, the riverbank, red dirt, dry season and crocodiles sitting in the water. Yet within the same song, he is writing about songlines being washed away by the West, stolen wages and generations of people fighting to hold onto culture.

Neither side cancels out the other.

The Fitzroy Valley Kayps gives us is beautiful because it is home, and painful because of what has happened there. The anger that naturally comes from that becomes much harder to ignore on “SHIPS”.

Kayps goes back to being the only Black kid in his class, remembering the prejudice that surrounded him and eventually being told that he was “too black”. His response isn’t restrained, nor should it be. The track carries an aggression that feels built from years of being expected to absorb those experiences quietly.

Flewnt and JJ Vacant extend that feeling beyond Kayps himself. Flewnt’s verse in particular is brilliant, moving from cultural pride towards stolen wages and the demand for greater space, funding and recognition. By the time the song ends, it no longer feels like one person’s frustration. The voices around Kayps are becoming an increasingly important part of the album.

That sense of community is something the album returns to constantly. Kayps may be at the centre of the record, but he rarely writes as though his story exists by itself.

On “765”, one of the strongest performances on the album, he moves between his own experience and something much older almost without warning. The track is technically impressive — Kayps’ delivery alone could give plenty of rappers a run for their money — but what makes it work is that none of that technical ability gets in the way of what he’s actually saying.

He talks about his culture being criminalised, wanting land returned and still waiting on his grandfather’s stolen wages before reaching one of the most haunting images on the entire album:

“As a youngin, I saw photos of my Elders hangin’

Lil’ me thinkin’, ‘Why is Uncle levitatin’?’”

There is something devastating about seeing that through the eyes of a child who doesn’t yet understand what he’s looking at. Kayps is smart enough not to explain the moment any further. He leaves the image there and keeps moving.

But for everything “765” carries, this doesn’t sound like a song weighed down by its subject matter. It’s huge. The hook sticks almost immediately, Kayps attacks the beat and there is a confrontational energy to the whole thing that makes me wonder what this song could become once people have had some time with it.

There is something about “765” that reminds me of what happened with Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us”. Not necessarily in how the two songs sound, but in their ability to carry something much heavier inside music that people can gather around. Kendrick made a diss track that thousands of people ended up shouting together, and listening to “765”, you can imagine Kayps getting his own version of that moment.

“765 section steppin’, tell me where you from.”

Give that line a crowd and you can already hear what happens next.

And if it does become that kind of song for him, there is something pretty powerful about what people will actually be shouting along to. A track about being a Black boy from the northwest, about culture being criminalised, stolen wages, land, family and the things he saw growing up has been packed inside one of the most immediate songs on the album.

Kayps hasn’t watered any of it down to make an anthem. The things he wants to say are the anthem.

That makes the “UNCLE JOHNNY” interlude that follows feel particularly important.

An older voice recalls trucks approaching while people sat in the middle of the river. They were told to move. Some did, while others locked arms and stayed before being taken away one by one.

“It was like a war to me,” he remembers. “I was really scared.”

There is no verse from Kayps afterwards trying to contextualise what we’ve heard. The memory is allowed to exist on its own, and after hearing “765” immediately before it, the relationship between the two generations becomes difficult to miss. One carries the memory of what happened; the other is figuring out what to do with everything that memory has left behind.

There is a quote commonly attributed to Jimi Hendrix that I’ve carried around in my wallet for years: “When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.”

I found myself thinking about it a lot while listening to the album, because so much of the history sitting underneath this album eventually leads you back to power. Who had it, who didn’t, what people were willing to do to keep it, and what happens when the consequences of those decisions are inherited by generations who had nothing to do with making them.

History isn’t sitting somewhere safely in the past on this record. Kayps is talking about his grandfather’s wages. He’s talking about photographs he saw as a child. He’s talking about things his family and community are dealing with now. The distance between what Uncle Johnny remembers and what this 20-year-old is rapping about isn’t nearly as large as it should be.

And then Kayps gives us the title track “BUNUBA BABY”.

Suddenly he’s full of bravado, calling himself the hottest brother in Boorloo City, putting on for the West and talking about Bunuba blood with complete confidence. In another context it might simply sound like the familiar self-belief of a young rapper who knows he’s good. Here, coming directly after the voice of an older generation, it feels closer to reclamation.

There is history behind that confidence, and maybe that’s why pride feels so important on this album. Kayps isn’t proud because he doesn’t know what happened. He’s proud while knowing exactly what happened, what survived and what his community continues to carry.

The same applies to the album’s politics. Kayps never treats them like a separate category of songwriting that requires the music to suddenly become serious around them.

“STICK TO THE CODE” is probably the clearest example.

