Radium Dolls

Storming out of Brisbane/Meanjin, Radium Dolls have carved out their place in Australia’s rock scene with sheer force and swagger, delivering a sound that’s as fierce as it is captivating. Known for their bone-rattling live performances and unmatched energy, this four-piece powerhouse consistently packs out venues and ignites crowd sing-alongs with their anthemic tracks. March 2024 marked a major milestone with the release of their debut album, Legal Speed, propelling them into the national spotlight. Standout singles like ‘CIA,’ ‘Wandering Eye,’ and ‘NAA’ have become anthems, resonating with fans far beyond their Brisbane roots. The Legal Speed headline tour saw the band play to packed venues across the East Coast, culminating in a sold-out show at Brisbane’s iconic venue, The Zoo. Fresh off the success of their second headline tour for their latest single, Man Scout, the Dolls have cemented their reputation as a must-see live act. Blending sharp humour, introspection, and ferocity, Radium Dolls craft music that balances raw storytelling with exceptional musicianship. With a growing following and unstoppable momentum, Radium Dolls are set to become a defining force in modern Australian rock. Bookings: brandon@selectmusic.com.au Mgmt: sag.noise@gmail.com

Gurriers

As the end of the first quarter of the 21st century inches ever closer, our planet precariously teeters from one crisis to the next. Rather than passively sit back and watch, the high-energy Irish guitar quintet Gurriers are firing on all cylinders and confronting the ills of the modern world on their debut album, Come and See, a truly thrilling collection of razor-sharp progressive punk songs.

Recorded in Leeds at the Nave with Alex Greaves, Come and See blasts off to an explosive start with “Nausea”, giving the concept of Jean Paul Sartre's classic novel of the same name a furious sonic makeover. Guitars screech like sirens, creating a curiously catchy clarion call for an album of raucous reflection.

Come and See explores many themes, be they the end of the world, the disenfranchised youth of Dublin, emigrant friends, the rise of the far right, desensitisation to violence, a pope struggling with belief and love amongst other things. “Nausea” examine how existential mundanity in the 21st century is now essentially lived in the digital realm, and society has blindly sleepwalked into this actuality without realising the full extent of its corrosive damage. Underpaid and overworked content moderators are forced to watch unspeakable horrors, as social media platforms drip feed its users dopamine, further distracting an already overstimulated and distorted cartoonish world from the harsh glare of too much reality.

“Des Goblin” channels the hypnotic energy of dance music and notes how modern narcissism is fuelled by an addiction to online personas. “Close Call” turns up the ferocious guitar intensity to eleven, a fierce hybrid of guitar pop with industrial techno sensibilities. “Dipping Out” is like a post-post-punk version of an Adam Curtis documentary, as the band cite his classic HyperNormalisation as a major source of inspiration. One line perfectly nails the disillusionment of contemporary youth, "Failed by a system that never really lets you exist.” Indeed, if Gurriers weren’t in a band they’d probably be part of a generation leaving Ireland in their droves, driven out by the soaring cost of living and the unattainability of home ownership, left to “live in debt and die in freedom”.

“No More Photos” opens with the memorable line, "Gentlemen, no fighting in the bathroom please. You've been caught doing too many Es” and proceeds to reference Caravaggio. Following a brief instrumental respite, simply titled “Interlude”, the album closes with a breathtaking final flourish of songs and a soaring title track, which tantalisingly hints towards an even more expansive, wide-screen sound for a future chapter. “Approachable” is a tongue-in-cheek anthem mourning the rise of the far right (“Damn, I was born in the wrong era”) that kicks off with a monstrous killer riff. “Top Of The Bill” combines an intricate guitar melody with blasts of noise and a knockout chorus, a live favourite and perfect example of how well Gurriers craft inimitable and intense pop music.

Taking their name from an antiquated and somewhat charming Irish term for lout, ruffian, or street urchin, Gurriers formed in January 2020, initially comprising Dan Hoff on lead vocals, Ben O'Neill on guitar and backing vocals, Mark MacCormack on guitar, Pierce O'Callaghan on drums and Emmet White on bass, who has since amicably left the band and been replaced by Charlie McCarthy.

Hailing from various parts of Ireland, Gurriers met in Dublin. They believed they were destined to connect creatively in a meaningful way, so they formed a band. We don’t need to dwell too much on how events in early 2020 temporarily stalled their progress. "All we wanted to do was be back in a room together and practice," Dan Hoff recalls. "I remember one stage screaming into my pillow because of the extended lockdowns.”

Instead of doom scrolling on their phones, baking banana bread, or bingeing on box sets, Gurriers seized an opportunity to hone their vision and advance their ambition. Over numerous Zoom calls, they meticulously discussed every single aspect of the band, plotting strategies at a time when venues, studios, and rehearsal rooms were shuttered shut. The silence spurned the fledgling group on to make a bigger, more beautifully abrasive noise.

Thanks to a productive pandemic, when Gurriers played their first gig on Halloween 2021 at Dublin's Workman's Club, they'd evolved remarkably as a band. On the back of earlier singles including “Sign of The Times” and “Nausea”, they have received the seal of approval from The Needle Drop's legendary Anthony Fantano and prestigious support from Steve Lamacq and Huw Stephens of BBC Radio 6 Music culminating in their most recent single “Des Goblin” making it up to BBC Radio 6 Music’s A-List at 6, not bad for an unsigned band self-releasing their own music.

Gurriers played festivals throughout Europe and beyond, including SWN, Mad Cool, Reeperbahn, Left of the Dial, London Calling, Latitude, Haldern Pop, Off, The Great Escape, Pukkelpop, Pitchfork Music Festival London, Electric Picnic and All Together Now. Scheduled to play South by Southwest in Austin, Texas last March, Gurriers pulled out alongside virtually all other Irish participants, boycotting the event due to its sponsorship by the US Army. This October, Gurriers will embark on their biggest tour to date in support of their blistering debut.

Inspired by timeless first records by The Strokes, Arctic Monkeys, The Chemical Brothers, and Black Midi, Gurriers' first album is no ordinary debut, but an exhilarating statement of intent by five people fed up with tiptoeing politely around the chaos. Come and see for yourself.

Temples Festival

Any band that can count British rock royalty like Johnny Marr and Noel Gallagher amongst its fans must be doing something right.

Kylesa

Since this Savannah, Georgia quintet first formed in early 2001, worrying about genre limitations has never been a priority. Taking musical chances, however, always has been. While KYLESA are as heavy as any band out there, they are beholden to no one scene and no preconceived notions of what heavy music should be.

"Lots of people like to stick to one kind of music," guitarist/vocalist Philip Cope elaborates, "and even with the underground, lots of people segregate themselves into small little categories and place lots of imaginary rules on these scenes."

“We just like playing heavy music and we've always liked playing it regardless of what is popular or trendy,” guitarist/vocalist Laura Pleasants adds. “It’s most rewarding for us to try and push our own boundaries of what we can to do with our music and hopefully, in the end, offer something that is at least original.”

Kylesa's third full-length, Time Will Fuse Its Worth, is the eagerly-awaited follow-up to 2005’s To Walk A Middle Course, which topped many year end lists and landed the band in metal and mainstream press alike. After grabbing ink in Spin, the New York Times, and metal mainstays Revolver alike, Time Will Fuse Its Worth again showcases the band as the ultimate definition of do-it-yourself dedication. With Cope lending his ears and hands for production duties at The Jam Room, and featuring comprehensive artistic layout and packaging from Pleasants, the KYLESA of current day continues to put the band’s future in their own hands by relentlessly touring Europe and North America alike.

Time Will Fuse Its Worth sees the band continuing to evolve upon KYLESA’s signature sound, seamlessly flowing from track to track encompassing listeners with sounds far and wide and an utter disregard for musical boundaries. Bringing together avant-garde experimentalism with the pure fury of dirty, sludgy riffs and raw, coexisting male and female vocals, KYLESA’s ambient noise interludes, grimy rock riffs and impassioned, gruff vocals portray the doom-inspired punishment they are capable of dishing out through the power of the band’s music.

Now adding to KYLESA’s signature sound and trademark triple vocal attack is the recent addition of drumming duo Jeff Porter and Carl McGinley. “When we first started the band, we had planned on having two drummers but it didn't work out, so now it feels like everything is coming together,” Pleasants says. “There is definitely a new level of intensity to Kylesa now. Since the new lineup has gotten together we have felt the strongest creative spark yet.”

The band's reluctance to attach itself to one sound or scene and to not play by conventional rules, along with that strong creative spark, has ultimately made KYLESA that much more versatile. With a constantly heavy touring schedule has found the band crossing boundaries, sharing bills with bands as diverse as High On Fire, Circle Takes the Square, Coliseum, Torche, and Darkest Hour, as well as playing to enthusiastic crowds throughout Europe. "While we are no kings of one scene," says Cope, "we have, in a sense, just developed our own thing.”

Die Spitz

Die Spitz is a mayhem-inciting cohort founded in 2022. The quartet is known for their stage presence, bombarding their crowds with a wall of sound. Their debut EP “The Revenge of Evangeline” captures this live, raw, and rowdy feeling with songs like “Kill Mr Jones” and “Going Away,” while also offering a more vulnerable listen in tracks such as “New Bait” and “Uncle Mark.” As Lee Ackerley of Austin Monthly put it: “youthful moxie has never sounded so good.”

Monolord

Thomas V Jäger - Guitars & vocals

Esben Willems - Drums

Mika Häkki - Bass

Management: Daniel Hall - daniel@ridingeasyrecords.com

Friko

Friko, a trio that’s cemented itself as a stalwart in the Chicago music scene, is frontman Niko Kapetan, bassist Luke Stamos, and drummer Bailey Minzenberger. Praised by the Chicago Tribune as “perfect slices of indie-pop,” their music is complex and dynamic, flickering between explosive rock, chamber pop, and serene sonics. It becomes even more pronounced in their live performances, where a crowd frenzied by wailing guitars finds itself minutes later collectively holding its breath, enamored by hypnotic strings and Kapetan’s emotive vocals.

REZN

Poppy Jean Crawford

No description provided for artist.

Closebye

Both born in Dallas, Texas in 1997 to respective Smith families, singer-songwriter Jonah Paul Smith and guitarist Julian Paint Smith met in elementary school. An organic orange juice debacle at Booker T. Washington HSPVA’s cafeteria cemented their partnership. In 2016, the two enrolled at The New School and moved to New York City. They formed a band and released the EP “Boring the Camera” under the name Pueblo in 2017. Through their collegiate years, the band developed an idiosyncratic folk-rock sound, combining elements of Elliott Smith's baroque-pop songcraft and Aimee Mann's irreverent adult contemporary.

In April 2022, Closebye released their debut album, “Lucid News.” The 9-song collection anxiously processes time’s relentless passage, charting a chronology of reverie and reconciliation, estrangement and acceptance, sadness and self-forgiveness. Upon the album’s release, the band expanded to become a solidified lineup of 5, adding multi-instrumentalist Ian Salazar, bassist Margaux Bouchegnies, and drummer Simon Clinton. The resulting live show is a testament to the quintet’s ripening sound – sweet, sharp and pithy, like the Texas oranges upon which their destiny is staked.

Lunar Vacation

As one would expect of any historic city, the houses in Decatur, GA are old, and while many have been renovated to suit the needs of the 21st century family, the one Lunar Vacation calls home has not. The porch is quaint and crumbly, the roof leaks, and there is a single bathroom shared by the band’s five members who insist that this is not, actually, a bad thing. “We go on tour and share a hotel room for a month and then all come back to the same house,” guitarist/vocalist Maggie Geeslin says cheerily, aware that to most, this scenario sounds maddening. “We’ve become homemakers together.” Just beyond the porch, the small vegetable garden produces enough to be proud of; in the cramped living room, there is always enough room for a house show, or a jam session. For ten months out of last year, engineer/bassist Ben Wulkan transformed the room into the ad-hoc studio wherein Lunar Vacation wrote and demoed their fearless sophomore album, Everything Matters, Everything’s Fire. “I used to be so protective of the songs when I gave them over to the band,” lyricist/vocalist/guitarist Gep Repasky says. “There’s so much trust involved, but this house helped us grow as best friends, as musicians, as a band.”

