Check Check

Pulp's music feels more relevant now than it ever did. The rallying chorus of “Mis-Shapes” could be copied directly from the internal monologue of a burned out, embattled gen-Zer. “What’s the point in being rich / if you can’t think what to do with it? ‘Cause you’re so bleeding thick,” Cocker snarls on that song. Turns out he didn’t even know the half of it: our ruling class have spent the last three decades accumulating wealth and bleeding brain cells.

So, when Pulp emerged on the Opera House Forecourt for the Sydney leg of their much anticipated revival tour, it wasn’t in the form of a legacy band. Cocker spent the gig spasmodically dancing on the very cutting edge, whirling through a setlist of songs that could have been written yesterday. He achieved the unthinkable: summing up the spirit of the times while dressed like a substitute English teacher in blazer, jeans and spectacles.

Full review via the link in the comments.

Australian music media is h***y for Spotify.

Spotify's new AI-generated prompted playlist feature has a bunch of Australian music media outlets very excited.

You tell the AI what you want from a playlist, and it’ll make it for you. No further effort necessary. It reminds me of something Liz Pelly, author of the Spotify exposé Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, said when she was in Melbourne last year.

“There’s this former employee who I interviewed who told me that the whole goal of the Spotify recommendation apparatus is to help reduce the cognitive work that someone has to do when they open this app,” Pelly said.

“It seems like at some point there was some sort of convention where a lot of these music tech start-up guys decided that deciding what music you want to listen to is the worst thing you could possibly ever do.”

It sounds unequivocally gross, right? Well, there are plenty of Australian music media pundits who seem to agree with this Spotify ethos.

Read more via the link in the comments.

The first Spasta of 2026 took place on Valentine's Day in the Heritage Gardens at Abbotsford Convent, perhaps the loveliest setting for a day party anywhere on Wurundjeri Country.

At 24 degrees, with bright blue skies and only the teeniest bit of wind, it felt like the first day of spring. At least, that’s what I kept telling everyone. But perhaps it was just the buzz of flowering romance in the air. New connections pollinating. Friends and flames bumping hips. Everyone feeling freaky.

Egyptian Lover’s 90-minute headline set certainly emphasised the latter. The Los Angeles musician, a self-described “freak” and “freak-a-holic,” split his time between old-school toasting, using a vocoder to send his voice up to a cartoonishly high pitch, and activating video game sound effects with child-like glee. Programmed 808 beats motored every track.

On multiple occasions during his no-frills and loopily eccentric set, Egyptian Lover asked the thousand-ish people at Spasta to join him in saluting his cherished Roland drum machine.

“Eight-oh-motherf**king-eight," we sang.

Full review via the link in the comments.

Strip Cameron Winter's career of its endless buzz – the meteoric rise to fame assisted by not one but two of the most talked-about records of the last couple years – and what’s left is the outrageous talent of an unsettlingly-young man who spits poetry in one long stream.

His Sydney Opera House show reduced material from Heavy Metal so severely that such poetry was impossible to ignore.

Full review via the link in the comments