In 1976, the Sex Pistols played a gig at a Trade Hall in Manchester for about 40 drunk punters.
Why do you care? The Sex Pistols were fucking shit. Almost unlistenable. But amongst those 40 punters was a young, handsome, not-yet-fascist Morrissey. Somewhere in the back were a few guys from Salford, they went on to form Joy Division — just ask Peter Hook, he never shuts up about it. The naive kids who organised the gig, ripping the ticket stubs on the way in, ended up starting a band called the Buzzcocks.
The Sex Pistols are still talked about, not because of their hair or the safety pins through Johnny Rotten’s nose; they’re remembered because they were influential. And most of the people that left that gig were inspired to pick up an instrument.
So as we near the end of a turbulent decade, it’s time to look back at the artists that have truly made an impact on the musical landscape. This list has nothing to do with album sales, Twitter beef, or tabloid fodder — this list is about zeitgeist, about the artists that moved the needle.
Featuring psych rock heroes, folk storytellers, pop superstars, it’s a testament to the breadth and depth of Australian music, and it bodes well for the decade to come. Dive in.
A.B. Original
Hip-Hop is the language of the historically oppressed and A.B. Original has the power of generations behind them. What was so empowering in their purpose was their refusal to acquiesce with the colonial Australian machine. Briggs (a proud Yorta Yorta man) and Trials (of the Ngarrindjeri people) were not to be appeased with handshakes and empty words from old white men and it marked a generational flashpoint, not only in music but in political culture.
What was so empowering in their purpose was their refusal to acquiesce with the colonial Australian machine.
Their unapologetic anger was justified and their invective was stupefying in its truth. ‘January 26’ was one of the most important Australian songs of the decade and their debut album Reclaim Australia, with the smartest of spins on the name of a racist political movement, simmered with tension. With the volume up, it was impossible to turn a blind eye to the injustices the two MC’s spoke of. Instead of draining the energy of their listener with single-geared rage, they tempered their rhymes with punchlines and sarcastic jabs that their progenitor Ice Cube would be proud of.
Released on Golden Era records by the godfathers of the scene Hilltop Hoods, Briggs and Trials are our wake up call to the atrocities still being committed against the original owners of a land over which sovereignty was never ceded. If you’re not listening to A.B. Original, you’re missing a vital civics lesson; if you’re not angry whilst listening to AB Original, you’re missing the point.
Dick Diver
A decade after Australia jumped onto the Rebirth of Rock bandwagon with Jet and The Vines, there was a lingering malaise for big choruses and beer stained shoes. Like so many success stories before them, the spotlight had quickly turned to ridicule and before the start of the decade, the mere thought of ‘Cold Hard Bitch’ sent a shiver down the spine of Michael Gudinski. In reaction to this, Australian indie-rock entered a period of great introspection; gone were the tight jeans and Beatles rip offs, in was the “New Melbourne Jangle”.
Less Foo Fighters and more Pavement, Dick Diver were the best of the bunch (and actually, their bassist Al was in most of them) that dissected modern Australian life in its tedium. Named after a character in an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel (because of course they were), Dick Diver excelled in wry portraits of the ordinary and whilst their songs were deeply personal, they were stories that could extrapolate to wider society like the best of Nick Hornby’s novels.
They inspired fifty off-key knock offs and had to endure the media’s temporary obsession with #dolewave, but what Dick Diver brought this decade was a droll perspective on the mundanity of our lives. Most of us were never going to ‘Get Free’, we just want to keep living our lives.
Courtney Barnett
Courtney Barnett’s breakthrough single ‘Avant Gardner’ showed off the wisdom of an old soul, a Wildian wit and an impressively incisive vernacular that could, in one couplet, provide a damning social commentary, an affable self deprecatory joke and a stinging one liner.
But while ‘Lance Jr’, ‘History Eraser’ and ‘Anonymous Club’ hinted at a clear-eyed storyteller in the vein of past masters like Paul Kelly and Liz Phair, what Barnett developed more than anything this decade was her ability to conjure images in your head when you hear her lyrics. None better than ‘Depreston’, which, while tapping into millennial anxiety with acute pathos, imprinted the image of a Californian bungalow with pressed metal ceilings into the retinas of every person who poured their heart into her debut.