It has the best and catchiest beat on the record, and everyone involved understands exactly what to do with it. Kayps, Yung Maynie, Sachém, Denzel Kennedy and Big Deej move through the track with so much confidence that it is easy to imagine the song becoming a live favourite.

Yet underneath that energy are many of the same concerns running through the rest of the album: tokenism, culture, land, money, family and the responsibility of standing with your people.

The message doesn’t interrupt the song because, for Kayps, there doesn’t seem to be any reason those things should exist separately. A song can carry history and still make a crowd move.

Even the short “RUN BOY RUN” gives us another piece of the world Kayps has been building. He writes about a 2,524-kilometre drive, flooded roads, water seeping through the door, six-foot ant hills in the distance, salt mounds, camping and the river continuing to rise. So much of the album is about what home means politically, culturally and personally, but here Kayps almost just lets us travel through it with him.

“SONNY WALTERS” brings the anger straight back. Kayps is looking at the systems surrounding his community again, calling out the way Indigenous culture can be celebrated when it is convenient while the politics rarely reflect that same admiration.

He moves through homelessness, incarceration and the history people would rather ignore, and by this point in the album you realise how easily Kayps moves between the past and the present because, in his writing, the two are constantly affecting each other.

That balance is one of the album’s biggest strengths, particularly because the further Kayps takes us into his world, the less straightforward his own place within it becomes.

“GOODY” is where that tension finally comes to the surface.

“Am I an imposter in my own culture?”

After hearing Kayps spend much of the album defending his identity so forcefully, the question catches you off guard.

He begins thinking about the distance that has grown between himself and his father’s teachings, wondering whether he understands himself well enough to be the kind of role model he wants to become. He talks about friends seeing him cry more often, accepting that he needs to let his feelings out and recognising that healing might require a kind of vulnerability we haven’t heard much from him elsewhere.

Then he looks back at his teenage years.

“Teen years as a black kid in a white place

Any photo taken had me changing into white face.”

What follows is perhaps the hardest question Kayps asks anywhere on the record: whether he had placed himself in environments where conforming became normal enough that he began washing out his own race.

These are some of the deepest and darkest lines on the album. Anyone who has ever felt themselves changing just to belong somewhere will know how shit it feels to eventually look back and wonder how much of yourself you left behind in the process. For Kayps, that question runs even deeper because he’s talking about his culture, his father’s teachings and his identity as a Black man.

And he doesn’t really answer it. Maybe he can’t yet.

For an album filled with confrontations, “GOODY” contains the most difficult one because Kayps is no longer confronting anyone else. He is looking at himself.

The second verse makes that reflection even more significant by taking us back to where his relationship with music started. Kayps talks about making his first tape at 13, when music was one of the only places he had to put the anger he was carrying. He remembers Ducky supporting him, Goonie seeing potential he hadn’t yet recognised in himself and his mum accompanying him to venues because he was still a kid.

Seven years isn’t a particularly long time, but there is an enormous distance between the artist described in that verse and the one capable of writing it.

The anger hasn’t disappeared, BUNUBA BABY wouldn’t be the same record if it had. What has changed is Kayps’ ability to understand what sits around it.

He can now trace personal experiences back through family and history, recognise that pride and uncertainty aren’t opposites and write about his community without reducing it to what has happened to it. Just as importantly, he can write about himself without pretending his own story exists outside the people who raised him.

That becomes especially clear on the closing track, “BROKEN GLASS”.

Kayps and BADASSMUTHA write openly about generational trauma and systems that continue to make decisions affecting their communities, but towards the end of the track, Kayps’ attention shifts.

“Money comes and goes, but your community’s forever

If you’re hurting, then at least we hurt together.”

After everything that precedes it, the sentiment doesn’t feel sentimental. If anything, it reveals what has been underneath the album from the beginning.

For all the justified anger running through the album, anger isn’t really what holds the record together, Community does.

Kayps keeps returning to cousins, family, his father, his grandfather, his Elders, the people who backed him when he was 13, the people he has lost and the younger generation now looking towards him. Even his most personal questions are connected to what those relationships mean.

It is why the album’s framing through Wangki Radio works so well.

At the beginning, Natalie Davey announces BUNUBA BABY across the Fitzroy Valley. What follows feels like Kayps filling that broadcast with everything he wants carried through it: memories of home, uncomfortable history, anger, humour, grief, pride, uncertainty and the voices of people around him.

Then Natalie returns at the end.

“If you’re still with me, that was Bunuba Baby.”

She reminds everyone that it’s hot outside and tells them to stay cool.

After everything we’ve heard, there is something almost perfect about how ordinary that ending is.

