I have written about Radio Free Alice before. A number of times, actually—they’re probably the act that this blog, since its inception just over three years ago, has covered more frequently than any other. I have written about them far too much for anyone’s liking. Much of this coverage has been conjecture, verging on gossip: most recently, I waded into the discourse surrounding the band’s unfortunately-viral triple j interview, and wondered whether their disastrous broadside of Usher’s ‘DJ Got Us Fallin’ In Love’ could actually delaminate their grand designs for indie rock ubiquity. But I’ve written more thoughtfully about their music on other occasions, most notably when I reviewed their third EP, Empty Words, as yet the most sparkling record the band have released. It’s still up on the Redshift website, and you can find it through the Reviews tab, in a peculiar section I have titled “AUS Underground”.

One year later, this section no longer befits Radio Free Alice. Their debut album, released this past Friday, came out on the major label behemoth Atlantic Records, where the band share a roster with artists as varied as Charli xcx, Fred again.., and Kevin Gates. This is no longer an “underground” band, and a reluctantly “Australian” one at that, with Radio Free Alice having now officially relocated to London. Words I have used in the past to describe the band include: "mammoth potential”, “inevitable”, "they are going to be so big it’s not even funny”, and “Radio Free Alice might be one of the most significant Australian rock exports of their generation”. So, if you’ll indulge me for a second: for once, Redshift was right about everything!

Indulgent also being the word that first comes to mind when describing What’s In Between. Radio Free Alice’s most significant musical statement yet looks and sounds paid-in-full: behind one of the more stunning album covers you might encounter this year lies an exquisitely-rendered new wave record, lousy with out-of-circulation 80s synths and glossy guitar licks stacked tightly on top of one another like baklava, boasting a (presumably very expensive) feature from the imperiously cool Rachel Brown of the Brooklyn band Water From Your Eyes. The word "oligarch” finds its way into the lyric sheet not once, but twice. And early on in the album’s proceedings, the band’s frontman Noah Learmonth openly laments, “I should have stayed with Ava from Perth who does marketing”, then yelps, unrelatedly, “time takes a cigarette and smashes you in the groin!”

Ahahahaha—what? Indulgent, here, is a load-bearing adjective, which I’m also taking to mean that What’s In Between is specked with Learmonth’s best and worst lyrical impulses. Radio Free Alice recently enjoyed a flashy cover story from the British magazine NME, which deftly touched on the Like A Version controversy and gave the band an opportunity to correct the record, prompting the following reflection from Learmonth:

The point I was trying to make meant something different to other people, and that was a consequence of careless use of words. The main learning thing for me was: if you’re gonna make a point – and particularly if it’s something a little subversive or irreverent, or you’re going to try and flip the script – you’ve gotta be really precise with your language.

Which I thought was interesting, partly because that’s not the “main learning thing” I would have anticipated the band would take away from the experience, but mostly because Learmonth the songwriter tends to eschew precision by default. That’s not a slight—the band’s most compelling songs often derive their immediacy from the hyperactive, shapeshifting urgency of his lyrics (the chiming chorus of ‘Chinese Restaurant’ refers). But this is very much still the mode of What’s In Between: unexamined. As a singer, Learmonth is less concerned with pitch than yaw; as a writer, he is first-thought-best-thought.

This can still work exceptionally well, especially on songs which draw upon the lithe post-punk of the band’s earlier material. Lead single ‘Rule 31’ is frenetic and glorious, a tightly-wound coil of Big Beat Cinema tension that roars to life with towering guitars as Learmonth’s burrows into a shifty, deliberately opaque hook: “We’re tapping on your window / we’re looking around for something to stay”. This blend of the insular and the incendiary is clearly the band’s one-wood. The character study of ‘Bottleshops’ doesn’t go much deeper than its accusation of “denying the fact that you can’t climax / your parents think you’re shit because you don’t pay taxes” but is buoyed by such a mobile motorik pop instrumental that any more detail would be beside the point.

