Brat Farrar started as one person and grew into four. That’s not the usual direction. Sam Agostino made the early records alone in a Melbourne bedroom, feeding everything through drum machines and programmed parts; five LPs, a pile of 45s and a long stretch of touring later, the project now operates as a four-piece.
Agostino (Digger and the Pussycats, Kamikaze Trio) writes and sings; Tim Wold (Brown Spirits, Kids of Zoo, Specimens) plays bass; Andy Porter (Blowers, Cakefight) handles synth; Daniel Dempster (The Sailors, Tiger By The Tail) is on drums. The new album, “Group“, is the first full record tracked with the whole band in the room.
“Group” was recorded at Soundpark with Idge, almost entirely live. The whole band did the tracking and vocals in a single day. They came back the next day for some guitar and synth overdubs and re-cut a few vocals, then scrapped the re-cut vocals and went back to the live takes. What’s on the record is essentially how the band sounded playing together, with Agostino singing on top of it.
“With records, you can always polish and polish and polish,” Agostino says. “You could make a completely different record by playing everything to a click track, tightening everything up, adding more programming and making it cleaner. But that wasn’t the angle for this record. The point was to capture the band live and show what the band could actually do in the room.”
Agostino brought most of the songs into rehearsals, but they looked different on paper than on tape. The demos leaned heavily on drum machines and programmed elements; once a real rhythm section worked through them, the feel shifted.
“A lot of nuance was added once Andy, Daniel and Tim got involved,” he says. “Once you take that out and put a real band in the room, the songs start moving differently. They become looser, more physical and more alive. The bones of the songs were there, but the band changed the feel and gave them a lot more character.”
Wyświetl ten post na Instagramie
The clearest example is the closer, “The Trouble With Me“. It’s a long, drawn-out, synth-driven piece that came out of the band jamming and improvising in the studio. Agostino points to it as the song that shows the biggest gap between old Brat Farrar and the current lineup; it’s open and stretched-out in a way that wouldn’t have come from one person programming the parts.
The band’s own shorthand for what they sound like points to early Wipers, Husker Du, The Spits, 80s synth wave, and (their words) “power pop bands recorded incorrectly”. It’s a useful set of pins on a map, but “Group” doesn’t sit cleanly in any one of them.
The first single, “About You Now“, came out at the start of April and already showed how the band hold tension across a track: melodic hooks that build without quite releasing, guitars with a jangly NYC-garage edge, and synth that pulls the whole thing somewhere colder when it steps in.
The full record extends that. Calling it just garage punk skims past too much; the Husker Du melodic instinct is there, the dry minimal pulse the band themselves point to when they bring up The Spits, but also a wound-up energy that doesn’t slacken.
“Group” is coming out through a small cluster of European labels: Beast Records, Ghost Highway and Take The City. Agostino’s relationship with Beast goes back roughly two decades through his other long-running band Digger and the Pussycats. He met Marco from Ghost Highway around the same time, though the two of them only started putting out records together in the last few years. Mario from Take The City was involved in the previous Brat Farrar release (a singles compilation) alongside Marco. Agostino also flags a personal soft spot for Spain and is pleased to have the record out on a Spanish label.
The European setup isn’t a status move; it’s pragmatic. “In Australia, we can cover most things ourselves,” he says. “We’d love to have an Australian label, but there are actually so few to choose from, and the ones that are really great are usually too busy to give the record the amount of attention that we’d want. So we can do most of the Australian side ourselves, while the European labels help get the record into places we can’t reach as directly from here.”
Melbourne’s underground guitar scene has had more international attention than usual lately. Amyl and the Sniffers and King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard have both pulled outside eyes onto the city, and the rooms underneath that, like the Tote and Old Bar at the centre, plus smaller spots like the Cactus, the Gem, Lulie Tavern and Café Gummo, are still where most of the actual work happens.
Asked who else from Melbourne and Australia people outside the country should be paying attention to in 2026, Agostino starts pulling names. The Blowers, Porter’s other band, get the first mention: a garage punk pop group with “really immediate energy that feels very Melbourne to me”.
Plastic Section, featuring Sue from The Exotics on drums, who Agostino calls one of his all-time favourite Australian drummers.
On the younger end of the Tote scene, Salmon Sisters and Hand Grenade Hearts.
He also flags Amyl Rink as part of the current local crop worth tracking.
Then a separate tier of long-runners: The Pink Tiles, Valentine and The Misanthropes, bands still recording and playing after twenty, thirty, even forty years in. “That matters to me because it shows that the scene isn’t just about new bands,” he says.
“It’s also about people who keep doing great work for a long time.”
It’s a fitting thing for Agostino to land on, because Brat Farrar themselves are now sitting on five LPs and a stack of 45s, with “Group” landing as the sixth full-length and the first one made as an actual band rather than a bedroom operation. Out now on Beast Records (France), Ghost Highway (Spain) and Take The City (Spain), with the Australian side handled in-house. Stream it on Bandcamp.
🔔 IDIOTEQ is ad-free, independent, and runs on one person’s time. If you want it to stay that way: DONATE via PayPal 𝗈𝗋 SUPPORT via Patreon.
Stay connected via Newsletter · Instagram · Facebook · X (Twitter) · Threads · Bluesky · Messenger · WhatsApp.
