R.M.F.C. are a staple of Sydney music. There’s no beating around it. Buz Clatworthy is the brains. Club Hits is their debut album. A five-year collation of the Rock Music Fan Club, the album features some familiar classics that we would have heard time and time again, this time with titles– tracks like ‘Introduction’, ‘Spectrum’, ‘Rock Tune’, et cetera. Other new tracks are expansions of snippets you’ve heard before – a one-off in a live set, slipped in with no context. These are the menial riffs that tie together tracks, the ones that didn’t register as a song but a harmless bit in the break for tuning, drink-sipping, or laughing at a bandmate during the set by the Rock Music Fan Club. These songs are no secrets, and why should they be? Club Hits is the flourishing of these moments. Trudging through each track, R.M.F.C walk the line of rock and divinity – not in a religious sense but a hint at a prophetic genius that could help us find our way towards an optimistic future, strengthened and fortified. The tongue-in-cheek-ness of having an abbreviated band name is a gag that doesn’t escape them – R.M.F.C. are not just a Rock Music Fan Club, but Finesse Club, Football Club, and Freak Club too. Club Hits is the natural progression of the rock canon. That it’s a 2023 release makes you sit in disbelief, for the simple reason that we’re so used to observing this level of quality at decades’ distance but how lucky we are to live in it.

Sweet Justice is the assured sophomore record from Tkay Maidza. It’s a showcase of Tkay’s dual strength as a songwriter and rapper;  gritty, hard-hitting bangers sharing the stage with slinking, neo-soul tinged RnB. Sweet Justice also leans into a Soulection-esque bounciness that carries the record through its many sonic deviations. In a way, it feels as though Tkay is picking up the baton from the pioneers of the genre (Kaytranada himself is featured on the record), and breathing new, dynamic life into it.

The album also feels like a culmination of the ideas and sounds Tkay explored across her Last Year Was Weird EPs. The series dealt with the turbulence of both the world around her, and her own complex personal relationships. Sweet Justice is the clear-eyed resolution of that turmoil, an ode to finding new clarity of what relationships and values are important, and striking a confident new path forward. A statement piece for her career thus far, Sweet Justice may just prove to be a launching pad for Tkay Maidza’s path towards superstardom.

Released after a ten year hibernation, Plot, thus is the debut album from Sydney instrumental project F’Tang. Showcasing an impressive level of instrumental mastery, the project dips into and amalgamates the sounds of post-rock, midwest emo and math rock in a comfortable half an hour. On it, delicious licks of guitar fold over each other, washing and collapsing into calculated and careful rhythms, accented snares and gentle rides. Synths thoughtfully pad out each track, inviting listeners into a different soundscape, each time tinged with a different mood. Featuring a mixed lineup of artists from Loose Fit, Ted Danson with Wolves, Burlap and Ghost of Television, the record leaves little to be dissatisfied with– what there is is confident musicianship and a broad and delightful sound.

Lahai is the healing, careful and tender new album from London artist Sampha. Following his 2017 debut album Process, his signature sound evolves further on this new release. For Sampha, the piano becomes a percussive vessel for unutterable confessions and introspection – a way of admitting to fears before moving forward through grief. This release blends notes of electro-soul and jazz, manipulating vocal tones and string soundscapes on top of vibrant and dazzling beats. Scattered with thoughtful contributions from artists including Yaeji, Yussef Dayes, and Lea Sen, the album is a testament to the broader influence of Sampha’s sound and collaborative touch. The album lingers on a feeling of optimism and closure, driving most songs in a euphoric sense of freedom that can only come from acceptance.

Population: 4 is glum, overcast, and sepia-toned. Leaning into slow tempos and lethargic vocals, Sydney’s Mope City are the ones spinning the tape back to the simplicities of 90s slowcore and grunge. On Population: 4, tracks are blemished with small scratches, taps, dissonant strums and a tempo conducted by its own emotion, in a way that makes you feel as though the tracks were a product of accidentally hitting ‘record’. Lyrics are humble observations, mindless thoughts that echo honesty and autumnal introspection. Weighed down by muddy, static chords, clarity comes in moments of thinner texture, whining guitar bends and steady beats. On this release, Mope City is unassuming, candid and imperfect, collaging a sad and eerie intimacy that can only come from being the band rehearsing down the road.