Because at the forefront of all of this is Kayps. It’s his story, his perspective of the world and the community around him, but that doesn’t take away from what the album really becomes by the time it’s over.

This is an album about community.

It’s about history and the things people went through, but also what those experiences did to the people around them and the generations that came afterwards. It’s about what gets passed down, what gets taken away, what survives and what people do with all of that when it eventually becomes theirs to carry.

Which is why it feels fitting that BUNUBA BABY itself doesn’t exist because of Kayps alone.

There are featured artists all over this record bringing their own stories and perspectives into his world. There are producers shaping how those stories sound, the people behind the mixing and mastering, the artwork, Natalie Davey and Uncle Johnny’s voices, and everyone else who helped turn the idea into the album we’re hearing now. You can feel that people understood what Kayps was trying to make here and brought their A-game because of it.

Take those people away and BUNUBA BABY wouldn’t be the same album.

In that sense, maybe the way this record was made tells us as much about it as the lyrics do. Kayps spends 11 tracks reminding us that nobody’s story really exists by itself, and the album carrying those stories was built by a group of people around him.

But standing at the front of that community is still this 20-year-old artist who started making music at 13 because he needed somewhere to put everything he was feeling. Seven years later, he’s not just putting those feelings onto a page anymore. He’s understanding where they came from, connecting them to the people who came before him and finding a way to make other people listen.

And it really does feel like Kayps is ready to claim his place. Not only within Australian hip-hop, either.

There is something much bigger in what he’s building here. The ability has always been obvious, but this album gives that ability purpose. Kayps knows where he comes from, he’s starting to understand exactly what he wants to say, and now he’s becoming good enough as a songwriter to make people far outside his own world stop and listen.

If there was only one Australian hip-hop artist we could put our weight behind right now, Kayps would be it.

BUNUBA BABY shows exactly why.

At 20 years old, he’s made the best record of his career so far, but I don’t think this conversation needs to stop at Kayps either. For us, BUNUBA BABY is already in the conversation for one of the best Australian albums of 2026.

Joy is often the last thing people believe they deserve when going through the darkest phase of their life. But that search for joy is exactly what led Sam Hales from The Jungle Giants to create their fifth album Experiencing Feelings of Joy.

Behind the colourful production and euphoric indie-pop moments sits an album born out of emotional collapse, heartbreak, and creative paralysis. Hales had not only lost someone deeply important in his life, but also the person he had been creating music alongside for years.

For an artist, losing both emotional connection and creative direction at the same time can feel like losing your entire identity. Understandably, that period pushed him into one of the darkest mental spaces of his life.

What eventually gave him a glimpse of light was stumbling onto The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron — a book centred around reconnecting with creativity and rebuilding your relationship with yourself through art.

In many ways, Experiencing Feelings of Joy feels like Hales creating his own version of that process in musical form. The album almost plays like a self-help book disguised as an indie-pop record, documenting someone slowly learning how to feel alive again through creating.

What makes this even more interesting is that you would never immediately guess the emotional state Hales was in when first listening to the album. Sonically, the record opens with warmth, movement, and an almost celebratory energy. Instead of drowning in sadness, Hales chooses to fight through it with colour, rhythm, dancing, and human connection.

That emotional contradiction is captured perfectly on the opening track, which is dedicated to Hales’ mother and already feels destined to become one of the band’s defining songs. Beneath its infectious energy sits a deeply personal tribute to unconditional love, resilience, and the people who keep us grounded when life begins to collapse around us.

When Hales sings:

“Mumma did you know your love is kinda punk
Ain’t no man was stoppin’ you from raisin’ me all on your own”

it becomes clear that this album is not simply about escaping darkness, but about finding the people, memories, and emotions that help you survive it. Even the repeated refrain — “Will you tell me how it feels baby?” — feels less like a hook written for a crowd, and more like someone desperately trying to reconnect with emotion itself.

For perhaps the first time in a Jungle Giants record, Sam Hales feels completely exposed as a songwriter. And that vulnerability is exactly what makes Experiencing Feelings of Joy their most human album yet.

The Search for Joy

What makes Experiencing Feelings of Joy so emotionally interesting is that the album never sounds like it was written from a place of complete healing. Instead, it feels like Sam Hales documenting the process of trying to get there in real time.

Across the album, joy is not presented as a permanent emotional state or some perfect ending waiting at the finish line. It feels more like a conscious decision to keep moving, keep loving, keep dancing, and keep creating even when parts of your life are collapsing underneath you. That tension between emotional pain and sonic euphoria becomes the defining heartbeat of the record.

And sonically, the album fully commits to that idea.

