Two decades after they exploded onto the Australian music scene with the era-defining hit Voodoo Child, Rogue Traders brought the energy, nostalgia and massive singalongs to the York on Lilydale for The Anthem’s 21st Anniversary Tour. Packed with anthems that shaped the 2000s Aussie dance-rock explosion, the Yarra Valley Room pulsed with excitement as fans celebrated 21 years of one of Australia’s most iconic crossover acts.
Tonight’s support act for the Rogue Traders is Dizzy Days an all-girl pop band, formed in Brisbane in 2021. Lead by Aisling O’Byrne on vocals, Bridgette Dabinett on bass, EJ Carey on guitar and Mikaela Swan on drums.
Dizzy Days
Dizzy Days reminded me of Disney princesses raiding an early 80’s wardrobe and performing modern pop on rock instruments. They play music that is chirpy, high energy with funky beats which is focused on original song writing.
Dizzy Days
They are confident and playful on stage, but don’t be misled these women know how to play their instruments, backed up by tight musicianship and a standout vocalist, Dizzy Days bring both talent and infectious fun on stage. They’re also building momentum with their upcoming release of the EP “Tunnel Vision” due out 26th June. Dizzy Days powered through a 40-minute set packed with mainly original songs, leaving the stage with the crowd dancing along.
I have to confess this was the first time I have ever seen Rogue Traders. I had heard of them and knew their radio played hits, but I didn’t really know what to expect. “The Anthem’s 21st Anniversary Tour” is high energy and non-stop. Rogue Traders banged out a 17-song set with a 2-song encore. The set is full of old hits, new music and a couple of covers all in 90 minutes. This show is a huge bang for your buck and the ticket price is great value.
This line up of Rogue Traders has the beautiful Natalie Bassingthwaighte on vocals, Tim Henwood the guitar master, the hard hitting Cameron McGlinchey on drums and not forgetting the founder of Rogue Traders James Ash on keys/synthesiser. Rogue Traders roots are based in electronic rock and it is evident in the synthesiser work, but add in driving electric beats, powerful drums and signature guitar riffs topped with Nat’s raw almost grungy vocals and energetic stage prowling and you have a formidable combination.
Rogue Traders came on stage at 9.30 and burst into “Watching You”, but oops no lead vocals, after a few seconds of panic and a mic change Nat’s edgy and commanding vocals came through. Nat asked the crowd should we start again? To a loud roar of Yes! They kicked off again to a perfectly run show for the rest of the performance. I thought Nat would have a pretty princess stage musical voice, but her voice as the lead of Rogue Traders is sultry, punchy and full of attitude.
Tim’s guitar playing is hook driven with aggressive strumming patterns and jagged power chords topped off with Cameron’s high velocity heart beat drumming. With James keys and synthesiser sound it is a marriage of a DJ and a rock concert. Rogue Traders have a one of a kind sound that is truly theirs. The 10th song of the night “In Love Again” was dedicated to James’s extended family with his 84-year old father rocking out in the crowd. Through out the set the crowd were lucky enough to hear some new music and be able to pre purchase their new vinyl “Midnight Alarms” (to be officially released digitally on the 5/06/26).
This past weekend, starting Friday was the first time in 18 years they have hit the road with this kind of tour. So if you love Rogue Traders I suggest you check the gig guides and buy a ticket you won’t be disappointed. And if you are a big Nat fan remember you can see her starring in the musical “Waitress” playing now at the Her Majesty’s theatre in Melbourne or buy her new biography “Love Like This”.
Ozgreeny photography and myself would like to thank The York on Lilydale for making us so welcome. Tony Kopa, Tim Henwood and The Rogue Traders and Dizzy Days for the wonderful media access.
Hard rock veterans Spread Eagle are pleased to share a new single today, ‘Ant Farm‘, along with an official video, taken from their highly anticipated new album ‘The Brutal Divine‘, out on June 12th, 2026, via Frontiers Music Srl. Spread Eagle are currently on the road on ‘The Brutal Divine Tour 2026‘, with dates across […]
Legends of the Seven Golden Vampires fuse psychedelic chaos and grunge-heavy power on Two Worlds Collide, an explosive anthem overflowing with distorted energy, towering hooks, and kaleidoscopic intensity. Built on crashing guitars, gritty textures, and a widescreen melodic core, the track channels the spirit of 90s alternative rock while injecting it with the band’s genre-bending DIY ethos. There’s a cinematic tension running throughout, balancing psychedelic atmosphere with raw emotional force and singalong immediacy.
Bold, noisy, and unapologetically massive, Two Worlds Collide feels like a collision between underground grit and festival-sized ambition.
A drum kit was never just an instrument in the hands of Joey Jordison. It became a weapon of speed, precision, and theatrical chaos, helping redefine heavy metal drumming for an entire generation. Raised in Des Moines, Iowa, Jordison developed his obsession with music at an early age after receiving his first drum kit from his parents. His earliest influences ranged from hard rock and thrash metal bands to punk groups, and by his teenage years, he was already performing in local bands around Iowa. Before music became his full-time career, he worked at a Sinclair gas station in Des
Listening to the new album from Brazil’s Deafkids, Cicatrizes Do Futuro, I’ve been thinking about rivers.
