Today, dust share ‘Alastair,’ a jaggedly anthemic new single that serves as the latest preview of their debut album Sky Is Falling (Oct 10 / Kanine Records).
While the fast-rising Australian group have always demonstrated a deft melodic touch, it’s often buried within a maelstrom of neck-breaking tempos, free jazz-indebted tears of saxophone, and broken glass guitar. Taken at a slightly slower clip, ‘Alastair’ takes the labyrinthine logic of dust songs and injects it with a newfound warmth. While a cascade of potential influences flash to mind — Sonic Youth‘s ping-ponged guitar interplay, the chiming Rickenbacker tone of The Byrds, both the cleverly shuffling drum patterns and cryptic barfly poetry of The National circa Alligator — the track is firmly planted in dust’s burgeoning vision of a damaged, but ultimately redemptive, world.
Of the single, dust’s Gabriel Stove and Justin Teale explain: “Alastair is a song about meeting someone down on their luck and feeling conflictingly empathetic for them. It is navigating the challenges of growing up without getting bitter. It’s a short story from when we went on a writing trip in Mullumbimby. We met a man named Alastair at the Mullumbimby Motel and within 5 minutes of meeting him he recounted his whole recent years of life, how he couldn’t get ahead.”
Pre-save debut album Sky Is Falling HERE.
Since first emerging in 2023 with their iteration of Australian post-punk on debut EP et cetera, etc, the group have continued to dominate. dust’s industrially shaped rock, endemic to their steel city origins, has taken them out of this world: major continental tours across Australia, the UK and US supporting formative influences Slowdive, Interpol, Bloc Party, Protomartyr and Militarie Gun, to stages with Hockey Dad, The Belair Lip Bombs, Armlock, Shady Nasty and more
dust’s evolution continues on debut Sky Is Falling. Their sound, grounded in genre defiance and reinvention – shoegaze and electronic experimentalism side-by-side with elusive saxophone arrangements and abrasive guitar lines – is firmly rooted in melancholia and self-inquiry. Anarchic propulsion that denotes Geese to Double Virgo level extremities, with blissful nods to the classics, Sonic Youth, and My Bloody Valentine.
Their debut album, dust reveal, is a seminal moment. “On our first international tour, “the sky is falling” seemed to summarise the infinite and indefinite possibilities ahead. It was a phrase that kept surfacing between that formative moment on tour and the nihilistic lull after returning home to normal work and life. Accepting the unknown has made us more comfortable experimenting and taking risks in our songwriting. Truly immersing ourselves, we’ve spent hundreds of rehearsals and live shows crafting and conceptualising this album.”
Sky Is Falling springboards contemporaries in Moin and untitled (halo) – their fusion, slightly softer and refined while still raw and spontaneous. Diverse in approach and wholly sub-genre agnostic, at once nostalgic and forward-leaning. Reflective of their restless engagement with the social zeitgeist, slouching towards the future that they uneasily attempt to define. Enter: Sky Is Falling, dust’s attempt at making sense of it all.
Formed against the backdrop of the pandemic in 2020, the project of Awabakal land / Newcastle-based dual guitarist-vocalists Gabriel Stove and Justin Teale, bassist Liam Smith, guitarist and saxophonist Adam Ridgway, and drummer Kye Cherry, dust offer an invigorating new take on Australian post-punk: progressive, catchy, and irresistible. Just as artistically motivated by the fragmented, free-genre steps of Yung Lean and Burial, merging experimental jazz and electronica into a sound as immediate as Inhaler and Violent Soho, this idiosyncratic joining of the fringes comes together much like their roots in Newcastle, and the band’s careful balance of in-betweens. Through their debut EP et cetera, etc dust set their sights on affirming their position in the local scene as vital and exciting. Born in the middle of periods of normalcy and uncertainty; not quite close enough to the major city scenes nor far enough isolated away; equally inspired by the groups making waves on both sides of the Pacific, dust take these keen observations to offer an invigorating take on Australian post-punk: progressive, catchy, and irresistible. In time, no doubt a contemporary answer to their hometown’s historic origins.
Thoughts Words Action 