Surf, sun, sea – it's the Australian way of life, and it's the reason why surf rock bands remain at the forefront of the Australian music scene.
For Mid Drift, it's no different. The Brisbane five-piece - comprised of Sarah Engstrom (vocals), George Swan (guitar), Daniel Larsen (guitar), John Reid (bass), and Rowan Bowyer (drums) – have been steadily building their reputation on the Aus indie circuit, blending dreamy reggae-inspired guitar tones with honest lyricism that captures both the breezy ease of coastal life and the complicated emotional terrain of growing up.
Now, with their latest EP Good At Avoiding dropping this week, Mid Drift are poised to cement their place in Australia's surf rock lineage. The five-track project represents more than a year of growth for the band, and they’re still trying to digest how fast life comes at you.
For Engstrom, the band’s frontwoman, the EP marks both an ending and a beginning; a document of who she was, and a stepping stone toward who she's becoming.
It’s been less than a week since the band played the Gold Coast leg of the iconic Laneway Festival when The Music catches up with Engstrom on Friday.
Between the festival having come and gone, and awaiting the new EP’s release date, the band have been in a strange liminal state, working their day jobs during the week while they try and process the undeniable increasing sound of their success as a band.
“I was thinking about that today,” Engstrom says of the festival milestone, “It feels like ages ago.”
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While the five-piece are seasoned pros at festivals now, having played the likes of several salty-themed surf and garage rock quadruple bills, there’s been nothing of the magnitude of a behemoth like Laneway before.
According to stats by Unruly Folk, 36,000 people sold out the Southport Sharks venue at Laneway Gold Coast, and, even as the first band of the day, Mid Drift are chuffed to have received a larger than life crowd of loyal and newbie fans alike.
The turnout caused the band’s stomachs to swell around with both warmth, and unexpected butterflies.
“I never get nervous to perform, and I was genuinely, like, shaking,” Engstrom laughs, “originally because, like, I didn't think anyone was going to be there and I was scared to be on a big stage while no one was there.
“But then people started sprinting in and there were so many people there and then I was so nervous.”
A behind-the-scenes video on the band’s Instagram shows the members shaking out their sweaty palms and taking deep exhales as they prep at the giant tented Good Better Best stage, before easing into head banging and dancing when the set takes off.
“It felt, like, it's so funny when you, like, wish for something for so long and then, like, it finally happened, you know what I mean?” Engstrom reflects, taking herself back to the days when she was rocking out at Laneway at 16, still that beachy blonde girl with the love for music, but this time attending on the other side of the stage.
The band is having to process the event retroactively, as time flies when you’re having fun.
“Oh my gosh, it went so quickly! I accidentally forgot that we were doing a 25-minute set, so it got to 20 minutes and I announced that it was our last song and I looked across at the clock that's side stage, I was like, (to the stage crew) ‘Oh, my gosh, I'm so sorry!’”
But the Mid Drift mates are still punters at heart, getting into the mosh for the rest of the day, and snapping a few fan photos in between. BENEE and Wet Leg were personal highlights for Sarah. “I felt like it was such an awesome female-fronted line-up this year.”
The road to Laneway was paved for the band thanks to triple j Unearthed, who crowned Mid Drift as the Queensland winners of the station’s annual Unearthed Laneway contest, giving the chance for small and up & coming artists to pitch themselves for the first slot of their city’s leg of the fest.
No stranger to Unearthed (their page has stacked up a healthy amount of song reviews, of which you can also add to), the band followed through with their application via an Instagram artist call-out from Unearthed’s Music Director Claire Mooney.
“I think the caption was, like, ‘email me if you want to put yourself forward’ or something like that,” Engstrom recalls. “So I think I did and then Tommy Faith (triple j Executive Producer) called me.
“But I missed his call, like, four times because I thought it was a scam.”
While an email may have seemed like the way to go for any regular new gig, the station wanted to catch the band’s reaction. It may have been lucky they didn’t catch a scam-paranoid band member giving them a hiding on the line.
“I was like, ‘Wow, this number is very persistent.’ Because it was… you know, it looked like scamming,” Engstrom admits, laughing now that she looks back on it.
At the start of Laneway week, triple j also tapped the five-piece as their Unearthed Feature Artist of the week, describing them as “repping the next gen of surf rock coming out of Brissy”.
For Mid Drift, the timeline between creation and release has always involved a bit of patience.