Loraine James says her new album Gentle Confrontation is music she would like to have made as a teenager. Naturally, it’s influenced by the emotion of your adolescent obsessions – math rock and emo electronic among them. It opens with its namesake – a lavish texture of strings, undercut by a skittering mesh of the analog and the synthesised. It encapsulates what the UK experimental musician has long defined her creativity with: an uncanny ability to harness IDM glitch aesthetics to tell a story. Never more than on this album especially, where James vocally steps into the light, offering vulnerable grapplings with emotion. Driven by a sense of improvisational jazz, the album then stays true to James’ strength – a freeform approach to club-ready IDM, RnB, and ambient. As much as Loraine James expresses the inscrutability of emotion, so too is listening to this album. Gentle Confrontation is unpredictable and absolutely compelling.

softscars is yeule’s lush, introspective, and melancholic ode to themselves. The album gels together in sounds of fuzz guitars, static, and synths in the most beautiful rushes and driving licks. Shifting focus from glitch to grunge, the release remains glossy and at times, sheer, taking cues from soft bedroom pop DIY in fleeting doses. Per the title of the album yeule proves themselves to be as tender as ever, peeling themselves back in acoustic strums, lowercase tracks titles and lonesome reverb that echoe even the most hushed confessions –  the post-human ghost within the machine. The album is expansive, and continues yeule’s dip into a cyber realm grounded in reality and nostalgia.

Sydney artist Cherry Rype’s debut album GOODGIRLSGETLOVEBOMBED feels like watching glass shatter: breathless, dazzling, violent, all at once. Drawing inspiration from a variety of sounds – soul, RNB, hip hop – she leans into fractured breakbeats, glimmering autotune, vocal samples, and extensive features, fleshing out a release that is nuanced and tragically beautiful. 

Cherry dips into experiences of messes of heartbreak, trauma response and melancholy, pointedly shining a light in the dark corners of taboo relationships and pain. The album focuses on the experience of love bombing – a form of excessive affection that quickly falls into dependency and manipulation. Cherry is sincere and raw, effortlessly moving between hopeful and therapising in her storytelling. Deception is the dark tinge bleeding across the tracklist as she questions the idealisation, torment and helpless longing that can stain relationships.

As a debut, GOODGIRLSGETLOVEBOMBED is sure of itself, reclaiming a narrative in an honest and uncompromising way – explicit and validating.

JULIA is the debut album from Melbourne artist Juice Webster. Like a sigh at the end of a long day, or wistfully looking out a train window on the way to work, JULIA is an exercise in deep self reflection. The album’s themes circle around loss, change and uncertainty, scattered across the album like ripples in a pond. Yet in this gentleness, Juice Webster’s songwriting is pointed and assured; sifting through the messy details and painful remembering to gain clarity and cast ahead a resilient next step.

The record was recorded live with her band, in between the bush and the city – perhaps explaining the impressively delicate balance between softness and rougher textures across JULIA. Juice Webster’s folkier roots, ever comforting, are balanced with a polished grittiness, reminiscent of 90s alternative and early 2000s indie.

It’s an inspired debut record, totally confident in it’s vision and sonic world. It’s a reminder that while remembering and uncertainty can be painful and often confusing, there’s a catharsis in its essentiality.

Viral Wreckage, the incendiary debut record by Nigerian rapper Aunty Rayzor, is one of the most intoxicating hip hop records of the year. With her impressive diversity of flows at the center, Viral Wreckage is a breathless blend of sounds and subgenres from all over the digital and physical world.

The album features an array of collaborators from East African label, Hakuna Kalula, and it’s sister label Nyege Nyege. Tracks produced by Debmaster and Scotch Rolex (themselves producing much of MC Yallah’s superb album earlier this year) combine trap and grime with meticulously detailed electronic production, and are blitzed by Aunty Rayzor with head-spinning, rapid-fire delivery. 

Across the album’s other tracks is where Aunty Rayzor showcases her versatility. She glides effortlessly over clubbier beats with influences ranging from baile funk, gqom and afrobeats. Other collaborations with label partners KABEAUSHÉ and Titi Bakorta lead to exciting sonic deviations, whether it be synth-laden RnB duets, or Aunty Rayzor rapping over highlife instrumentals.

Viral Wreckage is a confidently assured debut record, with Aunty Rayzor in complete command throughout the record’s exhilarating left-turns. It may well be the sound of the future- or, more accurately, a showcase of the artists on the cutting edge of music today.