Crate Digging

(Older faves and new stuff I reckon you’ll love)

If we’re mates (which of course we are now! right?) then I’m all about sharing the music that grabs me, on the off chance it might be your new fave song/band/record/gig.

When I find something I’m into – I kinda listen to it a lot in the beginning. Maybe because the artist has tapped into something I’m feeling at the time and I need to soundtrack that moment, or I just want to really feel the track and let it gently seep into my subconscious – to that end my dreams often have great playlists too 🙂

These songs are on high rotation initially, then become part of my mighty playlist arsenal thereafter, hope you dig them too.

20/8/25 – Saccharine love bombing but make it shimmer

This track is a collab between Dean Blunt and Iceage frontman Elias Ronnenfelt (the latter dude was a little full on during a show at a gig in Sydney a while back, but I’ll save that story for a vinyl monologue).

Ronnenfelt is all over a recent EP release with Blunt called Lucre, but the project that gave birth to tears on his rings and chains seems to be a little more elusive and is only spoken about in reverent articles. It seems to be hard to source on the webs (funny how we embrace a bit of mystery these days because we seemingly have absolutely every other answer in our hands at all times).

The lyrics are almost cloying in their optimism when compared to what I know and love from these lads previously (hence perhaps seeming almost unsettling in the best way).

Lemme know what you reckon as they say in the classics 🙂

10/9/25 – All killer no filler

So one of the best things about having kids (and believe me, there needs to be a few benefits because raising vaguely rad humans ain’t for the faint hearted), is that once they are past the Wiggles phase you can gently start indoctrinating them into the good stuff (otherwise known herein as just my stuff).

Once some of your favourite artists become literal household names, you then level up to the sharing music stage where you learn what the kids are into because I’m not a regular mum I’m a COOL mum! Even better still is the welcome and giddying ascent into the respectful, yet passionately loud debates that tells me they’re now actual music fans with their own opinions, that thankfully often challenge mine.

One such debate was with my oldest son and I; the two of us becoming very verbose, nerdy and utterly thrilled* (and therefore possibly insufferable to the casual conversation interloper) about the concept and structure of what exactly defines the ubiquitous idea of Post Punk.

I use the term loosely to basically describe anything that came after the initial popularly documented branding of that movement ; whilst acknowledging it’s a subjective timeline that MUST include The Saints in Oz and even Sex boutique curator/designer Vivienne Westwood, before the punk-by-numbers cacophony of The Sex Pistols).

The stuff I really love still carries the same defiance, opposition and stark, bleak and dull reality of suburban life. The working class ethos to just dance and drink and screw, because there’s nothing else to do (Cheers Jarvis Cocker), only now they’ve possibly been to uni or were thrown out of art school, sharing literature on the bus about unrequited love, searching for the ‘what else?’ and still rightly questioning everything.

There’s something more dynamic and melodic for me about post punk. Sometimes there’s a quiet sinister calm, a loud guttural roar or a sexy late night longing in an unusual time signature – a whole song can be made by even a singular howl for me to be fair.

Genres are a funny thing; being too beholden to them can seem limiting but they are often a great way to describe the indescribable. Below is a pretty recent playlist that I made in this vein: plenty here that I had not heard previously.

To add a bit of levity, those closest to me still maintain (and I paraphrase badly) that if there is a brooding middle-aged muso who has seen some shit, and deem s it necessary to channel said experiences into mournful wails over a reverb laden guitar, sparse and sometimes violently erotic** drumming, then that’s my new favourite band. Folks, they ain’t wrong.

*I may have been the winner of most thrilled

**Violently erotic could very well be one of the insufferable band names in theory, but Baby, I Don’t Care (Wendy James always seemed pretty punk to me).