[indignant voice from the back]: WHAT?
Mea culpa, friend. I’m here today to preach the gospel of
Under the banner of Deafkids, the duo of Douglas Leal and Marian Sarine makes music that is unabashedly polyglot, with roots in punk, noise, industrial, and electronic music, in addition to the wealth of Afro-Caribbean percussion and rhythms so pervasive in Brazilian music. My first encounter with the band was Metaprogramação, their excellent 2019 full-length for Neurot. Since then, the band has released a slew of live albums and collaborations (including 2020’s also-excellent Deafbrick with Iggor Cavalera’s noise/electronic project Petbrick), but Cicatrizes Do Futuro (Scars of the Future) is their first unaccompanied album in seven years.
Rather than keep the listener in suspense about what might be in store, Cicatrizes Do Futuro starts exactly as it means to go on: “Parasita” opens with a heavily distorted vocal sample, hypnotically pounding percussion, blown-out synth bass, and eventually a nervy twang of a main guitar riff that tumbles along a 3/4-rhythm that becomes a two-step. The minimal vocals that crop up are chopped and reverbed almost beyond recognition, so that like everything else they become entirely focused on what’s happening now, not next. Another way of getting at this is to say that the album sprawls like a single, grooved-out jam session, a psychedelic feast of drums and claps and shouts and 808 kicks – and was that birdsong? – with individual phrases or licks or rhythms bubbling up only for as long as they are useful.
“Reflexo” pulses with dizzying polyrhythms, cutting out midway through for scrambled vocal cuts and diced up synth, and while “Profecia” heats up after its sly dub feint of an opening, it tumbles down the line as one of the (relatively) more restrained pieces on the album. Cicatrizes Do Futuro is an album that feels like it would be equally appropriate as soundtrack for an old-school skateboard video as for a David Attenborough documentary on the despoilment of communal waterways. Your own personal constellation of reference points is sure to differ, but here’s a partial map of how the album hits for me:
l-r, top: Miles Davis/Dark Magus; Atoms for Peace/Amok; Sepultura/Roots; Neurosis/The Word as Law \\ l-r, middle: Ratos de Porão/Crucificados pelo Sistema; Skinny Puppy/Too Dark Park; Boredoms/Super Ae; The Prodigy/The Fat of the Land \\ l-r, bottom: Matias Aguayo/Support Alien Invasion; Einstürzende Neubauten/Halber Mensch
The good news about this is that the band sounds like so many different things that they end up sounding like no one thing except Deafkids. Nevertheless, I think the connection to Miles Davis’s 1974 live album Dark Magus is both unintuitive and instructive. Like Deafkids, at this point in his career, Miles was focused on long, dense, trance-like groove and rich textural interplay rather than the individual and collective displays of virtuosity of the hard bop scene. In fact, Miles’s trumpet is one of the least-heard instruments throughout many of his recordings from this time – he spent just as much time needling the band with short phrases and licks on his Yamaha organ as he did torquing his trumpet through effects pedals.
In that way, to listen to Dark Magus as primarily a trumpet album sets one up for a similar disappointment as if you listen to Cicatrizes Do Futuro as a guitar album. Instead, both albums feel like inherently recombinant experiments, with the magic being how engrossing and self-contained they feel. The A-side highlight “Advertencia” has a wonderfully gnarled drone riff that snakes and curls through the underbrush, driving the song into a lingering, noise-fracked drone conclusion. “Possessão Coletiva” is the longest song on the album, and it makes use of that extra runway to slink a little slower and really burrow into the subconscious. The guitar that gradually pokes its way into the song’s final third might as well be a didgeridoo, and I swear there’s the faintest bit of flute off in the distance, all of which speaks to the hallucinatory effect of Deafkids’ unwavering commitment to the heady psychedelia of deep groove.
Although very few sounds on the album are not tweaked, chopped, distorted, and manipulated in some way, neither the effect nor the intent of the album seems particularly aggressive. Instead, like a canoe in a swift-moving river, it feels like an invitation to move one’s body in harmony with the flow. That doesn’t guarantee a smooth ride, but it may still be the right attitude to cultivate. The album closer “Em Transe” maximizes the effectiveness of the overlay of electronic kick drums, hand percussion, and bass synth to drive the listener into a state of feverish dancefloor hypnosis while a snarling guitar crush threatens to tip into total chaos. It doesn’t, though, because unlike an ocean’s cresting, crashing waves, Deafkids’s music follows the river’s model of crescendo without climax.
