Fresh Finds: Class Of 2025 – Aussie Acts To Add To Your Playlist

Carley Hall, Journalist

Carley Hall

Carley Hall is a Gold Coast-based writer who loves spinning a good yarn. She’s worked in print news rooms for more than a decade and now juggles young family life with a busy career in research communication, promoting all types of science from the dire and necessary to the weird and wonderful.

When she’s not doing all of the above, she’s dancing around her living room trying to brainwash her kids into liking her taste in music or getting out to see some gigs. Carley likes the heavy stuff most, but if it’s got hooky melodies, clever lyrics or off-kilter beats nothing is off limits.

Reviews / Album
Album Review: Barbarossa - Imager
"Gone are the soaring organs and uplifting motifs that made 2013’s 'Bloodlines' such a gloriously winding, warm, lush affair"
Reviews / Album
Album Review: Baby Et Lulu - Album Deux
"A truly “magnifique” partnership was born"
Features / Music
The Album That Changed A Genre
"“It was a pleasure to see it go down the way it did."
Reviews / Album
Album Review: Django Django - Born Under Saturn
"There’s always more to be discovered in the layers beneath the surface and that’s what makes Django Django such a brilliant indie-rock sidestep."
Reviews / Album
Album Review: Hound - Dying In The Sun
"The Brisbane four-piece pull off a grim and gritty post-punk vibe – think Sonic Youth, Fugazi."
Reviews / Album
Album Review: Beth Hart -- Better Than Home
"Hart’s battles with past turmoils and personal demons have always given her a treasure trove of material."
Reviews / Album
Album Review: Mini Mansions - The Great Pretenders
"...The Great Pretenders teases out the colourful tangle to give us a more encompassing listen of light and shade."
Reviews / Live
Live Review: Mastodon, Caligula's Horse
Mastodon's "almost mathematical precision in wrangling melodic chug-filled riffs and dizzying time changes is mesmerising, utterly and completely."
Reviews / Album
Album Review: Awaken I Am -- Shields & Crowns
"Their progressive noodles and highwire lines and vocals have a distinctly clean and glossy treatment washed over them."
Reviews / Album
Album Review: Lurch & Chief - Breathe EP
"There’s less instantly appealing motifs that still crawl under the skin (Breathe), and a darker, confident attitude resounds (Reasonable Man)..."
Reviews / Album
Album Review: Boz Scaggs -- A Fool To Care
"In a career as long as Scaggs’, there are bound to be hits and misses and A Fool To Care lands at about the middle mark."
Reviews / Album
Album Review: Soko -- My Dreams Dictate My Reality
"she’s reemerged with a lower, more sultry register, pushing beyond the twee-songstress pigeonhole."