This impulse also helps to explain the beguiling vantage of the skunking album highlight ‘Lunch Money’, on which Learmonth freestyles according to an unintelligible logic: 

I heard you’re teaching once again at the conservatory
Well I’ve been riding city buses daily just for a hobby
Was it the work or the monеy that stole your blouse
Or cynical boys at the back of thе bus?
They always took your lunch money by the old canal
They always took your lunch money I don’t know how

I had a dream of your arms around me
When I’d come along I’d know that you’d hold me for days
I had a trench coat
You were my boyfriend
When I’d come along I’d know that you’d hold me for days

I don’t believe you, son, I don’t believe you

At once, seemingly, he is the schoolboy, the father, crushing friend, the disaffected contemporary, perhaps even the queer-baiter. If I pay close attention, I find the lyrics disorientating. But Radio Free Alice aren’t a band you have to inspect to understand. They are immediate. They sound good whether you enjoy the Cure or the Chameleons or Interpol or whether you don’t. They sound good whether you like Radio Free Alice or whether you can’t stand them. The three bandmembers that round out the group—lead guitarist Jules Paradiso, bassist Michael Phillips, and drummer Lochie Dowd—are, really simply, excellent musicians, capable of pumping out addictive, sweet-and-sour rock songs with the ruthless efficiency of a Sinaloa line cook or Swedish pop producer.

That I spill so much more ink about Learmonth is a testament to his relative enigma. He is the most polarising element of any Radio Free Alice song just as often as he is its gravitational centre, a volatile prospect that lends itself equally to hot-mic gaffes as it does to getting signed by quite literally one of the biggest labels in the world. At the denouement of What’s In Between, Learmonth finally finds a way to channel his restless energy into the perfection that his band were ready and waiting to facilitate.

“Been a year of regulation, plastic spoons and medication”, Learmonth dreams on ‘The Intersection’, an unusually sensitive portrait of institutionalisation set to a Peter Hook-like bassline and meteoric lead guitar. It patiently swells in sound as Learmonth observes the world in sharper focus than is his wont—the effect of which, to borrow from a great music writer, feels like “zooming out while dollying in”. But accumulation, by design, cannot last forever, and the undertow that sweeps the song away leaves Learmonth stranded and forlorn: “shaking like a leaf, for the second time this week / but they’re talking so much, I can’t say a word”.

This sense of paralysis is unfamiliar to Radio Free Alice. You get the feeling they are almost allergic to it. It is a rare band—a charmed band, if we’re being honest—that grows in four years from playing eighty-cap Canberra club shows alongside ANU Big Night Out bands to being signed by Atlantic Records. I can’t emphasise enough how improbable that trajectory is for any band not operating at terminal velocity all the time. Which is why it’s doubly unusual that, at the precise moment on Radio Free Alice’s debut album when desolation finally overcomes the band’s impossible momentum, Learmonth’s response is to remain in place.

‘Waiting’, the glitterball stargazer that closes What’s In Between, is all 80s schmaltz and smouldering tremolo, moving at no greater pace than a slow dance. “You keep saying it will happen no-ow”, Learmonth pleads into the ether, possibly in the direction of a record executive, his voice suddenly caterwauling in desperation. “Well, I’m waiting”. No more hiding behind allusion—this is serious, sincere music. When I reviewed Empty Words, I noted the band’s effortless adoption of the plasticky, rave-up sheen of indie sleaze, suggesting that this was “a sound that Radio Free Alice could call their own”. I was wrong. Indie sleaze lives and dies by the sword of irony, a sentiment Learmonth wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. “You’re no status girl, and I’m no Bonaparte”, he dryly intones, and… no, he is not. Radio Free Alice are too earnest for the guillotine. At the end of the band’s NME profile—which, admittedly, is titled ‘Radio Free Alice are ready to take on the world’—there’s a peculiar quote that attributes a modesty to Learmonth that I’m not sure the artist was really intending:

What would he like listeners to take from it? For all his ambition, the frontman’s answer is simple. “I just hope people listening to it have a similar experience to those I’ve had listening to records I love. Extreme levels of enjoyment.”

That’s not an unambitious answer. Really, it’s another way of saying: we want it all, but not at any cost. Just their luck, I suppose: By any conceivable metric, Radio Free Alice made it. And they only had to lay one ugly duckling to waste on their way there.

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Sam Gollings

3 November 2026