Full Flower Moon Band ProfileKate Dillon is holding out on the State Library of Queensland. Chatting over video from home, she brandishes a small golden cat figurine that she found on her last day in New York City in 2024.
She was there for a month to write a new album for her bruising rock outfit Full Flower Moon Band – a result of winning QMusic’s Grant McLennan Fellowship the previous year – but there’s a condition that comes with the prize.
“You have to bring back an object of significance to represent your trip,” says Dillon. “This is meant to be in the State Library right now, but I haven’t handed it over yet. I told them I wanted to hang onto it until the album’s finished.”
With a laugh, she confesses: “Now the album’s finished and I’ve still got it.”
That album is After Dark, LP4 from FFMB. It’s not out until February 2027, but Dillon doesn’t confine her ambition and drive to mere album cycles.
In fact, it seems like the band never really switch off: not long after Dillon returned from New York, FFMB dropped their 2024 full-length, Megaflower.
A year after that album topped the ARIA Australian album chart, a deluxe version added collaborations with Drunk Mums, Pond’s Nic Allbrook, and New York act Gustaf.
Fast-forward to today, and Full Flower Moon Band are preparing to open for Foo Fighters for the second and third time. Oh, and they’ve also gone viral twice, both times thanks to Dillon’s live-wire stage presence and expert grasp of the electric guitar.
Rock Star Origins
Growing up on a 10-acre bush property outside of Gympie, Dillon had already learnt to play classical violin and piano when the colourful figure of a guitar teacher performed during an assembly at her primary school. (This was in Year 5 or 6, she reckons.)
She immediately asked her mum if she could take lessons on this flash new instrument.
Dillon took to it easily, learning on her mum’s nylon-string guitar – which still hangs on the wall behind her during this interview.
Don’t let those delicate strings fool you, though: she grew up on a steady diet of rock’s heavier, darker, dirtier entities. In fact, it would be years before she realised that not everyone had those same touchstones.
“I grew up thinking the staples of rock were Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and The Rolling Stones,” recounts Dillon. “For other people, it was bands that I discovered later, like The Doors, The Beatles, The Beach Boys. That to me was second wave.”
The bluesy bluster of those early favourites still rings out through FFMB’s discography, and Dillon positively beams when thinking back to her weekend sessions blasting her parents’ records through a robust speaker system set up on the veranda.
“They only had a small collection of vinyl,” she says, “but I would play Led Zeppelin at full volume, and you could hear it echo through the gum trees. That was just my happiest place ever, every weekend, playing Black Sabbath and Pink Floyd as loud as you can imagine.
"What a way to learn about audio frequencies: just hearing them disappear into 10 acres of trees.”
Moving Up In The World
By 2015, Dillon had relocated two hours south to Brisbane and debuted Full Flower Moon Band with an EP. She had also adopted the stage persona Babyshakes, which sprung from a playful nickname that stuck around.
So arguably it’s Babyshakes, not Kate Dillon, that we’re seeing tear up the stage in those viral clips.
“Absolutely,” she confirms. “It’s part of the fun. I don’t think everyone wants to see a totally human human on stage. If I’m Babyshakes, I’m just a little bit more than that. I can be a vessel for things that people need, and I can be slightly unapproachable.
"Babyshakes can sing and say and be things that maybe Kate wouldn’t be so fun doing.”
After scoring that dream fellowship, Dillon was given a choice of decamping to either New York, London, or Berlin to write a new album. She also had to decide on an amount of time to be away, which is how she landed on a month.
Dillon thinks that clarity helped her to get over the finish line for the fellowship, which is adjudicated by friends and peers of the late Go-Betweens legend Grant McLennan.
“I was really struck by how giving the Fellowship is,” she says. “They’re not asking you to come back with a recording. They’re not asking you to come back with anything except having grown as an artist.”
As reflected somewhat in After Dark’s lyrical themes, however, the trip wasn’t an immediate success. “It was really cold,” Dillon recalls. “That changed my thoughts on what the city was going to give me … it was harsher than what I had in mind.”
By the time the month was up, Dillon was departing the Lower East Side without much confidence in the results. Toward the end, she met up with Johnny Mackay from Children Collide, who told her she’d see the whole project more clearly when she got home.
That’s exactly what happened when she flew back to Brisbane and opened that daunting splay of music files: “I was like, ‘Oh my god, I’ve just listened to 30 minutes of material that I actually like. Where was this 48 hours ago?”
Crafting After Dark
After returning from overseas, Dillon recruited Melbourne drummer/producer Jim Rindfleish to flesh out After Dark with her.
She makes sure to point out, though, that the band lineup hasn’t changed: it’s still bassist Marli Smales, drummer Luke Hanson and guitarists Christian Driscoll and Caleb Widener. (Yes, that’s three guitars total.)