An affable friendship with neighbourhood strange-kid Kurt Vile cemented Barnett’s Portland cred, but it was on Tell Me How You Really Feel that Barnett stepped up to the plate and shed any remnants of the bullshit slacker persona the media had attached to her.
The woman who had introduced herself to many by proclaiming “I’M A SCORPIO” had found her sting and instead of serving up more introverted anxiety-anthems, tracks such as ‘Nameless, Faceless’ and ‘I’m Not Your Mother, I’m Not Your Bitch’ aimed their eloquent malice squarely at a menace outside her head and one that far too many women have to face on a daily basis.
Camp Cope
‘The Opener’ was a seismic moment for the music industry. Rattling the institutionalised misogyny at its core, Camp Cope signalled a cultural sea change against the tokenistic approach to female artists in live music.
Their movement ‘It Takes One’ was the campaign that should’ve been launched decades ago, pushing to end the endemic of sexual assault at concerts and it was deafening against the patriarchy’s silence.
It helped that the band’s debut album How to Socialise & Make Friends was spectacular, balancing their righteous anger with the kind of pop hooks that would make Robert Forster jealous. None more so than ‘The Face Of God’, which is as harrowing as it is essential and it should be played to every high school student in the country. Camp Cope are your friendly neighbourhood revolutionaries, because fuck the norm.
Nick Cave
The start of the decade saw Cave riding a glorious wave of creativity. Off the back of the universally adored, Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! the last album to feature founding member Mick Harvey, The Bad Seeds found new soil to plough with Push The Sky Away, an album largely obsessed with the curiosities of the digital age. The process of writing and recording this album was then reaped for the intimate documentary 20,000 Days on Earth, marking a new period of transparency for the once oblique artist.
This newfound candour manifested itself in the adorably unfashionable medium of an internet blog, The Red Hand Files. But what has flourished since its birth has been nothing short of soul-nurturing, as Nick continues to answer the questions of his fans, in what is an essential source of human warmth and philosophical connection on the internet.
In 2015, the band were almost finished the recording of their sixteenth album Skeleton Tree when Nick Cave’s 15 year old son Arthur tragically fell to his death from a cliff near Brighton, England. Under the weight of such unfathomable pain, no one would have expected him to continue his artistic pursuits so publicly or with such vigour. And yet, he doubled down and channelled his enormous grief into some of the most haunting and affecting music of his career.
With him, The Bad Seeds were reborn with a new purpose, as they have become a conduit for Cave’s suffering to be exorcised and whilst Cave himself altered some lyrics for the final masters of Skeleton Tree, he fully plumbed his emotional depths on this year’s haunting and metaphysical album Ghosteen. That interminable quote about suffering for art always seemed like a dramatic cop out, but it’s clear that Nick doesn’t want our pity, he wants us to listen and learn from him; as this was the decade Nick Cave became one of music’s great altruists.
Gurrumul
Transcendental artists come along so rarely and Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu was the kind that seemed to conjure music from a spiritual place within himself.
Leonard Cohen, Kate Bush and Jeff Buckley also shared this ethereal quality, not only in their music, but in their presence; a strange ability to be humbling, nurturing and intimidating in the same moment. This decade saw both the celebration of Gurrumul’s life and musical gifts, as well as his tragic passing. His influence over Australian music and culture is immeasurable.
He had a way of summoning attention in the most unobtrusive way, like the last man holding a candle in a dark room, swiftly extinguishing it before your eyes.
Rrakala, The Gospel Album and the posthumous Djarimirri (Child of the Rainbow) all exhibited different elements of Gurrumul’s nature, with the intricate finger-picking of ‘Baru’ contrasting with the choir-led dirge ‘Djarimirri’ and the dramatic ceremonial ‘Djapana’, but his power as an artist was ever-present. He had a way of summoning attention in the most unobtrusive way, like the last man holding a candle in a dark room, swiftly extinguishing it before your eyes.
Those that were lucky enough to witness his music live will attest to his magnetism and raw, restrained power and while we have his beautiful music to remember him by, Australia is a poorer country without him.
Flight Facilities
Electronic music is cyclical and Hugo Gruzman and James Lyell were in the right place at the right time when they released the mesmerising ‘Crave You’ to an audience weary of Skrillex’s hyper-manic energy and downright weirdness.
