Amyl and the Sniffers – Cartoon Darkness
Key track: Chewing Gum
Credit to Amyl and the Sniffers for not standing still: the creative growth of this band since their self-titled debut album in 2019 has been startling. Which doesn’t mean that Cartoon Darkness sounds like anyone but Amyl and the Sniffers. The snort-laugh opening track Jerkin’ was a one-chord punk wonder, singer Amy Taylor dissing online critics with lines like “you are fucking spiders / I am drinking riders!” But there has always been more to this band than immediately met the ear. The arpeggiated guitar and wide-screen production of Big Dreams, electric/acoustic textures on Bailing on Me and Taylor’s increasingly reflective and insightful lyrics all suggest a long career ahead. – Andrew Stafford
King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard – Flight b741
Key track: Daily Blues
On Flight b741, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard channel old-school sounds – the dense, livewire aesthetic of classic ‘70s groups like Steve Miller Band and the Doobie Brothers – to create another troubled, deeply empathic exploration of the climate crisis and societal collapse. This is a conceptual tip they’ve been on for a few years now – having children seemed to snap the band’s gaze away from rich fantasy worlds and on to our deeply rotted modern society – but there’s something about Flight b741 that puts these ideas into sharp relief. It’s an album about seeking out creature comforts and finding they can’t shield you from the realities of life as well as they used to – that still manages to be a rollicking, rip-snorting blast. – Shaad D’Souza
King Stingray – For the Dreams
Key track: Southerly
If you’re in need of a bit of joy at the end of a dark year, then King Stingray are your ticket to ride. Their second album, For the Dreams, is a virtual reprise of their instant classic debut, which won the Australian Music prize. It’s buoyant, upbeat and almost relentlessly optimistic – which can make it seem thoroughly at odds with the times in which we live. On the other hand, it’s timeless. Over two albums now, these sons and nephews of Yothu Yindi have made making pop music sound like the easiest, most natural thing you can do in the face of apocalypse. For the Dreams may be unchallenging, but it’s also hugely enjoyable. – AS
Read more: King Stingray: For the Dreams review – an unbridled celebration of life from Yolŋu surf rockers
Dirty Three – Love Changes Everything
Key track: Love Changes Everything I
With salvation ever harder to come by these days, Dirty Three’s first album in 12 years kept the faith in aspiring to transcendence. There are pockets of mournfulness in this six-song suite, which all share numbered variations of the record’s title: Warren Ellis’s desolate piano and Jim White’s dejected drums on II; the vast, lonely echo of IV, in which Mick Turner’s guitar, Ellis’s violin and the drums sound incredibly far from one another. But by and large, these songs conjure an elemental frenzy as they reach towards something greater: Ellis’s great, triumphant rally on I; the flames gently licking III from ember to bonfire; the clarion, burnished euphoria of closer Vol 1. All straddling one side or the other of 60, Dirty Three make an indisputable case for revelation being there for the taking as long as you’re willing to push. – Laura Snapes
Middle Kids – Faith Crisis Pt 1
Key track: Dramamine
There’s enough pop hooks on Middle Kids’ third album for Olivia Rodrigo to hang her entire coat collection. Existential crises may be plaguing singer Hannah Joy, but the Sydney indie rock trio don’t let brooding lyrics – that wrestle with God, relationships and the whole damn universe – kill the mood. Like the title of the LP’s first single, Bootleg Firecracker, songs fizz and climax in kaleidoscopic cascades, and co-producer Jonathan Gilmore (the 1975, Carly Rae Jepsen) keeps the windows rolled all the way down for full wind-in-hair exhilaration on anthems such as Highlands and Dramamine. Bend, with its refrain “Maybe you’ve got to break me to see what I’m made of”, dares to out-Florence Florence + the Machine, while stripped-back album closer All in My Head – a duet with Gang of Youths’ David Le’aupepe – shimmers with Taylor Swift/Bon Iver energy. – Janine Israel
Missy Higgins – The Second Act
Key track: A Complicated Truth
Missy Higgins has made a career out of exploding the artificial binary between the simple and the complex, crafting pop songs that announce themselves without pretension, but unravel in a multitude of directions the more you let them linger. No surprise then that The Second Act has both a very direct narrative – it follows Higgins’ life after divorce – while settling for neither catharsis or melancholy. Don’t Make Me Love you howls with anguish while operating just above a whisper; Blue Velvet Dress decimates while finding new strength. There are no easy lessons here, really, except perhaps for a version of the one proposed by Samuel Beckett – “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” It might be one of the finest accomplishments of her career. – Joseph Earp
Read more: Missy Higgins: ‘I feel like I have enough love, but … I feel constantly torn’
Paul Kelly – Fever Longing Still
Key track: Going to the River with Dad
Here are the things we have learned about Paul Kelly over his many years as an artist: he loves bodies of water; he appreciates the raw sting that lives at the heart of desire; he knows how to say a lot with very little. In that way, Fever Longing Still, his first album of new material in six years, feels sort of like an ur-text. There is the lurching, pathetic beauty of Love Has Made a Fool Out of Me; there are the Shakespeare references; there is the melancholy richness of Going To The River with Dad. And underneath it all, there is the philosophy that Kelly has staked his career on – life is bleak, short, ravaged, tedious, embarrassing. But that’s why we spend it loving one another, not why we don’t. – JE
Read more: Paul Kelly: ‘Most of the time when I’m writing songs, I’m boring myself’
Speed – Only One Mode
Key track: Real Life Love
Hardcore is one of heavy music’s most notoriously rigid forms. But then the Sydney band Speed showed up and started dropping flute solos. The hardcore community loved it and they’ve exploded internationally. So much so that their debut album, Only One Mode, won them an ARIA. On Only One Mode, Speed makes an exceedingly fun racket primed for cranking from rolled-down car windows. As capable as the album is at disrupting suburban bliss, it’s also a deeply felt collection of songs. The band’s shredded lead singer, Jem Siow, locates masculine strength in vulnerability, speaking to themes including alienation, marginalisation and suicide. Speed’s ultimate success lies in living out the solution to these ills, through their unwavering loyalty to the hardcore community and each other. – Nick Buckley
Emily Wurramara – Nara
Key track: Lordy Lordy feat. Tasman Keith
Nara means “nothing” in Anindilyakwa language – which is what Emily Wurramara thought she was left with after escaping a devastating 2019 house fire. But the importance of what she did have came rushing into focus: her baby daughter, family and friends – in the moment she had nothing, she realised she had it all.
