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This week, Aeron Clark from Hobart’s Edge Radio contributes a list of the must-hear Australian music spinning on community radio right now.
7EDG Edge Radio’s Aeron Clark’s Amrap Picks
Za Noon is the alias of Melbourne artist Jess Zanoni, also known as the frontwoman of alt-rock band Arbes. Za Noon ventures into intriguing, incandescent alternative folk and pop, attempting to embody the ineffable, a tender and spirited measure of felt time and place. “Furnace” travels through an intricately arranged, raw landscape, featuring ceremonious piano, billowing synths and seductive bass, revealing a true multi-dimensionality to Za Noon. Za Noon’s musical nuance is powered by a versatility that is as effortless as it is virtuosic.
Solo Career – “Venus on speed dial”
“Venus on speed dial” is Solo Career’s first release in four years, and comes with news of her debut album Interior Delirium, due in July via Dinosaur City Records. The song is about the discombobulations of desire, and how wanting someone can so often come at the expense of your own personhood: “This one is dedicated to being messed around by someone and going a bit loopy, and the experience of morphing yourself into whatever you think someone might like you to be.”
It’s been a minute since we heard from Tasmania/Lutruwita’s punk-adjacent quartet Meres, but they’re back with a heavy dose of grit, heart, and their trademark shambolic existential dread. The second single from Meres’ long-awaited debut album Worried Sick (out April 25th), “Quiet Australians” is part satire, part emotional survival strategy. It’s about caring too much and not enough at the same time – and captures Meres’ signature mix of fuzzed-out alt-rock and gut-punch vocals, ’90s slacker grit, and now-core existentialism. Music to scream into the void to.
Teether & Kuya Neil – “Dial Up” (ft. Stoneset)
Together, Teether & Kuya Neil make future-focused rap informed by modern club styles like footwork, gqom, and bass music, with Teether’s nonchalant but vivid words infusing Neil’s disorienting, hyper-modern production. Wild and wholly untraditional, “Dial Up” remains in step with the off-kilter, experimental rap branding synonymous with the duo.
Nipaluna/Hobart-based producer and songwriter Q.E. (Jacky Collyer) took out the #1 spot in 2024’s Wettest 100 with her intimate ode to community, “To Tasmania”. She now follows up with “Hollow Words”, a fierce indictment of institutional dishonesty and the erosion of public trust. Collyer’s sharpened focus on the machinery of power emerges at a critical moment when truth itself seems under siege, and builds on Q.E.’s signature blend of modulated synthesizers and atmospheric electronics, while introducing a darker, more urgent edge.
“Land” is the first single from Naarm/Melbourne band Porpoise Spit’s forthcoming second album. A love song shaped by the shadow of depression, “Land” captures the quiet beauty of small moments – their weight and their wonder – and how they weave the fabric of our relationships. At its heart, “Land” is about the ebb and flow of human connection – how we drift apart, find our way back, and the quiet, enduring hope that threads us together. It is a song of patience, of presence, and of love that endures even when the light feels far beneath the surface.
Cathy Diver – Everything’s a Car
Everything’s a Car is the debut album from Nipaluna/Hobart based singer-songwriter Cathy Diver. Swimming pool sunny, occasionally harrowing, and with a psychedelic bent, Diver’s writing is energetic and bold. Like any good backyard chemist, Cathy Diver specialises in cooking the world around her into something fizzy, novel or transcendental. Everything’s a Car is a playful, dappled and intricate work, from an artist described by Will from fellow Hobart band Nice House as “the poet laureate of Hobart’s music scene.”
Ruby Gill – Some Kind of Control
Some Kind of Control, the second album from Joburg-born, Naarm/Melbourne-based pianist, guitarist & singer-songwriter Ruby Gill is a powerful set of songs-as-explorations about control over her body, her queerness and her politic[s], reflecting a witty assuredness and unflinching honesty that can only come with time and a dedication to going to the end of every feeling. Laced with intricate hooks and meticulously-crafted one-liners to live by, it is immediate in its emotional pull, inviting multiple listens to absorb the intricacies of each poem-like world.
Anthemic, driving and euphoric, “Us” is the closing song from Lutruwita shoegaze gloom-pop outfit Dvrkworld’s debut EP. Capturing the struggle of trying to make a difference in a world trapped in a cycle of violence and persecution, “Us” critiques these dynamics while expressing an unwavering commitment to us until the end.
“The line ‘I choose us’ is meant to be a sort-of call to action, or a call to ourselves—to show up for each other, be kind, fucking vote, and do everything you can to support those around you in this beautiful, yet entirely cooked world.”
Spiritual Growth is the second album by Lutruwita/Tasmanian band RABBIT. Hot to trot, full of spunk and vim and vigour, Spiritual Growth showcases 11 songs of plectrum-grinding guitar punk and power ballads, mostly about dogs and fruit. Veering away from the power-pop of yore, RABBIT’s new record pushes tempos faster than previous releases, leaning further into the progenitive bosom of Celibate Rifles and Saints-type punk, with nibblings of post-hardcore plinking and blonking.