The people just wanted warm, disco-lite house again and Flight Facilities had that in spades. Their debut Down To Earth was one of the few instant-classic Australian albums of the century, with good vibes aplenty and nothing that came close to challenging its listener. It’s the people pleaser that we didn’t know we needed and that has unfortunately spawned one million pretenders.
But their genius lies in the illusion. They make it look simple, but you try getting Reggie Watts to sound that good. And even more impressively, their cult Decade Mixes replaced the spot Girl Talk had left in our hearts.
Sia
Maximalism wasn’t in vogue. The huge Ministry of Sound choruses had gone from house music, Taylor Swift had injected pop with her southern country charm, and the likes of Frank Ocean and Solange had taken R&B on a more reflective and political turn.
Then in comes Sia with a voice like a melodic banshee, summoning the gods with a decibel level that could cause tinnitus. Leaving behind her indie-auteur roots, the fringed soprano went to Hollywood with 1000 Forms of Fear, a galactic pop album that left any trace of subtlety at the door of the recording studio.
Having already written for some of pop’s most iconic names, Sia decided to own her shit and the one-two punch of ‘Chandelier’ and ‘Elastic Heart’ was enough to make her a household name. She even lifted the likes of David Guetta out of the gutter and anyone that denies that ‘Titanium’ is a stone cold hit is lying to you.
Suddenly in the middle of the decade, Sia was one of the most sought after writers and contributors in the game, while also establishing herself as an artist to be reckoned with. Granted, saying yes to Pitbull and Flo Rida was perhaps a sign that she was getting ahead of herself, but by the time This Is Acting was released in 2016, Sia had reached Adele-levels of ubiquity. It wasn’t her strongest album, but it was never going to be, it’s name playing off the concept that it was a bunch of songs she wrote for other artists that didn’t even make it onto their albums. So the fact she still scored a US #1 with ‘Cheap Thrills’ from it says everything you need to know about her captivating pull as an artist.
Tame Impala
So rarely do we discover a band so fully formed in their sound and identity as Tame Impala. For some bands an album as cohesive and definitive as Innerspeaker would be their greatest achievement, the culmination of years of honing their craft. For Parker and the Perth boys it was a debut that barely scratched the surface of his potential.
And that isn’t to say it isn’t brilliant: Innerspeaker breathed new life into 1960s psychedelic-stoner-rock and Parker’s voice, with those echoes of Lennon, brought a celestial, dream like quality that balanced and harmonised with the music.
Innerspeaker breathed new life into 1960s psychedelic-stoner-rock and Parker’s voice, with those echoes of Lennon, brought a celestial, dream like quality that balanced and harmonised with the music.
Lonerism, released two years later safe from the arrondissements of Paris, dived deeper into the dream pop; losing a few guitars, adding a lot more synths and headed for the charts. Hadn’t Kevin read the ‘How To Be An Australian Rock Star in the 21st Century’ guide? Your second album is supposed to suck. Instead we had the the shaking big grey trunk of an elephant follow us from station to station as Tame Impala officially crossed over to the mainstream. And if that was it, we would have been satisfied; two spectacularly innovative and engrossing rock albums in an era where they are in terribly short supply.
But then came Currents. Kevin said he’d been listening to The Bee Gees a lot. And you could tell. The album had more vocal harmonies than Fleet Foxes, which is basically their entire schtick, and where’d there’d once been indecipherable lyrics about fate and social anxiety were now replaced with a crystallised narrative of the denouement of his relationship with Melody Prochet (of her Echo Chamber).
It began with the giddy hedonism of ‘Let It Happen’, which approached ecstasy the longer it went on while its lyrics begged for patience, wisdom and a trust in the universe. A dualism that defines Kevin Parker’s genius. This was an album about moving on and the heartbreak you leave behind and paired with Parker’s most flamboyant melodies to date, Currents was irresistible. Bring on The Slow Rush.
Hiatus Kaiyote
A tip of the hat from the great Purple One doesn’t get you on this list, but the admiration of one of history’s greatest and most influential artists surely doesn’t hurt. So what the hell is so special about Nai Palm, Paul Bender, Simon Mavin and Perrin Moss?