The first four tracks are incredibly upbeat, colourful, and alive. The production constantly pushes towards movement, warmth, rhythm, and connection. Even when the lyrics are dealing with heartbreak, loneliness, uncertainty, or emotional confusion, the compositions themselves almost refuse to stay emotionally stagnant. The music wants to move forward. It wants to breathe, and dance its way through the darkness rather than sit still inside it.

That contrast becomes one of the album’s strongest qualities. Songs about longing, breakups, emotional distance, and vulnerability are wrapped inside some of the brightest and most accessible compositions The Jungle Giants have ever created.

The upbeat nature of the album doesn’t exist to hide the pain. It probably exists because of the pain.

There’s a feeling throughout the project that Sam Hales is using music itself as a way to reconnect with life again. Whether it’s love, friendship, physical touch, community, romance, dancing, or simply being present in a moment, the album constantly searches for emotional experiences that make existence feel meaningful again.

Around the middle of the record, the emotional cracks begin to show more openly. Tracks become slightly more introspective, more reflective, and more emotionally exposed, but the album never fully loses its warmth.

That’s what makes the sequencing of the album so effective. The joy never feels naive, and the sadness never completely consumes the record. Instead, both emotions constantly coexist beside each other.

By the time the album reaches World’s Getting Smaller, the emotional walls fully come down.

The production becomes more stripped back, more spacious, and far more vulnerable than anything that came before it. After an album filled with movement and colour, the closing track almost feels like the moment after the party ends and someone is finally left alone with their thoughts.

It’s easily the most emotionally exposed moment on the record, and perhaps the clearest glimpse into the emotional state Hales was navigating while creating this project.

What makes the ending particularly powerful is that the album never fully resolves its emotions. It doesn’t pretend heartbreak disappears. It doesn’t offer some grand conclusion about healing.

Instead, Experiencing Feelings of Joy understands something far more human: sometimes healing simply means finding enough reasons to keep feeling things again. And that’s exactly what this album does.

Sound Under Top 3 Picks

1) Tell Me How It Feels

There could not have been a more perfect opener for Experiencing Feelings of Joy. In many ways, Tell Me How It Feelsacts as the emotional thesis of the entire album. It captures everything the record is trying to say — love, community, movement, vulnerability, emotional survival, and the search for connection during moments where life feels emotionally overwhelming.

At the same time, it also feels destined to become one of the biggest songs in The Jungle Giants catalogue.

What makes the track so powerful is the contrast at the centre of it. Sonically, the composition is bright, euphoric, danceable, and full of life. But underneath that energy sits someone desperately trying to reconnect with emotion, purpose, and the people around them. That emotional bait-and-switch becomes one of the defining characteristics of the entire album, and this track introduces it perfectly.

The production constantly moves forward with warmth and momentum, while Sam Hales delivers some of the most emotionally open writing of his career.

The emotional core of the song ultimately comes back to love — not just romantic love, but the love of family, home, friendship, memory, and the people that shape who we become. Lines directed towards his mother become some of the most powerful moments on the entire album, grounding the song in something deeply personal rather than purely euphoric.

2) All The Time In The World

At just over five minutes long, All The Time In The World is the longest track on the album — something that almost feels rebellious in an era where attention spans are shrinking and songs are increasingly designed for short-form consumption. But rather than overstaying its welcome, the track slowly pulls you deeper into its emotional warmth with every passing minute.

This is easily some of the finest songwriting on the entire project.

What immediately stands out is just how effortlessly addictive the song is. The hook is arguably the strongest on the album, and one of the reasons the record works so well as a listening experience overall is because of how naturally these songs embed themselves into your head.

There’s a warmth and repetition to many of the melodies that almost feels comforting rather than commercial. The album understands the power of earworms, but it uses them emotionally instead of mechanically.

Sonically, the track fully embraces the euphoric and romantic side of Experiencing Feelings of Joy. The composition feels weightless, patient, and deeply sincere.

That’s what makes the writing feel so effective.

The emotional core of the track is beautifully captured in the chorus:

“We got all the time in the world
And you know you’re my favourite girl
They say love comes, let it unfurl”

There’s something incredibly human about the simplicity of those lines. No overcomplicated metaphors, or emotional games. Just someone trying to hold onto a feeling before life changes again.

3) World’s Getting Smaller

If Tell Me How It Feels represents the emotional heartbeat of the album, then World’s Getting Smaller feels like the emotional aftermath.

This is Sam Hales at his most vulnerable and emotionally exposed. After an album filled with movement, colour, groove, and euphoric compositions, the closing track strips almost everything back. The production becomes quieter, more spacious, and far more intimate, allowing the emotional weight of the writing to sit completely in the foreground.

