Lambrini Girls walk into the Metro Theatre like they’ve come to repossess something that was stolen years ago, something vital and furious and inconvenient, and they’re not here to negotiate. Outside, the crowd curls around the block like a question mark daring the night to answer. Inside, the air already feels pre-bruised.
Backseat Mafia clocked their ascent early, watching them mutate from scrappy 300-capacity upstarts into thousand-strong congregation leaders in what felt like the blink of an eye. But statistics don’t capture velocity. Velocity is a force. Velocity is Phoebe Lunny gripping her guitar like it owes her money and Selin Macieira-Boşgelmezstride standing beside her like the last witness to the end of the world.
Their 2025 album Who Let the Dogs Out didn’t shoved them bodily into the wider bloodstream. Tracks like “Company Culture”, “Big Dick Energy” and “Love” came armed with serrated edges and a refusal to behave, dissecting power, masculinity and alienation with the kind of blunt force most bands spend entire careers avoiding. The record drew praise across the critical spectrum, and Backseat Mafia’s favourable review recognised it for what it was: not just another punk album, but a document of confrontation, a band discovering the exact temperature at which their anger could burn without consuming itself.
Before the detonation, there’s Big Wett, who doesn’t so much open the show as liquefy it. The Metro becomes a sweat-flecked cathedral of bass and skin and liberation. Her set is sex-positive, confrontational and joyful in ways that make repression feel like a fossil. Bodies move because they remember they can.
Then Lambrini Girls arrive and the venue prepares for impact. They named themselves after Lambrini, that syrupy, bargain-bin pear cider marketed with a wink and a smirk toward girls who were never meant to be taken seriously, a drink weaponised by culture as shorthand for disposable femininity. But Lambrini Girls aren’t cheap wine, they’re Molotov cocktails. If you were expecting something sweet and ignorable, you’d be wrong, instead you get ignition.
Within the first three songs, Phoebe Lunny has already detonated the invisible border between performer and witness, launching a circle pit into existence like she’s striking flint against bone. She dives into the crowd. She is absolutely fearless, moving through the mass as if she trusts it more than the stage, later clambering up onto one of the balconies and throwing herself back into the heaving organism below. This isn’t performance, it’s surrender to velocity. Suddenly there is no band and no audience, just a single organism convulsing in shared release. Circle pits are starting all over the place. Bodies lift and fall. People scream not because they’re told to, but because something ancient inside them has finally been given permission to speak.
But Lambrini Girls don’t just rupture the physical architecture of the room, they dismantle its moral comfort too. Lunny stalks the fault lines between songs, telling the crowd exactly how much she detests the UK government. She asks whether Anthony Albanese is popular here, and the response comes back immediate and unanimous: “NO.” She leads the room through chants that feel less like slogans and more like ritual incantations: “Always was, always will be Aboriginal land.” “Free, free Palestine.” Later she twists the air itself into call-and-response — “Craig…” “David.” “Lambrini…” “Girls.” “F*ck…” “Fascists.” Each word lands like a hammer strike, forging something communal out of noise and refusal.
Selin Macieira-Boşgelmez steps forward and speaks with unflinching clarity about sexual assault in the music scene, about how in general, perpetrators of sexual violence are often not found guilty, not because the harm did not occur, but because the burden of proof in criminal courts is extraordinarily high. The gig ends with a massive onstage rave, with Big Wett returning to the stage alongside the band, joined by a drag queen, bodies colliding in sweat, glitter and defiance. It feels less like an ending than an ignition point.
This is what punk was supposed to do. Not decorate. Not entertain. Not politely request your attention. Punk was meant to interrupt the lie.
Lambrini Girls prove that punk never died. It was just waiting for someone reckless enough to set it loose again. Sydney, tonight, was lucky enough to see it in full flight.
Images Deb Pelser.
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