Cut CopyWriting about Cut Copy in 2026 is an exercise in hagiography. If you’re reading this, it’s probably because you love them. You’ve loved them for a long time. Seeing them live for the first time was probably a James Murphy “I was there…” moment for you. You were cool. That nightclub was so cool. And nothing will ever come close to those nights. But it’s now 2026. You’re almost 40, and Modular Recordings doesn’t exist anymore.
The good news? Cut Copy are making better music now than they were in 2008 with their step onto the dancefloor with In Ghost Colours. I know. No shit. It surprises me too. Gracefully, they stopped trying to make club bangers and have instead released a series of interesting and introspective electronica albums. The music is still a shimmering melting pot of indie rock, new wave, and Haçienda dance, but they’re not searching for the same dopamine hit anymore. They’re now at the afters. They’re coming down, tapping that seat on the couch next to them and telling you to just listen to the music. These albums may not have the same Spotify hits, but it’s been their best work.
The club scene was never their natural habitat anyway. Bright Like Neon Love was Australia’s answer to Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space, and whilst they pivoted to higher BPMs during Modular’s halcyon days of 2007 - 2010 and landed their punches with a killer one-two-three combo of Hearts on Fire, So Haunted and Lights & Music; their comfort zone was always your lounge room; with no better evidence than their follow up, the criminally underrated masterpiece Zonoscope.
The last fifteen years have seen them oscillate between releasing psychedelic catnip like Free Your Mind and philosophical electronica like Haiku From Zero. But tonight they are in celebration mode. Fresh off a triumphant Golden Plains appearance, Live at the Gardens presents them as the headliner of their own mini-festival. And what a fucking lineup has been curated for them…
Don't miss a beat with our FREE daily newsletter
Do you know how hard it is to curate an interesting electronic lineup in Melbourne in 2026? Do you know how high the bar is? We are nothing if not elitist snobs, so well done to Mushroom Group and Roundhouse Entertainment because they have absolutely nailed it.
With the local rising star Colette, the wildcard inclusion of the artist formerly known as Crazy Penis, the reigning local champ CC:DISCO!, Todd Terje, the international heavyweight and Cutters, our beloved hometown heroes, it is impeccable from start to finish.
This microdose approach is exactly what Parklife/Listen Out should have done to stay afloat and hidden amongst the lush greenery and aesthetic astronomical observatories of the Royal Botanical Gardens (ironically, once the site of Listen Out). This hyper-focus on complementary lineups augers well for the long-term success of the Live at the Gardens series.
I will say, though, that Matt Gudinski must have some pretty good work/life balance policies at Mushroom Group, because whose idea was it to have Colette begin her set at 5 pm? Some of us are still working at that time, and the Friday peak-hour rush to the Botanical Gardens to make it in time was more stressful than it should have been. Sorry Colette. Let’s make sure we catch up soon.
‘The Penis’ (new nickname) were largely in reintroduction mode, opening with One True Light from their 2017 EP and closing with their disco-lounge classic Heartbreaker. It was a brilliantly understated set that knew its place in the evening, not ramping up the crowd too early and instinctively playing into the post-work-drinks vibe that people were walking into. CC:DISCO! picked up from where the Brits left off and built slowly from Pianoman by Pasion (Alex Kassian’s Mandarine Dream Mix) and Martin Solveig’s Rocking Music into a typically unpredictable and raucous house set.
It was just fun. And when I say fun, I mean, who else but Courtney would have the gumption to play the epic showstopper I Remember by Deadmau5/Kaskade before 8pm?! It’s a song most often heard at 2am at Tomorrowland, but she dropped it here with swagger and aplomb. She finished her set with the Miami Horror remix of Road To Recovery by local cult favourites Midnight Juggernauts. An easter egg that was not lost on the crowd, who cheered her off like a headliner before she passed the mic to Terje, quite literally, bigging him up to the crowd and telling us how often she used to play his songs on her PBS show.
Our Norwegian guest of honour seemed genuinely humbled by the reception. But then the master went straight to work, opening with the Italo-Disco banger Azoto by San Salvador before launching the night into the stratosphere with DJ Koze’s mashup of his own disco earworm Pick Up and ABBA’s SOS. Terje obviously didn’t fly 16,000kms to fuck spiders, because it became very obvious, very quickly that this was a bangers-only set; punctuated by him dropping an edit of Orinoco Flow by Enya and closing with his own mashup of Whitney Houston’s I Wanna Dance With Somebody and his own classic euro-disco track, Eurodans.
That’s not to say he went karaoke on us, with Sababa 5 and Yurika Hanashima’s Nasnusa (Kino Todo & Danielz Remix), At Night by Shakedown, the Dusky remix of Perth by Kink and Tony Lionni’s Found A Place also filling out a set that was most definitely intended to court the chin-strokers into an early evening shimmy. And having always been a fan of his Latin American-inspired edits, the inclusion of the Tangoterje remix of Alfonso Muskedunder was enough for me. I could have gone home there and then with a smile on my face.
But of course I didn’t. The boys were still to arrive on stage. Touring last year’s occasionally great album Moments, Cut Copy arrived on stage one by one and as such, A Decade Long Sunset arrived in layers: analog synths humming, drum machines snapping into a metronome, and guitars chiming through the mix like your mum slowly making her famous Christmas trifle.
Our ever-enthusiastic compère and frontman, Dan Whitford, stood towering stage right. A hybrid beast, half indie rocker, half DJ-sage, delivering vocals with an understated cool that contrasts beautifully with the ecstatic chaos of his arms, forever flapping like a mad preacher on the pulpit. But if he’s our modern-day David Byrne on stage, his vocals are closer to Curt Smith from Tears For Fears, which is to say, they are as smooth as butter.
The set is a masterclass in re-contexualising the band’s past. Saturdays, once a lazy daydream is clubbed into a mainroom banger, Out There On The Ice - forever the forgotten son from In Ghost Colours is finally given its flowers and Belong To You, the standout track from last year’s album, lands like Apollo 11. These songs, written years apart across the twenty-year lifespan of the band, seem like sisters alongside one another, and the entire discography seems like such a deliberate journey that it feels like synchronicity.
We spent the rest of the night eating out of their hands. But this was by design. It was a nostalgia lineup specifically curated to tap into the best moments of our youth. So grey hairs and $12 cans of beer be damned, we were going to bloody enjoy the music from a time when it was still cool to wear skinny jeans, we were worried about the citizens of Iraq, not Iran, and pill testing was not a widespread and uniform safe way to protect concertgoers. Wait, scratch that last one, we still somehow haven’t got that right.
The night finished gloriously with their most predictable, but satisfying singles, and the baying crowds were finally silenced, left to retreat to their KIA Sportages and Toyota Land Cruiser Prados to drive home to their bayside starter homes with the dread of a 9am Saturday morning toddler swim class. But let’s do this again! Same time next year, Mushroom Group? The Presets and PNAU would be fun. Maybe see if Fred Falke is free?
