{"id":697696,"date":"2026-05-27T10:45:14","date_gmt":"2026-05-27T10:45:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/697696\/"},"modified":"2026-05-27T10:45:14","modified_gmt":"2026-05-27T10:45:14","slug":"swapmeet-adelaides-accidental-band-going-for-broke","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/697696\/","title":{"rendered":"Swapmeet: Adelaide\u2019s accidental band going for broke"},"content":{"rendered":"

Austin in March moves at a kind of controlled chaos \u2013 gear being lugged down sunburnt sidewalks, bands downing their weight in tacos as they sprint between sets, and dusty alleyways pressed into service as makeshift venues. Swapmeet<\/a> seemed to thrive in that churn. Across five days at SXSW 2026, the Adelaide four-piece played 13 shows. They swear it wasn\u2019t a dare, even if it sure sounds like one. The band, who draw loosely from four decades of indie rock\u00a0\u2013 from the Pixies<\/a>\u2019 explosive choruses to the hushed intensity of Big Thief<\/a> \u2013\u00a0are nothing if not relentlessly eager. Their only regret from this year\u2019s SXSW? \u201cI wish we could have done more,\u201d says bassist Josh Doherty, joining NME via Zoom with his bandmates Venus O\u2019Broin (vocals, guitar) and Jack Medlyn (guitar, drums, vocals). \u201cI feel like we\u2019d have been better off doing 20 shows. All that extra time can be dangerous.\u201d<\/p>\n

The quartet (rounded out by Maxwell Elphick, who rotates between guitar and drums) aren\u2019t prone to exhaustion \u2013 or wasting opportunities. Anyone who\u2019s seen them live will recognise their knack for turning that restlessness into something electrifying. It often feels like they\u2019re assembling the songs in real time when they\u2019re onstage, and yet just as the songs threaten to collapse on themselves, they somehow manage to pull them back from the brink and snap them into shape. Swapmeet do it all at full tilt \u2013 members swapping instruments, ricocheting across the stage like pinballs.<\/p>\n

That same restless energy runs through everything they do \u2013 even their origin story. O\u2019Broin admits to poaching Medlyn and Doherty from another band on one of the last nights of high school. \u201cI\u2019ve actually got a drunken video of me filming Jack on that night, going, \u2018You need to come jam with me and my friend Maxwell.\u2019\u201d And just like that, Swapmeet were born.<\/p>\n

For all that momentum, their ascent hasn\u2019t been as fast as you might have guessed. The band point to a few reasons: forming in 2020 at the height of COVID, writing a lot of \u201cunlistenable\u201d songs early on, and simply being based in Adelaide. The city\u2019s isolation \u2013\u00a0an eight-hour drive from the nearest major city\u00a0\u2013 made touring difficult, and the band\u2019s lack of connections to industry hubs like Melbourne and Sydney made it even harder to get their music heard. \u201cThe only people who came to our gigs were our friends,\u201d O\u2019Broin says. \u201cAnd the only gigs we went to were our friends\u2019 gigs.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Swapmeet\"Swapmeet credit Olive Rush<\/p>\n

The turning point came in 2024. After self-releasing their debut EP \u2018Oxalis\u2019 the year prior, Swapmeet were invited to BigSound, Australia\u2019s premier showcase for emerging talent. O\u2019Broin still remembers the rollercoaster of emotions from that day: the excitement of their first major festival slot quickly gave way to dread as the crowd thinned after the preceding act. \u201cEveryone started leaving, and I thought, \u2018Oh well, I guess we came all this way for nothing.\u2019\u201d But as the band finished setting up, the room filled again \u2013 tighter than before. \u201cI was relieved,\u201d she says, \u201cbut also wondering if they\u2019d shown up for the right band.\u201d<\/p>\n

There was no mistake, and the unexpectedly rapturous reception at BigSound emboldened the band to make another bet on themselves: recording their debut album, \u2018Mount Zero\u2019, entirely independently. Similar to the process they employed for the EP, the band stitched together each song, voice-memoing ideas to each other and taking input from all four members. O\u2019Broin frequently refers to their process as a collage, where songs are cut up, added to, and reconfigured into something new. The result is a kind of jubilant haphazardness, shaped as much by the band members\u2019 disparate instincts as by touchstones that stretch from shoegaze stalwarts My Bloody Valentine<\/a> to Chicago indie cult heroes Twin Peaks<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Pressed to describe their sound in a word, O\u2019Broin eventually lands on \u201cgoofy\u201d. It sounds flippant, but she\u2019s not wrong. Even their most straightforward songs \u2013 like \u2018Mount Zero\u2019\u2019s exclamatory lead single \u2018I Know!\u2019 \u2013\u00a0lean into an off-kilter charm: guitars sit just slightly askew, melodies feel improvised on the spot, and O\u2019Broin\u2019s vocals flicker between playful self-awareness and childlike naivety. It\u2019s a looseness that comes naturally, much like their live show, often revealing a sharp instinct for hooks just beneath the surface chaos.<\/p>\n

That ingratiating weirdness extends to the lyrics, too. O\u2019Broin admits they can read like Mad Libs, a byproduct of the band\u2019s unconventional approach to writing. While not quite as inscrutable as another one of their heroes, Pavement<\/a>, Swapmeet will happily drop a reference to early-2000s sitcom Malcolm in the Middle (\u2018Bonnie\u2019) without explanation\u00a0\u2013 and trust it to land. More often than not, it does.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe ethos of the band is just us four making whatever we feel like making together\u201d \u2013\u00a0Venus O\u2019Broin<\/p>\n

Once the record was finished, the band had planned to continue independently. They assumed a debut album from a relatively unknown Adelaide band wouldn\u2019t exactly be a hot commodity. But on a whim, they sent it to Winspear, the US-based indie label behind a new wave of effervescent, shoegaze-adjacent acts like Wishy<\/a> and Winter. To their surprise, the label didn\u2019t just bite \u2013\u00a0it made Swapmeet its first international signing, following a meeting in Los Angeles late last year.<\/p>\n

Fresh off SXSW, Swapmeet now find themselves on the cusp of something bigger, with a debut album imminent and globe-trotting festival slots soon to be announced. Not bad for a band that started with a half-serious, half-drunken invitation\u00a0\u2013 and still seems to operate on that same impulse. \u201cThe ethos of the band is just us four making whatever we feel like making together,\u201d says O\u2019Broin, like it\u2019s the most obvious thing in the world. \u201cThere\u2019s really no higher motive than that.\u201d It hasn\u2019t steered them wrong yet. How far they go from here is anyone\u2019s guess, but Swapmeet seems to thrive when the odds are longest.<\/p>\n

Swapmeet\u2019s \u2018Mount Zero\u2019 is out on July 17 via Winspear.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Austin in March moves at a kind of controlled chaos \u2013 gear being lugged down sunburnt sidewalks, bands…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":697697,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[64,63,134,1770,136],"class_list":["post-697696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-entertainment","tag-indie","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/697696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=697696"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/697696\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/697697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=697696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=697696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=697696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}