A monthly spotlight on our favourite new albums, EPs, singles and videos from local musicians.
Kiva, Kiva
Dance music has exploded across Australia’s mainstream festival culture over the past decade, and attention is turning to our local 20th-century originators. There was last year’s glorious reissue of Itch-E + Scratch-E’s 1993 album Itch-E Kitch-E Koo, and now one half of that duo, Paul McDermott (aka Paul Mac), joined by the singer Royce Doherty, has received a vinyl-only reissue on Naarm’s excellent new reissue label, Gazebo. Their self-titled album Kiva is an ethereal articulation of fluid queer experience through downbeat breakbeats, curious dub and acid synth lines.
Sea of Mystery oscillates between skittering drum patterns reminiscent of Goldie’s Inner City Life, before diving into squelching acid and resurfacing among bird call samples. The album opener’s refrain – “from the stars we are eternity born” – points to the inseparability of queer and trans experience from the history of dance music, and society at large.
The Melbourne launch party’s opener, D.Tyrone, a trans non-binary producer-DJ, pointed out how electronic music’s aesthetics are sculpted from queer social forces, such as in Patrick Cowley’s cruising synth scapes released during the AIDS crisis. The songs on Kiva contain multitudes of emotion, history and politics, which, among today’s anti-trans rhetoric, make them as relevant now as when they were first released. Nick Buckley
MUNGMUNG, Fei
Sydney artist MUNGMUNG’s Fei comes to us like a late Christmas gift that got lost in the mail (I’m picturing Santa wilfully holding it back so he could keep his sleigh’s speakers rattling for the return trip). Released in the waning days of 2025, it’s the sort of soundtrack we could all use to set the scene for 2026: bright, bouncy, brash and fizzier than a whole summer’s worth of spritzes.
Following her 2023 full-length Boujee Bby, the Sydney rapper has built a reputation for her playful aesthetics and forward-thinking sound, but Fei – made with longtime collaborator Taka Perry (the Canberra producer is coming off his own breakout smash, last year co-producing Katseye’s majestic Touch) – takes the funhouse maximalism further.
The four-track EP – Fei translates to “fly” in Mandarin – is an endlessly replayable jolt of good vibes. Popdattrunk, with its bass-heavy beats and winkingly off-kilter flow, is an infectious nod to ’00s bloghouse queen Uffie, while highlight Wompx4, with its double-timed bars and skittering club beats, is party-starting hip-house. Before the dour routine of daily life properly takes hold, hit play on this and simmer in the holiday spirit a little longer. Robert Moran
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Robert Moran is Spectrum deputy editor at The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via email.