Nara sings to those people and the land that supports her, while jettisoning toxic influences. The album’s tracks move between breezy guitar pop, countrified blues, house and downbeat RnB. Unifying the songs’ is Wurramara’s delivery: a quietly intimate strength that feels as though she’s right there in the room, singing just to you. – NB
Read more: Emily Wurramara on surviving a house fire: ‘When I had nothing, I had everything’
Grace Cummings – Ramona
Key track: On and On
Discovering Grace Cummings was my biggest musical pleasure this year: her husky howl carries echoes of Nancy Sinatra, Nick Cave and Annie Lennox – but she is also entirely her own thing. Ramona is her most richly produced album, and has some of the emotional flair of an early Rufus Wainwright record – pianos, slow drums, moody strings and an enormous voice that tears former romances to shreds. “You think you know me like a folk song / Or a book that you read once,” she hollers on Something Going ‘Round. On Everybody’s Somebody she lets fly over triumphant horns: “Smoke in your room till the sun rises / And tell yourself that you’re number one / And maybe write a letter to your son, / If you miss him so much?” – Sian Cain
Read more: Grace Cummings, the singer with one of Australia’s most powerful voices
Dobby – Warrangu: River Story
Key track: Dirrpi Yuin Patjulinya
The Murrawarri-Filipino drummer and rapper has created a brilliant, pedagogic album all about the degradation of the Murray Darling Basin. So, not your usual hip-hop fare, then – but Warrangu is part of a wider tradition of protest, education and resistance in rap. Dobby blends drums, piano, strings and even bird calls to tell the story of what has happened to the river systems around Brewarrina, with interludes of Indigenous elders speaking about Country that recall The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. This is hip-hop with a point, and a brave and radical debut from a musician we’re bound to hear a lot more from in decades to come. – SC
Read more: Dobby: ‘Hip-hop is a powerful tool to remind people to see past the crap’
Cherry Chola – Bimbo Esoterica
Key track: Gasolinita
It’s in the name. She’s Barbie with a brain; she’s equal parts flirt and flint; she’s armed with either a dead-eyed gaze or a steely resolve, depending on who you ask. To put it another way: she’s sweet but psycho. Venezuelan-Australian artist Cherry Chola’s debut record – a collaboration with Mexican DJ Chico Sonido – opens with a flip of Daddy Yankee’s Gasolina and only grows more deranged, namechecking everything from Hello Kitty to Nintendo over whiffs of hardstyle and dembow beats that ripple like shockwaves. Above it all are Cherry Chola’s glassy vocals; you can practically hear the eye roll. – Michael Sun
Sycco – Zorb
Key track: I’d Love to Tell You
Sycco broke out with a series of fairly anonymous singles that sounded – for better or worse – prefabbed for Triple J airplay. On her first album Zorb – coming six years after her debut single – she unfurls a new pop persona: psychotropic, glimmering at the edges, and gloriously shambolic. These are weightless tracks that slough off familiar growing pains with high-saturation dance breaks: bursts of UK garage (Monkey Madness) and squiggles of distorted vocals that ascend towards the sky (I’d Love to Tell You). Sycco has cited her roommates as a generative force behind the album; like the best sharehouses, Zorb is pleasure and pandemonium. – MS
J McFarlane’s Reality Guest – Whoopee
Key track: Caviar
It took five long years for Julia McFarlane to release a follow-up to her superlative 2019 debut Ta Da, and in that time she made a hard pivot away from erudite lounge pop towards trip-hop and washed-out breakbeats. The resulting record, Whoopee, is a glacial late-night odyssey that fits squarely into the 2020s trip-hop revival (see: Acopia, a.s.o) while existing on its own murky plane. These songs are sexy and strange in equal measure – tracks like Wrong Planet conveying intimacy and alienation in the same breath, YouTube Trip turning a dissociative journey into the depths of the internet into something warming and surreal. Whoopee is gilded with touches of jazz, indie-pop and exotica, but it never feels like anything other than a look into McFarlane’s one-of-a-kind world. – SDS
Good Morning – Seven
Key track: Ahhhh (This Isn’t Ideal)
Seven is a gloriously ambitious record, and the culmination of over a decade of collaboration between childhood friends Stefan Blair and Liam Parsons. The Melbourne duo’s intense love of music is obvious in this album, which interpolates and samples a huge range of records; their lush, complex arrangements are impressive and creative. Highlights include Ahhhh (This Isn’t Ideal) and Real I’m Told, but there’s something fascinating in each of these contemplative tracks. As if that wasn’t enough, the band then released a surprise album in November, showcasing another side of their talents with more classic-sounding jangle indie tunes. There’s a reason Good Morning has been making waves abroad – they’re one of Australia’s most accomplished acts with a broad musical vision. – Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen
