backseat downunder
Live Gallery: Sydney’s Month of Mega-Gigs Peaks with Metallica’s M72 Tour Stop at The Accor Stadium 15.11.2025
Metallica’s M72 tour hits Sydney with a sense of inevitability and scale, arriving in a city already heavy with huge shows. Evanescence and Suicidal Tendencies prime the room, but when Metallica step out, the stadium shifts. Their precision, history and weight turn Olympic Park into a study in what stadium rock can still feel like when a band refuses to coast.
Album Review: ‘Soft Monstrous Masses!’ – 208L Containers deliver an anarchic dose of sardonic humour on a bed of angular post punk with a buzz-saw blast
Lutruwita/Tasmanian outfit 208L Containers have just released a blast of iridescent joy from the intense furnace of their creative minds in ‘Soft Monstrous Masses!’. Sardonic and unashamedly Australian-accented voices sing of a range of familiar and alien concepts laced with humour and a thousand yard stare, a mix of political observations with tales of the …
Live Gallery: Evanescence Strip It Back in a Rare, Intimate Sydney Show at The Metro Theatre 14.11.2025
At the Metro Theatre, Evanescence trade stadium grandeur for something far more revealing. On the eve of supporting Metallica at Acer Arena, the band deliver a taut, emotionally charged set that strips their gothic-metal hybrid down to its core—Amy Lee’s voice, the band’s shifting dynamics, and the enduring volatility of their two-decade catalogue.
News: What So Not and Buunshin Unite for New EP The Quiet That Hurts
Australian innovator What So Not and Dutch producer Buunshin join forces for The Quiet That Hurts — a genre-defying EP exploring silence, creation, and connection. Featuring Lucy Lucy, Alina Pash, Aiko, and Mara Necia, the project blends heavy bass with meditative emotion.
News: Mike Scott & The Waterboys To Bring “The Big Music” Back Down Under
After more than ten years away, The Waterboys will return to Australia and New Zealand in May 2026 for a long-awaited tour celebrating their new album Life, Death and Dennis Hopper — and a legacy that continues to shape the sound of modern rock.
Live Gallery: Pixies at Sydney’s Hordern Pavilion 13.11.2025
At the Hordern Pavilion, the Pixies remind Sydney why their sound has endured. Sharp, taut, and emotionally charged, their set feels less like a throwback and more like a statement of continued purpose.
Live Review + Gallery: Sharon Van Etten & the Attachment Theory, with Cash Savage in support, light up the Odeon Theatre, Hobart, 13 November 2025
A little slow on the uptake, the single ‘Seventeen’ was an entry drug for me, and then seeing Sharon Van Etten live at the Dark Mofo Festival a few years back sealed it for me. A magnificent mesmerising performance in the hallowed halls of The Odeon Theatre in Hobart in the middle of winter, and …
Track: There is a luscious beauty in ‘grace’, Joey Sachi’s new track, released ahead of EP ‘RISE’.
We have been tracking with great fascination the musical path of Tokyo-based Sydney-born artist Joey Sachi ever since we premiered her single ‘Fractured’ back in 2023. Her new single ‘grace’ displays a further development of her sound – something more fractured and esoteric and yet still infused with her soft velvet vocals and enigmatic style. …
Premiere: Lutruwita/Tasmania’s Lasca Dry has a ‘Messy Mind’ and we are the beneficiaries of the thrilling results.
Lutruwita/Tasmania’s pop sensation Lasca Dry is back with a new track ‘Messy Mind’ and we are honoured to premiere her new video for this luscious piece of hyper pop. We here at the antipodean outpost of Backseat Mafia are huge fans of her thrilling style of muscular pop laced with intelligence and humour. ‘Messy Mind’ …
Premiere: The superb The Nagging Doubts exclusively unveil their luscious new single ‘All To You’ with launch date announced for debut album.
Signed to Wayne Connolly’s prestigious Scenic Drive Records, we at the antipodean outpost of Backseat Mafia have long been fans of The Nagging Doubts, admiring their post punk/new wave sound that has an antipodean flavour and a genetic code that, despite their tender age, goes all the way back to Velvet Underground. We are therefore …