Innovation is definitely a part of it. But there’s also something to be said for providing accessibility into a genre that is notoriously difficult and exclusive. Call it whatever fancy, hyphenated sub genre you want: Futurist-Jazz, Freefunk, Neo-Soul; what Nai Palm and her talented mates do on stage is a wonder to behold.
Choose Your Weapon and Tawk Tomahawk are first and foremost lessons in music. Form, scale, melody and rhythm are all explored in both complexity and simplicity; twelve notes and the myriad ways to express them. But what Hiatus Kaiyote do, better than most of their contemporaries, is imbue their progressive sonic exploration with ear catching pop melodies and Perrin Moss’s hip-shaking rhythm section, so their music never seems like the wanky, self-indulgence of a virtuoso; but a fun dance-party. Albeit, one with much better musicians than most.
With the respect of music nerds around the world; from Questlove to Animal Collective to Erykah Badu, Hiatus Kaiyote are now on the frontier of soul music — and the best thing about it is that no one knows where they are taking it.
Flume
Bedroom producers used to soundtrack your hangover. And from Flume’s first single ‘Sleepless’ you can hear the influence of chillwave heroes Toro Y Moi and Washed Out, but Harley Streten just wanted to party.
His self titled debut was a ready-made party playlist. ‘Holdin On’ was the sound of summer and his well documented bromance with beard-du-jour Chet Faker was a spring of electro-pop gold dust, first with ‘Left Alone’ and later with their collaborative Lockjaw EP where Harley even got loose enough to bring out his childhood saxophone.
The electronic producer/huge rapper arranged marriage may be old hat these days, but that doesn’t make it easy and it’s failed more times than it’s succeeded. Flume though, has an affinity with them, chalking up tracks with Vic Mensa, Vince Staples, Pusha T and his first/best collaboration with T.Shirt. This crossover appeal has made him the go-to mainroom floor filler for every Australian festival over the last ten years. He’s the Swiss Army knife of Australian music.
London Grammar to Slowthai, Beck to Little Dragon, everyone has wanted a slice of the Sydney producer. The fact he spent the front half of the decade as one half of What So Not makes his solo output even more laudable. He’s been a busy boy and thankfully for us, he hasn’t stopped pushing himself artistically with this year’s mixtape Hi This Is Flume straying closer to Aphex Twin than any other cookie-cutter EDM producer would ever dare to. Here’s hoping for another decade of cheesy guilty pleasures as good as ‘Never Be Like You’.
Sampa The Great
What blows you away about Sampa The Great the first time you hear her really depends on what song you’re introduced to.
The wordplay and flow of ‘Black Dignity’ recalls a Fugees-era Lauryn Hill, the playfulness on her track with REMI ‘For Good’ is reminiscent of Estelle’s debut, ‘Protect Your Queen’ is on par with Noname’s stream of conscious rhyming and ‘Leading Us Home’ has the inherent spirituality that made Erykah Badu a deity of the scene for the last three decades.
The Zambian-born, Australian-claimed intellect is indefinable, her palette a mélange of African rhythms, Eastern mysticism and warm organic soul that she can slice open with her spitfire tongue. In a few short years since The Great Mixtape of 2015, Sampa has created a world for her own, operating on a plane that very few of her Australian peers can yet join her on.
But until everyone else catches up to her, she’s content dropping progressive compositions like The Return that challenge our preconceived notions of how hip-hop, soul and jazz can blend in Australian music.
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard
You usually hear the phrase “through sheer determination” in association with an Olympian overcoming adversity to win bronze. It’s not usually used to describe psychedelic rock bands, but it’s not everyday you see a band release 15 *pretty fucking great* albums in 10 years — achieving this feat alongside a touring schedule that would make most managers cry.
Among this madness, their festival Gizzfest has become a highlight of the music calendar and they’ve just announced a few marathon three-hour shows for good measure. Their machine is unstoppable and they’ve made the rest of the industry look positively lazy.
Highlights include the dreamy flutes of ‘Paper Mâché Dream Balloon’, the rollicking spaghetti western of ‘Eyes Like The Sky’, the 16 minute odyssey ‘Head On/Pill’ and the searing tornado destruction of ‘The Lord Of Lightning’. But that list could go on and on.
