The Factory Theatre feels built for a night like this. Bodies packed towards the front and four bands approaching heavy music from very different angles. Ocean Grove’s Oddworld Underground Tour has landed in Sydney, bringing Cane Hill back to Australia after a decade away alongside Deficit and Blinder.
Adelaide’s Blinder are first into the room, bringing a very different texture to the usual heavy-show opening slot. Their music sits somewhere around shoegaze, alternative rock and the heavier end of nu-gaze, with guitars allowed to blur and stretch rather than simply bludgeon. Recent single ‘chrome’ gives a good indication of where they are heading, balancing atmosphere with enough weight to remind everyone exactly what sort of night this is.
Then comes Deficit, and any lingering dreaminess is swiftly shown the door. The Western Sydney band have become one of the more interesting names moving through Australia’s heavy underground, mixing hardcore and metal without sanding away the rough edges. Five EPs in, millions of streams behind them and tours alongside Alpha Wolf, Malevolence and UnityTX already ticked off, they arrive at the Factory with considerably more mileage than the tag “rising band” might suggest.
Cane Hill carry a different kind of anticipation. The New Orleans band haven’t toured Australia since supporting Bullet For My Valentine in 2016, making tonight a reunion with an audience that has waited ten years to see what has happened to them in the meantime.
Quite a lot, as it turns out. Across ‘Smile’, ‘Too Far Gone’ and 2024’s ‘A Piece of Me I Never Let You Find’, Cane Hill have steadily moved beyond straightforward metalcore, pulling alternative rock, grunge and more experimental impulses into the machinery. Their music can be brutally heavy, but there is vulnerability running underneath it, particularly in the way they write about identity, addiction and self-destruction.
And then there’s Ocean Grove. Calling what the Melbourne trio do nu metal doesn’t quite cover it. Neither does hardcore, alternative rock or any of the other labels that have been thrown at them over the years. They’ve solved the problem by inventing their own term, Oddworld Music, which is probably as good a description as any for a band happy to have Korn, Faith No More and N.E.R.D. rattling around in the same musical universe.
Nearly a decade has passed since ‘The Rhapsody Tapes’ announced that Ocean Grove were going to do things their own way. By 2024’s ‘ODDWORLD’, that refusal to behave neatly had become the point. ‘RAINDROP’ subsequently picked up Most Performed Hard Rock / Heavy Metal Work at the 2026 APRA Music Awards, while tours with Thornhill and Poppy have kept the band in near-constant motion.
But tonight they are back at the top of the bill, on home soil, with the whole strange shop to themselves. The Factory is filling, the temperature is climbing and there’s already that familiar migration towards the front of the room.
The Oddworld is open for business.
Images Deb Pelser
The tour moves to Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth next, tickets HERE.