Cicatrizes Do Futuro is an album that sounds like a river, like that paradox of endless movement by which it is always and never the same thing. Deafkids’ origin in the southeastern Brazilian city of Volta Redonda is a few thousand kilometers from the Amazon River basin, but their music feels marked by the water’s current. The press materials for the album quote the band as saying, “Our music comes from the perception of the environmental, political, and moral toxicity that permeates our realities…” This is reflected through in their lyrics, as on album opener “Parasita”:
“E se houver um amanhã / A nos observar / É pintado de sangue!” (“And if there’s a tomorrow / To bear witness to us / It’s a blood-soaked one”)
The writer Robin Wall Kimmerer, in her book Braiding Sweetgrass, writes about how she had to shift her mindset when trying to learn Potawatomi, a language in which many phenomena we know in English as nouns are instead treated as verbs: “A bay is a noun only if water is dead. When bay is a noun, it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word. But the verb wiikwegamaa – to be a bay – releases the water from bondage and lets it live. ‘To be a bay’ holds the wonder that, for this moment, the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores… Because it could do otherwise – become a stream or an ocean or a waterfall, and there are verbs for that, too” (Kimmerer 2013, p. 55).
Through this lens, through this failure to learn what Kimmerer calls the “grammar of animacy,” the environmental degradation that Deafkids are (at least in part) lamenting on Cicatrizes stems from humans seeking mastery over the thingness of nature instead of learning to hear and live alongside the personness of nature. On “Reflexo,” the lyrics are pointed:
“Beba das águas / Do rio que seca / A sua sede / É o meu reflexo” (“Drink the waters / Of the drying river / Your thirst / Is my reflection”)
I doubt that Deafkids intended to evoke the feeling of a river with Cicatrizes Do Futuro, but now I can’t shake the feeling. One way to think about your relationship with a place is to reflect on the waters that feed and flow through it. “Feitiço” opens with chanted vocals and distorted tin-sounding drums, but when the electronic beats come in, the synth pads sound like thick raindrops radiating concentric circles that swiftly merge with the sleepless flow. This way of hearing is also a way of seeing, and it reminds me of Robert Macfarlane’s recent book, Is a River Alive?:
“Hold the map of your country in your mind. Imagine it now entirely blacked out except for the rivers and streams: these alone are present. Let them glow in vivid colours… A new topography leaps to the eye. The land is suddenly intricately veined… The pattern repeats, then repeats again with each scale-shift: a fractal branching of tributaries and channels, fronds and stems. It resembles the vascular system. It resembles a neural network” (Macfarlane 2025, p. 23).
Curiously enough, it wasn’t until I nearly finished writing about this riverine album that I remembered a piece of art that hangs on my office wall:
Growing up in the Twin Cities, the Mississippi River was ever-present. In college, I traversed it several times every day on a massive pedestrian bridge. I have visited Lake Itasca and waded in the headwaters where the Mississippi begins, and I have been to New Orleans to watch the river on its final turnings before it sloughs into its delta and merges with the Gulf of Mexico. I don’t live near the river now, but I can feel how it has shaped me. Art can be like that, too–it can put you in your place. And if you listen intently to the wild, pulsating flux of Cicatrizes Do Futuro, maybe it can put you in someone else’s place.
May 7th Thursday Carlisle Old Fire Station with Pauline Murray tickets and details May 8th Friday Galashiels MacArts with Stuart Braithwaite (Mogwai) tickets and details May 9th Saturday Edinburgh Voodoo Rooms with Stuart Braithwaite (Mogwai)tickets and details May 10th Sunday Newcastle Pilgrim with Pauline Murray tickets and details May 14th Thursday Leek Foxlowe Arts Centre tickets and […]
The Xcerts have continued their hot streak of heartbreakingly beautiful songs pulled from their upcoming album ‘i think i want to go home now.’ with another belter.
Titled ‘rinse repeat’, it is a jangly, lingering, sensationally raw look at what it means to find yourself stuck in a cycle of pain and hurt. Musically, it feels like something which could have been pulled from the band’s early days, which feels like an intentional move, but delivered with the lessons learned and life lived that has occured in time inbetween. The result is an absolute triumph of heartfelt and heartbreaking emotional outpouring, the sort that sticks with you long after the chords have faded away. It’s a brand of songwriting that the band are well versed in, but they really are reaching another level altogether.
Vocalist Murray MacLeod has explained exactly where the song has come from and what it represents within their entire story:
“This might be the first time we’ve self-referenced our own material. There are a lot of parallels between our first record and this record, with the heartbreak of a relationship deteriorating and the loss of a parent. We wanted this song to be reminiscent of ‘crisis in the slow lane’ but from the perspective of adulthood. Sadly cancer was all too prominent in our lives during the writing and recording of this record, and this song is very much about my father’s diagnosis at the tail end of 2022 and the helplessness of it all. I also tend to merge different scenes in verses and tie them together with choruses, so verse 2 is also about hopelessness, but in regards to my then partner’s struggles.”
‘i think i want to go home now.’ is set for release on July 10 via FLG Records.
Here is previously released track ‘pretty ugly’, which is heavy in a completely different way.
