The Thousands

Leading the nation from Canberra, Dream Damage have been consistently releasing local music that’s forward thinking without trying too hard, pop without pandering, and contemporarily cool without pretentious posturing.

Take Jonny Telafone: making smart, heartfelt, deadpan folktronica. His debut Wherever The Wind Blows plays like an Aussie James Yorkston or Machine Translations (download it here).

Or Danger Beach: they wed the scattershot low-fi intimacy and ramshackle charm of early Smog or The Microphones with that echoey, dark 50s doo-wop twinkle that’s popular (Beach House, Beach Fossils, Crystal Stilts). Debut CD Milky Way feels like a transmission from their diary to yours, its aesthetic roughness matching the raw emotion within.

Then there’s Horse Macgyver, doling out the most challenging, yet possibly the most exciting, of this lot: pummeling noisy new-goth meets screwed and chopped a la Salem. Preview his debut tape Void here.

Stoked to see these Canberra upstarts get the scoop on the best new music in Oz. Thanks Dream Damage for restoring my lust for DIY culture.