New Music Friday can be a lot. That's why every week we cut it down to the songs you need to hear for PLAY, our new music edit, and deliver a new cover feature to go alongside it. This week... Swapmeet.
Every band has a division of labour. Swapmeet's is more of a rotation policy. On paper, Josh Doherty plays bass, Venus O'Broin sings and plays guitar, and Jack Medlyn and Maxwell Elphick both cover vocals, guitar and drums - which is another way of saying the drum stool changes hands depending on the song, lead vocals get passed around like an overwrapped parcel at a 6 year old's birthday party, and sooner or later most of them will have done most of the jobs. They are, in the most literal sense available to a rock band, a swap meet.
It's Josh who is fielding Dork's questions, squeezed in on the way to the band's first in-store show of album week. Busy times, then. 'Mount Zero' is nine tracks, out at last, and the reason one of Australia's most tipped new bands are about to be everywhere all at once.
They come from a city that specialises in making its own fun. "Adelaide has a very tight-knit scene," says Josh. "Everyone in bands comes to each other's gigs and is generally in 6+ bands themselves." Run the maths on that, and Adelaide may technically contain more bands than people, which goes some way to explaining what happened next. "Starting out was surprisingly very easy for us," he continues, cheerfully torching decades of received wisdom about paying your dues. "Venus' old band had to pull out of a gig at the last second, so we filled in and started getting asked to support other Adelaide bands from there."
That's the short version. The slightly longer one stars four teenagers who met at the end of high school, jamming in a basement within a week of finding each other, cutting their teeth at a downtown pub called the Metro. Their first show outside Adelaide involved driving fifteen hours to Wollongong at the head of a convoy of their own mates, meaning half the audience had made the trip with them. Some bands build a following; Swapmeet's arrived pre-installed.
They weren't always Swapmeet, mind. They started life as Sour Sob, named for the yellow-flowered weed that carpets South Australia every winter, until a local musician by the name of Soursob Bob decided the state wasn't big enough for both of them, and the cease and desist arrived. Rather than go to court over weed, they took the hint and renamed themselves after the place Maxwell bought a guitar as a teenager - a name that turned out to be a working sketch of how the band actually operates. The old one didn't vanish entirely, though: their 2024 debut EP, 'Oxalis', is titled after the plant's botanical name. A band quietly memorialising their own past so early is a band to keep both eyes on.
That EP is where the momentum kicked in. Recorded and mixed entirely by the band themselves, it made them the most-nominated act at their home state's music awards, where they took home Best Song and Best Release. Then came a Best Emerging Artist prize at SXSW Sydney, a US debut at SXSW proper in Austin, and a deal with Winspear, the American indie behind some of the most quietly adored guitar records of the past few years, who made Swapmeet the first band from outside the US they'd ever signed. Not bad for four mates from a city the touring map so often forgets.
Which brings us to their new record. The titular 'Mount Zero' is a real place: a peak that sits just off the highway on the nine-hour run between Adelaide and Melbourne, one that the band have watched slide past the window on every eastbound trip of their gigging lives without ever once stopping. "Mount Zero is a place you pass but never go," guitarist Maxwell Elphick has explained. "It became a symbol for people we'd see but never meet. When you're always in a different city and trying new things, there are a lot of experiences you observe but never get to fully explore." For a band who appear to be moving so fast they're permanently mid-journey, it's quite the flag to plant.
The record's been brewing a while, too. "I reckon we started writing the first couple songs, 'Halfway' and 'Seeds', a couple years ago," says Josh. "I feel like everyone was in pretty mixed headspaces at the time - leaving school, starting degrees, dropping out: all the beginnings and endings that mark your early 20s. The record continues to reflect these themes of hopeful beginnings and confrontational endings."
"I wouldn't say we are perfectionists, more throw all the shit at the wall and see what sticksists"
— Josh Doherty
That's 'Mount Zero': first loves, first heartbreaks, first embarrassments, first disasters, all the doors slamming and then creaking open at once. 'Halfway', the band have said, deals with "the first confrontations with change. The first confrontations with loss, and every choice feeling like a mistake. When you finally realise things can't truly ever return to how they once were." Heavy cargo for a debut, and they haven't flinched from any of it. "I didn't write any of the lyrics, so I don't want to speak on behalf of the others," Josh offers diplomatically, "but I feel everyone was pretty upfront with everything."
What there wasn't, at any point, was a master plan. "I don't think we had an intention of what we wanted from the start; it came pretty naturally throughout the process," he says. "One thing I guess we wanted to do was bridge the gap between our live set versus our recorded music."
Swapmeet songs begin with one member and end with all four, produced by the band as a unit, stacking dozens - sometimes hundreds - of layers into each track before carving away everything surplus until the actual song emerges from the block. It sounds forensic, but Josh would like to correct the record. "I wouldn't say we are perfectionists, more throw all the shit at the wall and see what sticksists. We kinda just try everyone's ideas and see what works from there."
The hard bit, it turns out, wasn't starting. "Finishing the fucking thing!" Josh answers, when asked about the record's biggest challenge. "That's why we locked ourselves in a house for two weeks to get it done. The only distraction there was table tennis." The house in question was a beach house south of Adelaide, where all four slept in bunk beds in the same room as the recording gear, winter storms outside, ping pong on tap. Some bands need residential studios in idyllic isolation. Swapmeet needed a fortnight, a table and each other.
The guitar-history brigade have already been busy filing them next to bands who split before any of Swapmeet were born, and Josh takes the comparisons with good grace and a raised eyebrow. "I definitely hear some of the comparisons, like Sonic Youth and Pavement," he admits, "but I feel like a lot of the songs on the album stray away from those influences too." He's right, obviously. The reference points are more rearview mirror than destination; this is a band listening forwards, but able to pick and play with the bones of what came before.
Not that they're sweating the critical consensus of who sounds like what. Asked for the best thing anyone could possibly say about the album, Josh doesn't hesitate: "It's a masterpiece of our generation." No notes, good goal setting. And long-term success? "Being able to keep doing what we're doing and visiting new places, dripped out head to toe in Supreme." Somewhere between those two answers - one half-joking, one possibly not joking at all - sits a band with a healthy relationship with ambition.
The visiting-new-places portion of the plan is already sorted. "We're going on a world tour!" Josh beams. "Very, very keen for this tour, it's all we've been thinking about." Australia gets them in September, North America in October, and come November, they'll be lapping the UK and Europe: Brighton, Manchester, Glasgow, and a London stop at Pitchfork Music Festival's Dalston takeover on 7th November. For a band who wrote a whole album about the places you pass but never go, they're certainly looking to put things right. This time, they're stopping at all of them.
Anything else we should know before they arrive? "The less you know, the better," Josh signs off. "Trust me."
Too late. On this evidence, everyone's about to know plenty.
Swapmeet's debut album' Mount Zero' is out now.
