There are moments on Drunk Tank Pink where you almost have to reach for the sleeve to check this is the same band who made 2018’s Songs Of Praise. Such is the jump shame have made from the riotous post-punk of their debut to the sprawling adventurism laid out in the bigger, bolder James Ford produced follow-up.

This creative leap, in part, was sparked by the band’s recent crash back down to earth, having spent their entire adult life on the road. It stems from their beginnings as wide-eyed teenagers, cutting their teeth in the pubs and small venues of South London, to becoming the most celebrated new band in Britain, catapulted by the success of their breakthrough debut album.

Readjusting to a new normal back home with - for the first time since the band’s formation - no live shows on the horizon, frontman Charlie Steen attempted to party his way out of psychosis.  “When you’re exposed to all of that for the first time you think you’re fucking indestructible,” he notes. “After a few years you reach a point where you realise everyone needs a bath and a good night’s sleep sometimes.”

An intense bout of waking fever-dreams convinced Steen that self medicating his demons wasn’t a very healthy plan of action and it was probably time to stop and take a look inward. “You become very aware of yourself and when all of the music stops, you’re left with the silence,” reflects Steen. “And that silence is a lot of what this record is about.”

In a room (well, more of a cupboard that used to house a washing machine until it was lugged outside and replaced with a bed) painted in a shade of pink used to calm down drunk tank inmates, Steen cocooned himself away to reflect and write. In the room dubbed ‘the womb’ - through the prism of his own surrealistic dreams - he addressed the psychological toll life in the band had taken on him. The disintegration of his relationship, the loss of a sense of self and the growing identity crisis both the band and an entire generation were feeling.


“The common theme when I was catching up with my mates was this identity crisis everyone was having,” reflects Steen. “No one knows what the fuck is going on.”

“It didn’t matter that we’d just come back off tour thinking, 'How do we deal with reality!?’” agrees guitarist Sean Coyle-Smith. “I had mates that were working in a pub and they were also like, ‘How do I deal with reality!?’ Everyone was going through it.”

Coyle-Smith took a different tac to Steen and barricaded himself in his bedroom. Barely leaving the house and instead obsessively deconstructing his very approach to playing and making music, he picked apart the threads of the music he was devouring (Talking Heads, Nigerian High Life, the dry funk of ESG, Talk Talk…) and created work infused with panic and crackling intensity.

 “For this album I was so bored of playing guitar,” he recalls, “the thought of even playing it was mind-numbing. So I started to write and experiment in all these alternative tunings and not write or play in a conventional ‘rock’ way.” 

The genius of Drunk Tank Pink is how Steen’s lyrical themes dovetail with the music. Opener Alphabet dissects the premise of performance over a siren call of nervous, jerking guitars, its chorus thrown out like a beer bottle across a mosh pit. Nigel Hitter, meanwhile, turns the mundanity of routine into something spectacular via a disjointed jigsaw of syncopated rhythms and broken-wristed punk funk. The result is an enormous expansion of shame’s sonic arsenal.

Release: January 15, 2021, Dead Oceans/Inertia
​Words: Dead Oceans

God I'm Such A Mess is the debut album from Wollongong duo Cry Club. It's an album that showcases their confidence, vision, and fiercely idiosyncratic personality, astoundingly textured with some unique surprises. Written from 2017 through to 2020, the duo of vocalist, ​Heather Riley​ (they/them) ​and​​ ​guitarist,​ Jono Tooke​ (he/him)​ note it’s an album that is “very autobiographical for the two of us.”

The album commences with their empowering and delightfully anthemic track, DFTM. It was a track they were unsure about, however, was the single that painfully resonated the most. “All of the lyrics are something that I’ve experienced first hand, and it’s actually sad to think about how many people relate to it,” explains Heather.

The band elaborates: “​God I’m Such a Mess, honestly it says it all. These past few years have been extremely tough for everyone - it’s easy to feel nihilistic or want to give up, and each new hurdle seems so much fucking bigger than the last one. This album is really about telling yourself it’s OKAY to be upset. It’s okay to cry, to be angry, to be anxious, to struggle because if you’re honest about not being okay, it makes it easier to start walking the path towards being okay again. It’s okay to throw your whole heart and soul into something, even if it fails.”