And that restraint is exactly what makes the song so powerful.

There’s a feeling throughout the track of someone looking back at one of the hardest periods of their life with a clearer perspective. Not necessarily healed, but emotionally aware enough to finally sit with the pain instead of trying to outrun it. Unlike many of the earlier songs on the album that use rhythm and energy as emotional survival mechanisms, World’s Getting Smaller feels like the moment where all distractions disappear and only honesty remains.

And throughout the track, Hales captures a feeling that many people experience after heartbreak — the strange contradiction of living in a world that feels increasingly connected while emotionally feeling further away from someone than ever before.

“If the world that we’re living in is getting smaller
Why do you feel so far away?”

That hook alone carries the emotional weight of the entire song.

What makes the ending of the album especially beautiful is that despite all the heartbreak and emotional distance being described, there’s still love present inside the writing. Even in loss, Hales never fully turns cynical. If anything, the pain exists because the love itself was real.

And perhaps that’s the final message of Experiencing Feelings of Joy.

By ending the album in such a stripped-back and emotionally vulnerable way, The Jungle Giants leave listeners with the clearest glimpse into who Sam Hales really was while making this record — someone trying to rediscover joy while still carrying the weight of everything he had lost.

Very few albums manage to sound this joyful while carrying this much emotional weight underneath them. That’s what makes Experiencing Feelings of Joy such a special record.

At its core, this is not an album about someone who has fully healed or figured life out. It’s an album about someone learning how to survive again through music, movement, love, vulnerability, and creation itself. Sam Hales takes heartbreak, creative paralysis, loneliness, and emotional exhaustion, and somehow transforms those feelings into some of the warmest and most life-affirming songs The Jungle Giants have ever made.

What makes the album resonate so deeply is that it never pretends pain magically disappears. Even in its most euphoric moments, there’s still sadness living underneath the surface. But rather than allowing that darkness to consume the record, Hales chooses to dance through it, sing through it, and create through it. And in many ways, that feels like the entire message of the album itself.

By the time World’s Getting Smaller closes the record, it becomes clear that Experiencing Feelings of Joy is less about reaching happiness, and more about rediscovering the ability to feel things again after emotionally losing yourself for a period of time.

This might end up being one of the strongest albums released in 2026, and certainly one of the most emotionally honest records in The Jungle Giants’ catalogue. At some point, we’d love to sit down with Sam Hales for a deeper conversation around this project, because this album genuinely feels like it still has layers left to unpack beneath the surface.

There aren’t that many bands sounding truly unique and interesting right now, especially in a scene where a lot of bands are starting to blur into each other. But nightlight are taking influences like many others and turning them into something that genuinely feels like their own.

Even when the Melbourne band first started as a duo, there was already a very clear identity forming around the project. Not just sonically, but visually and emotionally too.

Their music always carried this mix of chaos, confidence, drama and pop sensibility that made them stand out from a lot of alternative bands trying to occupy similar spaces.

But with PARALLEL//LINES VOL. 1, it feels like that vision has become much clearer.

Since becoming a trio in 2024, the band feel far more settled into who they are. The songs feel bigger, the transitions feel more intentional, and there’s a confidence running through the EP that makes it feel less like experimentation and more like nightlight fully understanding their strengths.

The band describe themselves as “pop music for alternative people,” and honestly, that probably explains their sound and the EP better than any genre label could.

Across these four tracks, nightlight move through heavy guitars, electronic textures, breakdowns, huge choruses and hyperactive production choices. Even though there’s a lot happening, everything still feels connected to the same emotional world.

And the world they are building here feels loud, dramatic, messy and a little dangerous in the best possible way.

This is the kind of EP that will make you dance, scream, mosh, and probably break something at the same time. And although nightlight’s sound has always been interesting and unique, it genuinely feels like the release of their EP what if i’m the devil? and the addition of Jordan on drums helped push the band into another gear creatively.

Performance, Control & Emotional Chaos

One of the most interesting things about the EP is how much it revolves around performance and control.

A lot of the lyrics across the project play with exaggerated personalities, manipulation, ego and obsession. The people inside these songs are constantly pulling others closer while also creating distance at the same time. There’s attraction, tension, confidence, insecurity and emotional games all happening together.

That’s what makes the EP work so well. nightlight understand how theatrical this world is, and instead of hiding that, they lean into it completely.

There are moments across the project that almost feel larger than life, but the band always keep enough self-awareness in the writing that it never becomes exhausting.

Even the way the songs move feels connected to that energy.

The hooks often feel seductive before suddenly becoming aggressive. Certain moments feel playful one second and chaotic the next. There’s this constant push and pull throughout the EP that keeps everything moving in an interesting and engaging way.

