Indie
Live Review & Gallery: Microdosing a Full-Day Festival With The Jungle Giants at Metro Theatre – Eora Nation/Sydney 04.04.25
The Jungle Giants are back and their sold-out stop at Eora Nation/Sydney’s Metro Theatre on Friday night was exactly like a full-blown, sweat-drenched, sun-soaked day festival condensed into a few hours – minus the overpriced bottles of water. The Meanjin/Brisbane indie-pop heavyweights are midway through their Hold My Hand tour, and they didn’t waste a …
Live Review + Photo Galleries: Dvrkworld’s explosive launch gig debuts self-titled EP at Nipaluna/Hobart’s Altar Bar 04.04.2025
The depth and breadth of the Tasmanian music scene was put on full display at the launch of Dvrkworld‘s magnificent debut self-titled EP (see Backseat Mafia’s review here). Held at the über cool Altar Bar in Nipaluna/Hobart, the night was a blast of thoroughly satisfying brilliance from all the bands, ranging from the death metal …
EP Review: ‘Is It Really Goodnight?’: Celeste Madden’s Introspective and Evocative New Release
Key to London-based singer-songwriter Celeste Madden’s new EP, Is It Really Goodnight?, is its dense atmosphere. It’s not foreboding or oppressive, but rather a sleepless sheen that coats the tracklist in a way the cyanotype cover art would suggest. Madden’s sound swings between minimal, almost ambient guitar ballads and brooding alt-rock cuts that could soundtrack …
Live Review & Gallery: Trentemøller Lights Up Sydney in a Dream-Pop Fever 5.04.2025
Trentemøller Returns with a Dream and a Scream
News: Soccer Mommy Announces Australian Headline Shows
Indie Darling Soccer Mommy Locks In June Headline Tour Across Australia
News: Teenage Joans Are Back with a Bubblegum Sledgehammer of a Track
Adelaide’s Punk Sweethearts Teenage Joans Deliver a Love Song with Bite
Album Review: The Nightingales – The Awful Truth; Post-punk chaos meets twisted pop brilliance.
The Nightingales return with The Awful Truth, their first album since 2022’s The Last Laugh, proving once again that Robert Lloyd and company remain as sharp, unpredictable, and essential as ever. Released on Fire Records, the album is a tangled, exhilarating mix of post-punk urgency, surrealist storytelling, and skewed pop sensibilities—an acerbic, sideways glance at …
News: The Church announce ‘The Singles Tour: A Career Retrospective’ with Australian dates in November.
In exciting news, one of Australia’s greatest music exports, The Church, has just announced an Australian tour that will feature all their singles: a stunning retrospective of their storied career. We have covered this band extensively here at Backseat Mafia and can attest that in their current form, they have never played better. The creativity …
Album Review: Release the bats – Infinity Broke are rampaging through the cities with their excoriating, thrilling new album ‘This Masthead’.
It’s hard coming up with enough new superlatives to accurately describe an Infinity Broke album. Inevitably epithets and phrases such as contained chaos come to mind, along with freight trains careering out of control, sonic explosions, disturbances in the cosmos, mind shattering shards of metal. It’s enough to suggest that you should ensure any sound …
Track: The iconic Sparks release new single ‘Drowned In A Sea of Tears’ ahead of new album ‘MAD!’.
The inscrutable and enigmatic brothers Ron and Russell Mael return as the iconic Sparks with their new single ‘Drowned in A Sea of Tears’. The release precedes their new album ‘MAD!’ due out in May. The track is poignantly beautiful with a motorik thrum and yearning vocals. Dappling instrumentation underlies the searing melodies, typically enigmatic …