Homegrown hits: The best Australian music to hear this month

Sleepazoid, New Age

What have you achieved in the last 18 months? If you’re Melbourne post-punk/shoegaze rising stars Sleepazoid, the answer is a lot. I only wish I could say the same. From supporting FCUKERS and Faye Webster, to playing a sold-out headline show at Melbourne’s Northcote Social Club, the band has done a lot since starting to release music just a year-and-a-half ago. They’re off to conquer the world soon, too, playing taste-making UK festival The Great Escape in May. If they were a child, we’d call them precocious.

On their second EP, New Age, the band stretch their wings and flex their range. Lead singer Nette France steals the show, but her commanding vocals are elevated by the swirling walls of sound that drummer Luca Soprano, bassist Josef Pabis, and guitarists George Inglis and Jim Duong produce in tandem.

There’s never really a moment to settle on New Age: opener 3am is hazy, while the title is jittering and raucous. Fig Tree, meanwhile, is the band’s most touching moment yet, as France asks “When you feel love, does it ever go away or does it just change?” If anyone knows the answer, please let me know. Ben Madden

Devaura, If You Don’t Laugh, You’ll Cry

This six-track EP, the second volume in New Zealand-born/Sydney-based Devaura’s three-part series which began with last year’s Learning in Public, builds on her first instalment with sharper self-awareness and emotional precision. The release – which exists where alternative R&B, indie sensibilities and understated electronic textures intersect – finds the singer sharpening rather than softening her edges, letting songs occupy those uncomfortable spaces where laughter becomes a coping mechanism.

Her vocals are a highlight, moving fluidly between conversational phrasing and melodic control, often addressing the listener directly before lifting into composed passages. The elasticity creates immediacy and rawness, like on the pounding Why So Sensitive? and the playful Dancehead, where she reflects on themes of identity, emotional fatigue and self-preservation.

The production frames her voice with restraint. Percussion is subtle, basslines purposeful, and atmospheric elements create breathing room. Small details, layered harmonies, pauses, and tonal shifts land with weight, reinforcing a sense of control amid the lyrical chaos. Ify Obiegbu

Christopher Young, Dominique Cheviet, Nicolas Lelievre, The Breath

Christopher Young is something of a maverick on Melbourne’s jazz scene, only occasionally releasing albums but always having something worth saying. He’d known Dom Cheviet, a fellow reeds player from France, for 25 years before they finally got around to collaborating, and what a project it is.

They laid down rhythmic beds and soundscapes in a Paris studio with drummer/percussionist Nicolas Lelievre, over which they then free-improvised with startling clarity and emotional intensity. The music’s as moody as it is texturally exotic. On Morning Jungle, for instance, Cheviet’s kalimba provides a dancing backdrop in tandem with Lelievre’s drums and percussion, over which the horn players interweave, with Young primarily playing bass clarinet and Cheviet soprano saxophone. On Black is the Colour, they both play flute against Lelievre’s portentous textures and deep groove.

The wonder is their unerring instinct for space and contrast, as if one mind is making the music. The dialogue is completely organic as to who plays when, when they overlap, and when they swap from foreground to background. A recurrent feature is Young’s mighty bass clarinet, rumbling and coiling beneath Cheviet’s flights, or suddenly arching up with its own dramatic cries. John Shand

Station Model Violence, Station Model Violence

Who knew deconstructing the impending apocalypse could sound so alive? On their self-titled debut record, post-punk torchbearers Station Model Violence are conscious but fearless, staring into the horizon of an unfolding cataclysm.

Formed by Total Control vocalist DX and guitarist Buz Clatworthy from R.M.F.C., and produced by Mikey Young of Eddy Current Suppression Ring, Station Model Violence is something of a Melbourne underground supergroup. The result is a 10-track LP that is urgent and prescient, a funhouse mirror held up to a society on the brink of collapse, reflections of modern life both distorted and eerily clear.

Inspired by Iggy Pop and ’70s krautrock, shades of Joy Division and Television, the hallmarks of classic post-punk are all here: droning guitars, hypnotic drums, ominous baritone vocals, feedback for days. But Station Model Violence imbues them with a fresh vitality, a brightness that keeps it from descending completely into the abyss.

With the spellbinding eight-minute Heat at its centre, the album spirals out: to the electrifying dirge of Cliffs, the screeching cacophony of Drip Away, the menacing apathy of Leisure, and the delicious irony of something so sunny and bright being titled Immolation. Surging through modern anxieties about surveillance, war, AI, and societal ruin, but never falling into hopelessness, we’re left with a message: don’t let it destroy you, there’s still life to live. Tom W. Clarke

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