The music feels heavy enough for hardcore and alternative crowds, but still melodic and accessible enough for almost anyone to get pulled into it after a few listens.

That balance is difficult to get right, especially for bands mixing this many influences together, but nightlight make it feel surprisingly natural.

The Sound of the EP

The opening track VOL. 1 does a really good job introducing the EP’s world before things fully open up. It feels less like a standalone song and more like the beginning of a longer experience.

By the time the second half of the track expands and transitions into DRAMA//DRAMA, the tone of the project already feels fully established.

From there, the EP keeps building momentum.

What stands out most throughout the project is how controlled the chaos feels. There’s a lot happening sonically across these songs, but the band never lose sight of structure or melody. The drums add a huge sense of movement throughout the EP, especially during the heavier moments, while the hooks still remain central to almost every track.

That’s probably what makes the project so replayable.

Underneath all the distortion, attitude and energy are songs that are genuinely catchy. Not catchy in a forced commercial way, but in the sense that certain hooks, melodies and moments naturally stay with you after the EP finishes.

The production also deserves credit for understanding when to let songs breathe. Even during the loudest sections, things rarely feel overcrowded. Every element feels like it exists to push the atmosphere of the EP further rather than simply making things heavier for the sake of it.

And because of that, the whole project feels immersive rather than overwhelming.

Final Thoughts

What makes PARALLEL//LINES VOL. 1 exciting is not just that nightlight are making good songs. It’s that the band already feel like they have a strong understanding of the kind of world they want to create around their music.

The EP feels dramatic, chaotic, confident and emotionally messy, but all of those things feel intentional and packaged in a way that people across different genres and age groups can still connect with after the first listen.

And if this is only the beginning of the PARALLEL//LINES series, it feels like nightlight still have a lot more to show.

Some bands spend years trying to define their sound. Divers seem more interested in escaping definition altogether.

Across three EPs, the Naarm/Melbourne four-piece built a reputation for restless evolution — moving between slacker indie rock, warped electronics, post-punk tension, surreal humour and moments that feel like they were discovered by accident rather than carefully designed.

That unpredictability is what made them interesting. On Odd Dog in the Capital, it becomes what makes them special.

Released on May 1, Divers’ debut album feels less like a formal first statement and more like the natural result of years spent experimenting without needing permission.

The title itself says plenty. Odd Dog in the Capital captures the discomfort (and freedom) of being outsiders in a scene obsessed with categories, algorithms and easy branding. Divers don’t sound built for neat playlists or obvious lanes. They sound like four friends following instinct until something clicks.

That looseness runs through the entire record. Yet beneath the weirdness is a band with sharp songwriting instincts.

The third single from the album, “Head Chef”, is the clearest example. On paper, a track built around breakfast, coffee, brisket and kitchen ego should collapse under its own joke.

Instead, it turns into one of the album’s most infectious moments: a wiry, high-energy song about inflated self-importance disguised as kitchen chaos. It’s funny, catchy, slightly ridiculous, and deeply precise in how it works.

Even the presentation reinforces that spirit. The cover art’s wild-eyed blue dog staring over a city skyline feels like the album’s mascot: slightly chaotic, impossible to categorise, and strangely charming.

Combined with titles like “The Great Tree”, “Cruisy Confusion”, “The Mouse” and “Health Freak”, Odd Dog in the Capital presents itself less like a conventional indie release and more like a collection of strange urban fables.

The World of the Album

The opening track “Plans” wastes no time pulling listeners into Divers’ universe.

It begins with an almost sinister laugh before unfolding into something quirky, jagged and intentionally off-centre. It is not the kind of opener designed to ease people in — which is exactly why it works. Starting the album this way shows a band fully confident in the strange language they have built for themselves.

One of the hardest things for any band to achieve is a sound that feels unmistakably their own. Divers have flirted with that identity across previous releases, but Odd Dog in the Capital is where it fully clicks into place.

“Plans” feels built on instability — chaotic rhythms, sudden turns and production choices that never let you settle. That same spirit runs through the broader record. The album often moves in extremes: “Sand Dunes” leans into dancefloor energy with disco and electronic textures, while “Beep Beep” hits with a heavier, more abrasive force. That contrast becomes one of the album’s biggest strengths.

What ties it all together is the sense that Divers are building a world rather than chasing a genre. Their music can be difficult to pin down, but experimentation has always been central to what they do. On this album, that instinct feels sharper and more purposeful than ever.

That is what the title captures so well. An odd dog naturally stands out. You may not fully get it at first, but you remember it.

Odd Dog in the Capital works in the same way.

