Some songs are about certainty. This one isn’t. Perth five-piece Salt Museum have built their debut single around the space just before a confession of love — that fragile, half-terrified moment where hope and doubt are still tangled together — and Backseat Mafia is thrilled to premiere both the track and its accompanying video ahead of its release this Friday, July 31st. The fact that this is track a debut is extraordinary.
Formed in April 2025, Salt Museum are a group of Perth music students steadily carving out a name for themselves in the city’s alternative scene, drawing on shoegaze, dream-pop and slowcore in roughly equal measure. Their reference points — Slowdive, Wolf Alice, Beach House, She’s Green — are audible without ever feeling like imitation; what comes through instead is a band figuring out its own voice in real time, and doing it with a lightness that belies the emotional weight of the songwriting.
‘I Kinda Love You’ is a patient piece of work. It opens hazy and unresolved before slowly filling out into warm, fuzzed guitars, rolling drums and a bassline that keeps things moving even when the lyrics are stuck in place. Vocalist Eadie Barrett’s countermelodies drift through the mix like a second conscience, and the track builds toward a genuinely unexpected payoff: a soaring saxophone solo that arrives right as the song commits to its own leap of faith.
It’s simply a beautiful, ethereal track that positively shimmers like a mirage in the desert, filled with a burning melancholia, a deep yearning that sends shivers down your spine. It has all the grace and beauty of Cocteau Twins mixed with a little Sigur Ros and fellow antipodeans The Temper Trap.
Barrett says of the track:
In a generation where everyone seems scared of commitment, I wanted to challenge the ‘kinda’ in I Kinda Love You. There’s never any certainty in love. It’s so shockingly beautiful, and equally terrifying. But if love is pushing you forward, there’s no point resisting. I’d rather be rejected a million times over, as painful as it may be, than sit on my hands and always be left wondering.
Recorded, mixed and mastered entirely by the band themselves — using a mix of university studio time and at-home gear — the single is a strong statement of intent from a group still very early in its story.
The debut music video, shot by Lawrence Sukmanegara, matches that mood beat for beat — all blurred movement and half-lit figures among trees and long grass, closer to a fever dream than a straightforward performance clip.
Watch and listen to ‘I Kinda Love You’ below.
This is simply magic and heralds a band with an mazing future. Out tomorrow, you can pre-save the track here.
To celebrate the release, Salt Museum will host a launch show at Buffalo Club in Fremantle on the evening of July 31st. Fans can also get their hands on the band’s first merchandise collection, featuring one-of-a-kind thrifted shirts screen printed by Studio Thirty Four and designed by Divine Damage. Tickets available here.