At the core of their music is the concept of using theatrics, drama, and genre-bending to tell a more truthful story. It’s their go-for-broke honesty that gives ​God I’m Such A Mess​ its power and gravity. “We’re an open book, and so is this album.”

Release: November 13, 2020, Best & Fairest
Words: Future Popes

Dharawal and Gadigal country-based punk trio SCABZ have revealed their ingenious debut album Pressure – produced and mixed by Dan Antix at Defwolf Studios.

Pressure is ten tracks of high-octane punk rock, dripping with the sharp wit and fierce attitude of lead singer Siobhan Poynton. The members of self-proclaimed "Newtown’s shittest band" exude ferocious performances, combining driving bass lines, piercing guitar chords and propelling percussion.

Political satire, Australiana anthems, backyard singalongs, and intense reflection combine to create a pertinent and definitive Australian punk-rock album.

Release: November 27, 2020, Independent
​Words: Here For Good

Paper Souls have released their long-awaited debut album, The Great And The Grieving, a labour of love that follows on from their 2 previous EP releases, 2014's Paper Souls, and 2015's Forever, Always.

The Great And The Grieving is a collection of songs showcasing their dynamic alt rock style of song writing.

The album draws from the darker side of life, but manages to inspire a sense of hope and triumph throughout.

The album was recorded, engineered and mixed by frontman Luke Triffitt at Valley Sounds, in Launceston, Tasmania.

Paper Souls are Luke Triffitt, Sarah Triffitt, Josef Bound, Tom Harvey and Angus Austin.

Release: November 7th, 2020, Independent

Method of Places is the beguiling debut album from Lewis Coleman, and an encapsulation of the depth and artistry of the Melbourne musician.


The fruits of Lewis’s labour are on brilliant display on Method of Places. It’s an album which effortlessly straddles the worlds of indie rock, electronica, jazz and soul, bristling with big ideas and artfully arranged songs that are both abstract and melodic, shifting and morphing around you, pulsing with a hushed intensity, but always grounded by a rhythm section so spartanly groovy that your head can’t help but nod along in assent. 

Written, played and self-produced across five years, in five bedrooms, the record has a big kind of history in it, both sonically and lyrically. Ask Coleman and he’ll unassumingly tell you that for him each song is a micro-world containing multiple moments in time, each one swimming with memories and pieces of himself that span the last half-decade. “Some of these songs have like a 21-year-old version of me playing bass, and like a 22-year-old version of me playing the guitar line and a 24-year-old version of me singing vocals and a 26-year-old version of me adding some other elements to it,” he says. “And I hear it and I can kind of remember where I was at those times in those songs.”


In ‘Good Side’ he is a 15-year-old kid in Year 9, trying on corduroy pants at Savers (Melbourne’s much-loved Mecca for secondhand clothes), developing a personality, finding friends, having crushes. In ‘Going Your Way’ he’s six wines in, a piano stool creaking beneath him as he idly plays the keys. In ‘Is This Me Now’ he’s accidentally out of his mind on hallucinogens, as synths warp and crash around his distant voice, convinced he’s broken his brain forever.  When taken as a whole, Method of Places becomes a history of his young adulthood up till now. A Memory Palace, where all the songs are different rooms, co-existing under the album’s roof.


While recording the album in his bedroom wasn’t so much a “cool” choice (“It was more about convenience to me,” he says), it did help him capture that real, lived-in warmth. Listening closely, you can hear a lot of ambient sounds left in the mix. “I love being able to hear a room or physical space someone’s in at a time, not just a complete artificial reverb world. A phone turning off or getting moved, a piano stool creaking, when you can actually hear those kinds of things, it makes it more of a visceral experience.” 

It’s these kinds of details that give the impression of Coleman physically moving around inside the album, his Memory Palace. But while the album is often introspective, Coleman doesn’t want it to feel exclusive, but rather inviting to the listener. “I really hope it isn’t something that’s just in my brain that no one can connect to,” he says. “I would love it to be a world that other people can exist in as well.”


Release: November 20th, 2020, Ivy League Records
Words: Ivy League/Mushroom