It is not an album built for everyone, nor does it try to fit the increasingly common template of clean, predictable indie music. Instead, it chooses personality, risk and originality — and becomes far more memorable because of it.

Humour, Anxiety and Real Meaning Beneath the Weirdness

One of the best things about Odd Dog in the Capital is how much it says without ever forcing the point.

Divers rarely approach ideas in a direct or overly serious way. Instead, they filter them through humour, strange characters, sideways storytelling and a constant sense of mischief. That playful surface is part of the appeal, but it also hides a surprising amount of emotional and thematic depth.

“Head Chef” is a perfect example. It arrives as one of the album’s funniest and most immediate songs, built around kitchen imagery, caffeine-fuelled energy and exaggerated personality. But underneath the absurdism is a sharp take on ego, pressure and the performance of status. It pokes fun at people who take themselves too seriously, while still sounding like a blast.

Elsewhere, “The Great Tree” expands the album’s world into something more reflective. It carries a sense of environmental unease and frustration with short-term thinking, but never turns into a lecture. Divers understand that satire can often land harder than sincerity, and the song benefits from that balance.

What makes Divers compelling is that they never separate meaning from fun. Many bands can write serious songs, and many bands can write quirky songs. Fewer can combine both without losing momentum. Odd Dog in the Capital consistently finds that middle ground.

Standout Moments

A few moments on the record hit especially hard:

Cruisy Confusion

“Cruisy Confusion” feels like one of the album’s most complete moments. Built around a rolling guitar riff that carries grit through nearly every second of the track, it sounds loose, but never careless — something Divers do really well.

What makes the song hit harder is the emotional core beneath its swagger. While the production and hooks carry confidence, the writing comes from a more vulnerable place. Ben Bray has described the track as emerging during a period of identity crisis, wanting to make music that felt genuine rather than chasing the wrong reasons. You can feel that honesty in the performance.

Lyrically, “Cruisy Confusion” captures the strange emotional swings of adulthood — workplace banter, nostalgia, boredom, overstimulation and the search for something real underneath routine.

The real turning point, though, comes in the second half.

The song opens up into a bigger, more euphoric stretch where the instrumentation takes over and carries everything forward. It is the kind of section that reminds you Divers are not just interesting songwriters, but a genuinely exciting band musically.

At over four and a half minutes, it never feels long. If anything, “Cruisy Confusion” feels like one of the clearest examples of what makes this album work: personality, movement, vulnerability and a refusal to stay predictable.

Head Chef

“Head Chef” is the kind of song that feels destined to travel. It has already been making waves, and for good reason.

From the first listen, it lands immediately. One of those songs you replay before it’s even finished. Every section feels like it is teasing the next, which gives the track a constant sense of momentum.

There is something deeply everyday about its appeal. This is the sort of song you throw on while cooking breakfast, making coffee or moving through the house with energy. It turns ordinary routines into something a little more cinematic. Few songs manage to feel this casual and this carefully constructed at the same time.

What makes “Head Chef” especially effective is the contrast at its centre. Lyrically, it plays with ego, status and self-importance through kitchen-world imagery, but musically it feels joyful, loose and alive. Divers use that bait-and-switch brilliantly. Beneath the humour is satire, but above it is pure fun.

The hook is impossible to ignore, the groove keeps swerving just when you think you’ve caught it, and the band know exactly when to lean into absurdity without overdoing it. It is catchy without sounding obvious, weird without losing accessibility.

Every time “Head Chef” comes on, it does the same thing: it makes you move without thinking.

Odd Dog in the Capital is not an album built for passive listening. Give it a few listens and its strange little universe starts opening up. Some songs hit immediately, others slowly reveal themselves over time, but almost all of them carry the same sense of character and intention.

What makes the record worth returning to is that Divers never chase easy answers. They back personality over polish, surprise over formula and instinct over trend. In doing so, they have created a debut that feels genuinely their own.

For listeners tired of algorithm-friendly sameness and predictable indie releases, Odd Dog in the Capital offers something rarer: a band that sounds like themselves.

Some bands take years to sound incredible. Others spend years quietly experimenting, failing, learning, then emerge already sharp. Public Figures feel like the latter. They arrive with the urgency of a new band, but the instincts of one that has already done the groundwork.

The Naarm/Melbourne four-piece, built around longtime collaborators Evie Vlah and Gigi Argiro, introduced themselves with “Onto Something” in May 2025. It didn’t feel like a tentative debut. It felt like a band that already understood tension, hooks, identity, and visual language. Less than a year later, Figure It Out! lands as a debut EP that feels fully formed rather than exploratory.