"We always – apart from this year because it's been a bit hectic – but we usually record in January of the previous year and then release it in Feb the next year," Engstrom explains. "So we recorded all of these songs in January 2025."
The exception was Whiplash, which came later in the recording process. But the bulk of Good At Avoiding has been laid down for quite some time, giving the band over a year to sit with the tracks before sharing them with the world.
"It's cool to see how much we've grown since then, and I guess our process of writing hasn't changed that much from then," Engstrom reflects. "But, yeah, it's funny; we've had these songs for so long and they're only coming out now. It's kind of like that funny lag time between."
That gap between recording and release feels like a split in the timeline: by the time fans hear these songs for the first time, the band has already lived with them, processed them, and in some ways, moved beyond them.
For Engstrom, who wrote the lyrics even before the band entered the studio, the distance is even more noticeable, especially when the EP’s topics at hand were once thoughts and feelings to be avoided. Hence the EP’s title.
“I feel like I've been pretty point blank with calling it Good At Avoiding, which is something that I have always struggled with and I still do, is I avoid things and it makes things into, a bigger problem than they kind of should have been," Engstrom admits.
"And I feel like a lot of songs are kind of a reflection on that because, like, I avoid the situation I didn't want to have a tough conversation or I didn't have the confidence to.
“It's actually a lyric in Whiplash and I say I'm good at avoiding because, the person that I kind of wrote about… they know that I'm good at avoiding things and it's probably the reason I was giving such Whiplash to them."
The other tracks on the EP expand on these themes in different directions. Easily, one of the new tracks, explores the journey toward understanding yourself and others.
"It's about, yeah, that kind of thing,” Engstrom notes, “Everything you wanted to say but you couldn't really put into words or you were kind of avoiding finding a way to.”
But there's a bittersweet quality to releasing these songs now, a year and a half after they were written. The person who wrote these songs isn't quite the same person releasing them. "I think it's also a bit about closing the gap between who I was and who I'm becoming, that kind of thing as well – or who I wanted to become."
The band road-tested most of the new EP’s tracks during an Australian tour last August, playing singles like Madness and Whiplash to guage whether their spot on the latest project would hold up, and it seems fans are keener than ever to hear the recorded version of the songs they’ve been boogieing to at Mid Drift gigs.
And once the EP is out, fans can catch Mid Drift slinging their sun-drenched tunes on the road once more, and this time, they’ll know the words.
In March, the band will be supporting Aus legends Ocean Alley on tour, hitting Port Macquarie and the Sunshine Coast, among other more regional joints.
"I'm so excited," Engstrom gushes. "The Ocean Alley tour is just an absolute dream come true. Yeah. Anyone who knows me knows that I never shut up about Ocean Alley. So when we got the text message that we were supporting them on that tour, it was so awesome."
Ocean Alley are just one of the many, many Australian bands that call the surf rock community home, alongside the likes of The Terrys, DICE, Beddy Rays, and Old Mervs, to name a handful, and Mid Drift have been lucky enough to rub shoulders with a lot of the scene’s beachy balladeers.
It’s a tight-knit community, where a lot of the work rises out of DIY festivals and runs on bevvies and backseat camaraderie. While the people she’s met along the way have taught her a lot, it’s seeing them do their thing that she takes the most inspiration from.
“I’m not sure about spoken advice, but I know that, watching them (fellow bands) play and then perform (is a source of inspiration),” Engstrom notes. “I talk a lot about, because we supported The Preatures last year – and that was, like, one of the first gigs I ever went to – watching her perform, I just remember thinking – I might have been, like, 15 at the time –i t was just so amazing.
“I'm not sure if that's advice, but I just remember thinking I want to be like that,” Engstrom admits, her voice lighting up. “I want to have that confidence on stage and I want to, you know, just have good energy.”
From teenage Laneway line-ups to that all-ages Preatures tour, the teenage memory has clearly planted a seed that has since blossomed into Sarah's own stage presence.
It turns out, you don't always need someone to sit you down and explain how to perform; sometimes you just need to see it done well, to witness someone fully inhabiting their art, and to be the fan that sticks around to see the music in motion.
Now Mid Drift get to be that band for someone else, standing on stages like Laneway, showing younger kids in the crowd that it's possible.
Mid Drift’s Good At Avoiding EP is out now.
This piece of content has been assisted by the Australian Government through Music Australia and Creative Australia, its arts funding and advisory body
