Look at the cover for “WHAT I’M DOIN‘” long enough and the literal arrangement starts doing the work. Two columns of figures. On the left: a priest, a king, a peasant. On the right: a scientist, a soldier, a homeless person. Paired off across centuries, same roles in different uniforms. Running down the middle is a winding blue tube, half intestine and half industrial conveyor, and every figure is pulling out their own brain and feeding it in. A volcano smokes in the background. A 5G tower stands beside it. A phone with an all-seeing eye watches the whole thing. One figure looks straight back at you.
That’s the song, made visible. Hand drawn by Dirk Kruithof from a concept by IDIOTEQ featured artist smallways., the Sydney two-piece who in March fractured open the second half of their debut album BROKE BRAIN with “KNOW WHERE?”. “WHAT I’M DOIN'” is the follow-up, out April 17 on the Part 2 schedule, and it’s their heaviest track to date.
Where “KNOW WHERE?” asked the question, “WHAT I’M DOIN‘” abandons it. The band describe the second single as a snap in tolerance. The point where questioning stops working. Where awareness doesn’t lead to change and instead builds pressure: helplessness, loss of control, exhaustion on the inside; resentment, rebellion, disconnection on the outside. Both at once. A liminal state, as they put it. Hyper aware and completely stuck.
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The song matches that. Stevie took lead vocals and guitar. Tez wrote the bass and the structure, with minimum guitar contributions. Producer Dave Bleus laid guitar across the breaks between verses, sliding and winding through the gaps where a traditional chorus would sit. There’s no chorus. They didn’t want one. The shape of the song refuses to land.
The artwork makes the same argument in another medium. “They’re deliberately paired,” smallways. explain.
“Priest to scientist, king to soldier, peasant to homeless person. Different eras, different titles, same roles within the same structure.” The priest becomes the scientist, a voice of authority telling people what’s right and true. The king becomes the soldier or police, enforcing that authority. The peasant becomes the homeless person, “at the bottom, treated as less so others can have more. Then told it’s their fault, regardless of circumstance.”
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The hierarchy hasn’t moved since ancient civilisation. That’s the whole image. “It’s still a top-down system, a pyramid structure manipulated into being labelled as political and economic ideologies. None of them exist outside of that pyramid form. The names, institutions, and uniforms change, but the function doesn’t. Control people and extract the value of their labour.” Inside that pyramid, life behaves like a Ponzi scheme. The framing of modern civilisation and technology as progress is, structurally, repetition. Even biologically, the band argue, we haven’t kept pace with the systems we’ve built. The industrial age meets the technological age and the species slows down. “It’s not something many of us seem to discuss.”
It isn’t abstract for them. They point at New South Wales: changes to free speech and protest laws, NDIS cuts running alongside increased military spending. “That’s not progress. It’s the same system continuing in modern form, under different justification and language.”
The production line at the centre of the cover carries that idea forward. People knowingly participating in and sustaining the system that controls them. The volcano building toward collapse. The 5G tower beside it as the man-made counterpart, “highlighting artificial systems of disruption.” Red and blue across the composition referencing the illusion of choice within a fixed structure, the obvious left/right disconnect, red urgency butting against the cold continuous blue. The phone in one corner holds the symbols of major corporations. smallways. originally considered adding the faces of the people behind those corporations and decided against it. “They don’t deserve the attention.”
One figure makes eye contact with the viewer. That’s the only break in the loop. The image asks one question without writing it down: where are you in this?
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“WHAT I’M DOIN'” is what it sounds like when that question goes unanswered too long. The band describe it as grief, loss, hopelessness, “emotional desperation for relief, without false comfort.” Where “KNOW WHERE?” was significantly sarcastic, “WHAT I’M DOIN'” is the same with the seriousness pushed forward. They’re inside the loop and they aren’t pretending otherwise. They wake up aware of the systems they participate in and continue participating anyway, because dropping out is dropping out of contact with the people they love. “Awareness never really shuts off. It just sits underneath everything, like a dull pulsing headache that never goes away.”
That’s where the band name comes from. smallways. Small ways to make this a better place. The full disconnection is available and they reject it, because disconnection doesn’t change anything. So they stay in the system and use whatever the system gives them to disrupt it.
They reference the Law of Polarity. Those who confront problems get labelled pessimistic, even though they’re usually the ones producing real change. People who cling to positivity end up protecting their own comfort while suffering continues around them. “At that point, positivity ceases to be awareness and becomes avoidance disguised as peace, which ironically is a considered form of delusion in psychology.” They study this stuff. It’s why, by their own admission, they struggle with communication. They won’t comfort people with lies, no matter who those people are. To them, that’s a form of caring more deeply, not less.
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The Sydney scene context maps onto the artwork in another way. Pressure on people produces pressure on community. “Right now, Sydney feels more competitive and disconnected than it did in the past.” Cliques harden. Some bands stop supporting each other and start trying to pull each other down to secure shrinking opportunities. They’ve watched it happen first-hand. “This behaviour has always existed within music, art, and entertainment generally, but as life becomes harder for everyone, it intensifies into something far more visible and frenzied.”
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Their counter-move is MOVING DIFFERENT Festival. Twenty bands, three stages, the second edition this year after the 2024 debut. In between, they contributed to the first LOUD WOMEN Festival in 2025. MOVING DIFFERENT returns in November. They’re aiming to make it annual. Their attempt, in their words, “to foster further connection, and development within our immediate community and the Australian scene.”
When we asked them for a list of artists who feel similarly unhinged or misaligned, they declined. They could have given one. They don’t believe in directing people. “Discovery is far more meaningful when it happens organically. We’d rather encourage people to explore and interpret things for themselves than tell them what they should relate to.” They’ve avoided comparative band mentions on purpose. They don’t sound like the bands they reference, and that’s the point.
“We’re never trying to speak at people. What we do is conversational.”
“WHAT I’M DOIN'” is out April 17 as the second single from BROKE BRAIN (Part 2). The cover is the manual.
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