Across six tracks and roughly thirteen minutes, Public Figures do what strong punk records often do best: say a lot without overstaying their welcome. No wasted space. No filler. No over-explaining.

The Visual Language of Figure It Out!

The first thing that stands out about Figure It Out! is the visual world around it.

The artwork feels like an underground zine found in a sharehouse kitchen, or pasted onto a city wall after midnight.

Black-and-white collage photography, newspaper typography, cut-and-paste disorder, fragmented portraits, vinyl-era sequencing (“Side A / Side B”), ransom-note aesthetics, punk tabloid energy.

That matters, because Public Figures seem deeply aware of one of punk’s oldest truths: image can be a weapon when substance backs it up. The EP cover mirrors the record itself, fragmented identity, public personas, media distortion, inner confusion, resistance through style.

Even the band name becomes sharper in this context.

Public Figures suggests performance, surveillance, labels, visibility, judgment. Who are you when everyone is looking? Who are you when nobody is?

Then the title: Figure It Out!

That phrase can be read as a command, a frustration, a self-challenge, or generational exhaustion.

The Themes Running Through the Record

Without needing to spell everything out, Figure It Out! constantly circles a few central tensions.

Identity vs Expectation

There is a recurring sense of people trying to define themselves while being shaped by outside forces. Whether it is social roles, relationships, public perception, or wider systems, these songs often feel like a pushback against being boxed in.

Emotional Burnout

The record carries the feeling of mental fatigue without collapsing into self-pity. There is frustration here, overstimulation, emotional repetition, and the exhaustion of trying to stay steady while everything around you feels unstable.

Entrapment and Escape

Several moments across the EP suggest cycles people struggle to break out of — dead-end routines, toxic patterns, internal loops, city pressure, economic strain, or emotional dependence. The songs often sit in the tension between wanting freedom and feeling caught.

Defiance and Boundaries

For all its anxiety, this is not a passive record. There is confrontation throughout Figure It Out! The energy often feels like reclaiming space, calling something out, refusing manipulation, or drawing a line where one didn’t exist before.

Modern Alienation

There is also something distinctly current about the EP. This doesn’t sound like retro punk cosplay. It feels rooted in a generation dealing with overstimulation, visibility, fractured attention, unstable economics, and emotional numbness.

That is what gives the project relevance.

Coolworths Top 2 Picks from the EP

1) Cut It Out

There could not have been a better way to open Figure It Out! than with Cut It Out. It immediately throws you into Public Figures’ world with one of the sharpest guitar riffs on the project, a sense of urgency, and a hook that feels impossible not to shout back. If there was one track on the EP that fully captures the band’s songwriting strengths, it is this.

What makes the song hit harder is how much attitude it carries without feeling forced. There is swagger here, but it is backed by craft. The chorus lands instantly, the guitars bite, and the whole thing feels like controlled chaos.

Lyrically, Cut It Out revolves around power, ego, validation, and rejection. There is a tension between wanting approval and wanting freedom from the same systems that hand it out. The references to worship, control, image, and performance make the song feel like a takedown of fake dynamics, whether in relationships, social circles, or wider culture.

And then there is the video. Shot largely inside a lift, it proves Public Figures understand something many bands miss: creativity matters more than budget. It is minimal, raw, stylish, and completely in tune with the song’s energy.

2) How I’m Feeling

Closing the EP with How I’m Feeling was a smart move. Where some of the earlier tracks punch outward, this one turns inward. It still carries punk DNA lyrically, but musically there is an off-kilter bounce to it that makes the frustration feel strangely addictive rather than heavy-handed.

The song taps into urban fatigue, emotional burnout, social alienation, and that recurring feeling of being mentally drained by your surroundings.

At its core, this track feels like someone caught between overstimulation and self-awareness. They know they are spiralling, they know the environment is feeding it, and they know they need distance — from people, from the city, maybe even from themselves.

As an EP closer, How I’m Feeling leaves you with the most human side of Public Figures. Beneath the riffs, attitude, and aesthetics, there is real vulnerability sitting underneath it all.

Why This EP Works

What makes Figure It Out! land so well is that it never feels like imitation. Plenty of young bands borrow from punk’s sound, its clothes, or its attitude. Public Figures understand that punk has always been bigger than aesthetics.

That spirit runs through this EP.

More importantly, Figure It Out! feels emotionally current. These songs carry the pressure of modern life — overstimulation, identity fatigue, social performance, city frustration, the need to protect your own space. It speaks in the language of punk, but it speaks to now.

Public Figures also understand something many debut bands take years to learn: identity matters. They already have a visual world, a point of view, and a sense of themselves that goes beyond individual tracks.

If Figure It Out! is the introduction, Public Figures may already be onto something much bigger.