Homegrown hits: The best Australian music to hear this month

Parissa Tosif, I Have This Memory of You

Parissa Tosif’s debut album, I Have This Memory of You, arrived with the spectre of the US and Israel’s war looming over Iran, the ancestral homeland she’s never visited. It was written as an intergenerational, border-crossing dedication to Iranian women, but great art habitually extends beyond its creator’s intentions.

Now, with her chances of ever visiting Iran dwindling, this gorgeous record has an added, heartbreaking relevance.

Tosif, also a member of the electronic duo Vallis Alps, drapes her delicately constructed songs in a gauze of piano, samples, drum machines and traditional Persian instrumentation. Each weaves stories and experiences told to her by friends and relatives with her own reflections.

I Sing For You (پروانه) is a garland of familial love, containing conversations between Tosif and her mother, aunt and daughter. Fury (نیلوفر آبی) and Vacation (سمیرا) are about a couple torn over whether to fight in or flee the Iranian Revolution.

Mysterious (دریا) was inspired by a story written by her great uncle during wartime, and the closing track, For Yara (يارا), is a message to her daughter to “be free, in love, in life”.

Sitting in the beauty of I Have This Memory of You connects the listener to the real people, and entire family lines, whose love keeps them resolute in the face of displacement, loss and conflict’s irrevocable consequences. Nick Buckley

Hermitude, Eight

For nearly 25 years, Luke ‘Dubs’ Dubber and Angus ‘El Gusto’ Stuart have methodically carved out some of Australia’s premier dance music from the icy climes of their home in Blackheath in NSW’s Blue Mountains. Their last album, 2022’s Mirror Mountain, beautifully reflected that iciness, with atmospheric and crystalline tracks that drifted ever outward.

A couple of key things changed in the years since: the duo’s longtime, revered record label Elefant Traks folded, resulting in them setting up their own label, Heavy Weather. They also toured the US, during which they discovered fans were clamouring for pure, high-octane, four-to-the-floor club tracks. Dubs and El Gusto put their heads together and, with ’90s acts like The Prodigy as their north star, set to work creating their best album in years, Eight.

They’ve enlisted a stack of established and emerging talent for the record, including ex-Elefant Traks singer DEVAURA, Perth Afropop artist Adrian Dzvuke, London punk rap duo Bob Vylan, and Californian rapper Wes Period, to name a handful. Hermitude have always expertly woven their arrangements around vocals, and they do so brilliantly on heaters like Light Up and Royalty. But the standout comes in Over You, which explodes its splintery vocals into a bone-shaking ’90s warehouse drop. Jules LeFevre

Fan Girl, 8HRS

On their newly released EP 8HRS, Melbourne band Fan Girl are raucous in all the right ways. From the opening notes of Easy Now, right through to the closing strums of Submarine, the band runs the sonic gauntlet, often choosing to shoot out of your chosen speaker system with the force of a runaway train.

Across the project’s quartet of songs, vocalist Noah Harris, guitarists Vincent McIntyre and Luke Thomas, and bassist Tom Dowling control cathartic ebbs and flows with a deft touch. Worth It? threatens to break open far before it actually does, while Echo Grey simmers menacingly, swirling around your eardrums without ever truly spilling over into chaos.

The title of the EP, which was written in Melbourne, Paris and Guadalajara, is a nod to the sprawling timezones within which the project came to life. They’re heading off to Britain and the rest of Europe in July to play shows and write more music, as overseas love for the band starts to roll in. I might not consider myself much of a Fan Girl – I don’t really fit the description, unfortunately – but when it comes to 8HRS, lauded by the likes of BBC Radio 6, BBC Radio 1 and KEXP, I’m tempted to make an exception. Ben Madden

Ms. Thandi, Soft Like Fire

Soft Like Fire is a debut that feels quietly assured from the first note. Across six tracks, Sydney artist Ms. Thandi builds a world of alternative R&B, neo-soul and Afro-reggae textures that feels warm, intimate and emotionally precise. The EP centres on love in all its contradictions, tender and consuming, liberating and disorienting, where vulnerability can feel just as powerful as defiance.

What makes the project land is her restraint. Ms. Thandi never over-sings or over-explains. Her voice moves with softness and control, often sitting close to the listener before opening into fuller melodic passages that give each song weight. There is confidence in her phrasing and in the way layered harmonies and shifting rhythms create emotional lift without forcing it.

Day Dreaming is a highlight, drifting on misty synths and understated percussion as she captures longing without turning it into spectacle. It feels suspended, reflective, like a private thought said out loud. Never Unlove, featuring Gold Fang, introduces a reggae warmth and a looser groove, broadening the emotional and sonic palette without disrupting the EP’s intimacy.

The production is subtle but deliberate; warm basslines, light percussion and layered harmonies that never crowd her voice. Soft Like Fire succeeds because it trusts feeling over performance. It is a debut full of patience, clarity and real emotional presence. Ify Obiegbu

Becca Hatch, Garden (Bang Goes the Drum)

Have you seen her, have you heard? Local R&B’s most adventurous star just keeps pushing her craft forward. Just over 18 months since releasing her debut EP Mayday, a masterful tilt towards the club that brought EDM, Jersey Club and amapiano into her uniquely western Sydney brand of cosmopolitan R&B, singer Becca Hatch is levelling up yet again.

Her new single Garden (Bang Goes the Drum), the first from her upcoming release Black Flower Project, is an epic that showcases an artist working at peak confidence. Co-written with Sean Kenihan of Northeast Party House, the track edges from a pulsing beat and woozy synths towards maximalist overwhelm, before a sax solo from Andre Lew sends the whole thing erupting like champagne from a shaken bottle.

Hatch’s vocals are subdued and searching, plucking gorgeous melodies from the maelstrom, as she wrestles with the vulnerability of opening herself up to a potential paramour. Keep this drum banging on and on. Robert Moran

The Amity Affliction, House of Cards

It was never going to be easy. The acrimonious departure of founding member and lead singer Ahren Stringer casts an inescapable pall over Australian metalcore pioneers The Amity Affliction’s ninth album, House of Cards.

Thankfully, new bassist Jonathan Reeves does an admirable job providing the clean vocals, and a record that could easily have been a disaster becomes a triumph.

The title track and lead single is a Reeves showpiece, designed to show longtime fans that the band could not only survive but thrive in this new status quo. But if House of Cards makes one thing clear, it’s that this is Joel Birch’s band now.

Birch is typically ferocious – in fact, he sounds reinvigorated. His signature roar does much of the heavy lifting, a thunderous one-man demolition crew. His screams power so much of the depth and momentum of the record, his pained honesty an escaped demon that can’t be returned to its box.

Kickboxer is relentless cannon fire, Birch barely taking a breath over a tour de force by drummer Joe Longobardi. Eternal War is explosive and theological. And while no track reaches the heights of Youngbloods or Pittsburgh, Speaking in Tongues is damn close, brutal and hopeful in equal measure.

The Amity Affliction’s ability to grapple with grief, depression, anxiety and mortality and channel that pain into glorious catharsis is what made them one of the world’s most celebrated metal bands. On House of Cards, they mourn the band they once were, and come out the other side shining. Tom W. Clarke

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