And if all of that sounds chaotic then you’re just dipping your toes in the water. The seven-piece have set themselves a pace that they will undoubtedly struggle to maintain for the next ten years, but as long as whatever magic is powering them remains, The Gizz should have another good ten to twenty albums left in them.
Gotye
At some point we’d all heard ‘Somebody I Used To Know’ so often we collectively started to imagine killing poor Wally de Backer. Surely between us we could find The Basics a new drummer right?
But in hindsight, it wasn’t really his fault that he was able to so successfully hijack our childhood’s brainwashed love for ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ and repurpose it to define our most recent heartbreak. What we’d also forgotten in the midst of our blind rage at the radio is that he’s an incredibly gifted musician, one that enjoys subverting the norm for what should exist in pop music.
It wasn’t really his fault that he was able to so successfully hijack our childhood’s brainwashed love for ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ and repurpose it to define our most recent heartbreak.
And while the success of its lead single might suggest a more commercial route, Making Mirrors was actually built on the spacious yearning of Like Drawing Blood’s closing tracks ‘Seven Hours with a Backseat Driver’ and ‘Night Drive’. The use of composer Graeme Leak’s public art installation during a windy night in central Queensland to create the bassline for ‘Eyes Wide Open’ is just one example of how refreshing it is to have a percussionist as a lead songwriter – their brains are just wired differently.
You would think the overwhelming, sudden success of the album’s lead single – including becoming the first Australian song to hit #1 in the US for over ten years, the ARIA awards, the APRA awards, winning Record of the Year at the 55th Grammy Awards and the countless cover versions, airplay and media coverage — would be enough to drive the naturally sensitive, shy and introverted artist into the shadows. And you’d be right; he hasn’t released another album since. Though his work with The Basics continues to be admirable — check out their new album B.A.S.I.C. at your local indie record store — we miss you Wally.
Gang of Youths
In a decade where most of our indie rock bands were more preoccupied with doing shoeys than writing melodies, Gang of Youths stood shoulders above the middling masses of Australian pub rock.
It’s a truism that the best and worst music is written unapologetically from the heart, and if done right it yields the most beautiful results, but if done poorly can lead you to the banjo and the likes of Laura Marling writing take downs of you. Historically, only Coldplay have fit both categories. David Le’aupepe writes music that’s straight from his right atrium, but he pulls it off through sheer conviction because he’s lived through the shit he is singing about.
Go Farther In Lightness is an album that offers strength in vulnerability and hope in despair.
Following their debut The Positions and a telling cover of Joni Mitchell’s ‘Both Sides Now’ on Let Me Be Clear, Le’aupepe put U2’s The Unforgettable Fire on repeat and his swirling emotions to paper. Go Farther In Lightness is an album that offers strength in vulnerability and hope in despair. And if that sounds overly dramatic and cliché, consider yourself fortunate to have never needed music in this way.
It’s a remarkable document of fragility, which is a quality you cannot attach to many albums in a country of big tough guys with no feelings. Let’s hope Go Farther In Lightness continues to give permission to young males around the country to admit they are not okay and know that there are people around them that will support them. Honestly, we need more bands like them.
RÜFÜS DU SOL
RÜFÜS introduced themselves as the sound of summer. No seriously, they actually named one of their first singles ‘This Summer’. But at a certain point of time that shit becomes depressing — you can’t listen to some salt water washed synth banger as the rain is pounding on your train window and your socks are wet on the way to work on a Monday morning. That’s enough to make you want to throw your iPhone at a Lollypop Lady.
So they traded the surf boards of Sydney’s northern beaches for the dank dungeons of Berlin’s nightclub scene. What a pivot. And while the blonde mop on Tyrone’s head remained, Jon’s synths became darker and RÜFÜS became a 3am staple.
Many would argue ‘Innerbloom’ is the best Australian song of the decade and, well, you know, it’d be pretty fucking hard to argue otherwise. Closing their second album Bloom, it discarded the radio-friendly pop-dance template for an almost 10-minute throbbing journey, instantly etching themselves into Australian electronic folklore.
Their third album Solace saw them back on familiar Bondi sand and whilst it didn’t win over any new fans, it cemented their place as Australia’s preeminent dancefloor specialists.
Chris Lewis is a writer and critic based in Melbourne. Follow him on Twitter.