2014 has been the year of the boutique music festival, with the festival calendar welcoming a plethora of new and unique music offerings to take the place and fill the void that larger music gatherings such as Big Day Out have left.
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But up until now most of those new offerings have catered to the electronic, indie, or nostalgia crowd. Now, Australia is poised to get a brand new heavy music festival that will no doubt feature a local heavy lineup.
The event hasn’t been officially announced yet, although theMusic did spot a photo announcement on Instagram displaying the festival’s logo and accompanied by the hashtag #unifygathering.
The festival is believed to be the brainchild of local heavy music heavyweights We Are Unified, whose various management, label, and publishing rosters include the likes of Vance Joy, The Amity Affliction, Northlane, Dead Letter Circus, and more.
Internet sleuths have also uncovered a splash page on the domain name unifygathering.com. A quick search of the ownership records for the domain show that it is registers to a Aaron Smith, who is the Digital Marketing Co-Ordinator at We Are Unified. Aaron is also listed as the registrar on a number of Unified domains such as unfdcentral.com .
The website doesn’t give much away, although fans are asked to sign up to a mailing list to be amongst the first to find out about the festival when it is officially announced.
The official Twitter account for the festival however gives us a few more clues. The account is following a few other Twitter accounts of bands that could be a preview of what to expect from the lineup, such as Thy Art Is Murder, In Hearts Wake, Northlane, and The Amity Affliction.
The festival’s location may have also been revealed, with the account for The Hills Are Alive also being followed.
One of Australia’s best kept music festival secrets, The Hills Are Alive is a two-day boutique camping and music gathering set in the beautifully picturesque rolling hills of South Gippsland (90mins drive from Melbourne). The festival has been expanding with the addition of NYE On The Hill, the new event from the team behind The Hills Are Alive which sold out in its first year.
Aidan and Rhett McLaren, who run the festival, also manage rising star emcee Remi and have recently joined their management operations with Unified. The Hills Are Alive festival remains outside Unified’s operations, but at the time of the management merger Unified Director Jaddan Comerford revealed that he was hoping to team up on an event in the future.
“Hills is Aidan’s and Rhett’s,” said Comerford at the time. “We have no involvement apart from just being fans and a number of the team attended over the weekend. However, I’d be lying if I said we haven’t discussed some cool event ideas that we can collaborate together on in the future.”
NYE On The Hill and The Hills Are Alive are both camping festivals, so it’s reasonable to conclude that Unify will also be a camping affair; making it one of Australia’s first heavy music camping festivals.