“I’m always looking to give myself a more professional experience with each album,” Dillon explains. “And every album we have scaled up, whether it’s the process that we gave ourselves or the crew that we worked with.
"The missing piece for me was that we never had a producer from the beginning of a record. I’ve always pretty much delivered a fully playable demoed album before a producer stepped in.”
She had moved to Melbourne herself by then, and she came across Rindfleish on Instagram promoting his production work – not realising he’s also the drummer for the mind-expanding jazz/psych/dance ensemble Mildlife.
“I just felt this immediate trust with him that he was the right person to take a very fragile state of art and come with me on it,” confesses Dillon. “I wanted to experience someone seeing it from the start.”
She adds that Rindfleish also “held space for full concepts”, all whilst poring over thematically linked mood boards and playlists with her. Concepts are big for Dillon, as are capital-A albums.
“I think in terms of full albums,” she says, “and I feel shortchanged at the idea of a single song existing by itself. I feel like it gets lonely. I like to give it a family that it will live with, and I like to shape works that live together.”
In the case of After Dark, that means certain guitar riffs or synth sounds reappear in different forms across different songs, subtly tying the record together.
As for the aforementioned lyrical themes, the first two singles have upbeat titles that belie the actual mood of each song.
Endless Summer is a brooding slice of stoner rock complete with a slow yet frazzled guitar solo, while Party Hard is a phaser-licked stomper that could have been beamed straight from 1990s alt-rock radio.
Dillon sees both songs as accessible entry points into a more tangled record that might reflect the lack of sunlight she experienced while writing it in New Year.
Without giving too much away before the record comes out, she says: “I’m really just trying to find the nicest way to invite people into an album that has a lot going on.”
Viral Videos And Stadium Supports
In the two years since Megaflower came out, Full Flower Moon Band’s fanbase has enjoyed exponential growth.
First, there were the two viral film clips – featuring Dillon ripping into West Side and Devil, respectively, with rock-star moves that casual music fans might have assumed extinct.
Those clips and other strokes of exposure have earned FFMB high-profile co-signs from Iggy Pop, Jack Black, Fred Durst, and many others.
When the West Side clip blew up in 2025, the band were in the thick of touring Europe, which meant they were bombarded with notifications in the tour van.
“I’m glad I was with the band when it happened,” Dillon reflects. “It was like a game: ‘The actress from The Sopranos is following us … Sleaford Mods shared.’ Just fun, and also incredibly overwhelming.”
The latter sensation came in part from the sheer amount of what Dillon politely calls “pretty hectic comments” that accompanied sudden virality. And when it all happened again with the Devil clip this year – including her scenery-chewing guitar solo – she knew more about what to expect.
“I have seen behind the curtain now,” she says, “and the bubble’s burst a little bit for me [regarding] what social media can do. So many people are striving for numbers and stats, and I’ve got a lot of them.
"We’ve gone viral twice now, and it’s kind of sad. As fun as the highs are, I’m like, ‘I know this game. Boring.’”
That said, she acknowledges that “making it” will never look like you would expect – and the process of “making it” is really never-ending for a band. In the end, she’s learning to accept these blessings when they do arrive.
“It was a nice reminder that we’re not doing it for nothing,” she adds. “We’re probably deserving of this.”
They are – and then some. Which is why, almost a decade after releasing their debut album, Full Flower Moon Band are starting to get comfortable in a stadium setting. After supporting Foo Fighters last February at a 25,000-capacity venue in Launceston, they’re about to do it again at a stadium twice that size in Brisbane – Dillon’s former stomping grounds. Then they’re topping it off with another Foo Fighters slot in Townsville.
Considering that their last Brisbane gig was at the 1,500-capacity theatre The Tivoli, this definitely feels like a win for not just the band but their fans – and potential new ones.
“Maybe we can reach people who are looking for us and don’t know where to find us yet,” muses Dillon. “But I don’t really see the Foo Fighters thing as an exposure experience. I see it as playing for people who want to see us in that space.”
Does that mean she’s ready to attack the stadium with the same fervour captured in those viral clips? Absolutely. “I actually think [our] back catalogue is scarily suited to a stadium,” Dillon says.
“When I was sound-checking in Tasmania, hearing Luke play the drum parts to that massive echo effect was kind of life-affirming for all of us.”
She finishes that thought with well-earned relish: “And hearing triple guitars come through such a powerful PA? Really, really encouraging for the future of rock ‘n’ roll.”
Full Flower Moon Band's After Dark arrives February 26th via Impressed Recordings. The band also support Foo Fighters on November 5th in Brisbane and November 7th in Townsville, with tickets on sale now.
This piece of content has been assisted by the Australian Government through Music Australia and Creative Australia, its arts funding and advisory body