That newfound sense of trust is apparent on Everything Matters, Everything’s Fire, whose title, taken from the concluding track “You Shouldn’t Be,” is a thesis statement. While Lunar Vacation’s last album, 2021’s Inside Every Fig is a Dead Wasp, happily bathed in the waters of indie pop, their latest effort is exploratory, a product of many hours shared experimenting in a living room together. Inspired by prolific shapeshifters like Yo La Tengo and Björk, Everything Matters, Everything’s Fire adopts an ethos that every idea has the potential to be a good one. “Our last album was super produced, manicured,” Maggie says. “This one’s organic. We embraced mistakes; it made the work even better.” In other words: everything matters, everything’s fire.

Once billed as a band of high school friends, Lunar Vacation have transcended the cloying designation of “just kids” and have confronted the sink-or-swim mentality that overtakes you the minute you’re out of your parents’ basement. “Stop being so bitter,” Gep self-admonishes on the chorus of “Bitter” over a plodding, bony arrangement anchored by Connor Dowd’s drumming that summons Television. When they wrote the song, there was a lot to be bitter about; Gep had undergone a year of emotional tumult that led to a psychiatric hospitalization, which was both traumatic and transformative. Most of Everything Matters, Everything’s Fire documents that period, which the rest of the band witnessed as Gep’s closest friends. “When it happened, everyone was there. They brought me a note in the hospital, they brought me clothes, they brought me books.”

For a while after, the songs Gep wrote were lovelorn, angry, hopeless, but with Maggie’s encouragement, they began to see the duality in every lyric they penned, the cracks that let the light in. Now, Gep describes “Just for Today” as a song about both suicide and sex, as heavy as it is featherlight. When Lunar Vacation decamped to Athens, GA to record with Drew Vandenberg, Gep was mortified that “Set the Stage,” a song they’d written after a humiliating rejection, was the producer’s favorite. “It went from a super emo love song to, like, My Bloody Valentine,” Gep says, their astonishment still palpable a few months later. With Vandenberg behind the board and their bandmates’ unrelenting encouragement, Gep’s shame became a towering wall of sound.

After their hospitalization, Gep sought a sense of stillness they’d long been deprived of, which required letting go of the frenetic, elliptical thought patterns that had led them to rock bottom. In ways, the recording process mirrored the therapeutic, as the band made choices in the studio that, as Maggie puts it, “prioritized performance over perfection.” Mistakes started sounding like happy accidents that grew the band’s confidence and pushed them in unexpected directions. “Fantasy” begins muted and confessional, a smoke screen for the potent, psychedelic chorus that hits with the oomph of Portishead’s “Glory Box” when it drops. Opening track “Sick” is a bass-driven punk song, simple on its surface, but punctuated by Matteo DeLurgio’s rototoms, woodblock, and jaw harp, it offers an unsettling introduction to the album as Gep beckons a coming apocalypse. “The Earth is finally taking back her children,” they sing over the seasick arrangement, voice clear and unguarded, a beacon.

When Lunar Vacation started writing Everything Matters, Everything’s Fire, they returned to a song Gep started writing years ago called “Tom,” initially named for Vanderpump Rules cast member Tom Schwartz, whose maddening, happy-go-lucky approach to even the direst situations now modeled the cartoonish ease Gep was trying to enact in their own life. Abandoning the original premise, the band reconfigured the song in their living room while the sky dimmed to dusk outside. “We went through so many versions of it before finally settling,” Maggie says. The product of those many hours of work and laughter is sublime; just as “Set the Stage” became an empowering epic, “Tom” is a blinding pop song, filled with the possibilities that a crush engenders. Nothing about it sounds vulnerable until the bridge, when the instrumentation falls away save for a sputtering drum machine that accompanies Gep’s isolated, reverbed vocals. “I want you to be my friend,” they sing. “Let me out or let me in! Let me in! Let me in!” And as those words repeat, Lunar Vacation crashes back in, just in time to catch their bandmate as they sing, “As lonely as it seems—”

In that single, isolated moment, surrounded by friends, loneliness seems impossible.

Radium Dolls

Performers