What happens when Australia’s angstiest alt-rockers find love? Great things

Stand Atlantic, Godbreath

★★★★

You don’t usually come to Stand Atlantic expecting heartwarming fare. On their previous records, the Sydney alt-rock band, led by the magnetic Bonnie Fraser, excavated relationship breakdowns (2024’s Was Here) and attempted to bottle the suffocating anxiety of the COVID-19 pandemic on 2022’s f.e.a.r. (the opening track was called Doomsday, to give you an idea).

So what happens when Stand Atlantic find happiness? Great things, it turns out. After dealing with a bout of writer’s block following Was Here, Fraser broke through the fog and wrote Favourite Flavour about the blissful start of a new relationship. Godbreath, the band’s fifth album, unfolded soon after, with the band once again linking up with longtime producer Stevie Knight.

Don’t mistake happiness for toothlessness: Godbreath crackles with energy across its 11 tracks, with David Potter’s guitars and Jonno Panichi’s drums as potent and locked in as ever (see the wailing guitar solo on standout NEXT2U, or the crunching breakdowns on d.L.M.A. and SO COOL). After avoiding love songs for years, Fraser carves some beauties in Velcro and NEXT2U, finding a new vehicle for her mighty vocals.

Edge of Vegas, another highlight, is a moment of pause and clarity, as Fraser reflects on a life lived as a frayed nerve ending, always braced for pain. But for the first time, Fraser and Godbreath put that feeling in the rearview. Jules LeFevre

Sampa the Great, Nu Zamrock

★★★★

“Africa is the greatest ghostwriter of all time,” says Sampa the Great in the press notes for Nu Zamrock, a statement which succinctly acts as a thesis for her new album.

The record opens with a recorded conversation between the Zambian-born, Botswana-raised artist and her blood uncle George Kunda (aka Groovy Joe), a founding member of Witch, a band which spearheaded the 1970s Zamrock movement. As Sampa describes it on the track, the movement was defined by the ways in which it injected historically Western genres – such as psychedelic and garage rock – with a Zambian sonic identity. “You were among the first to do that,” the ARIA Award-winner says to her uncle. “That’s the creating of a genre.”

So follows an album that merges past, present, and future to create a kaleidoscopic tapestry of sound and identity; it is shaped by legacy but creates something unequivocally new. Canary hums with explosive, futuristic production as Sampa spits lines like: “Last time I checked, I got the needle and the thread, weave that shit together.” Location, another standout, boasts an intoxicatingly ragged drumbeat while eviscerating the West’s artistic exploitation of the African continent.

Throughout Nu Zamrock – which also features appearances from the Melbourne-based angelic chanteuse Mwanje Tembo and Aussie pop luminary Sia – Sampa the Great drips with charisma, facilitating rapture and revitalisation. “What do I do?” she asks herself on the album’s closing track I Can Love – but she already knows the answer: “I will renew.” Emily Wilson

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