At the interstices of post-punk and slacker-folk Daily Toll finds profundity and serendipity in the mundane. Considered but unbothered, the album has an in-the-moment magic that can only come from synthesising multiple lifetimes worth of half-finished songs and aimless jams. The petina of off-white sharehouse walls, mortar flaking off long-forgotten brick fences, fig trees and all the other signals that life is passing ya by — Da Toll weaves longing while outright refusing to be nostalgic for something that never existed. Tropes after all, pale in the face of the everyday: “too far to touch, not far enough to forget”. The world conjured forth on this LP evokes the kitchen-sink POV of dolewave without aggrandising. Simple songs can often be the hardest to pull off, and the Sydney group effortlessly do-so track after track, Kata’s vox being situated in the matter-of-fact but paired with songwriting that drifts between fragments of suburban dissociation. The instrumentals are content to relish the blemishes – fingers erring on the wrong fret, the occasional string buzz, breaths before the chorus – and it all contributes to a sense that the songs are not so much describing the world but emergent from it. Flecks of mess and noise creep their way through the tracks, production being used to evoke the unadorned and by extension, ‘the real’. The album does feel to me like an homage to the rich shades of meaning which transpire in the undulations between dreariness, uncertainty and boredom – of understanding that such states can themselves be sites of resistance, engines of critique. Regardless, we are dealing with a rejection of spectacle. A band like Kitchen’s Floor touches on similar topics and themes but with a hamfisted self-destructive lens. Daily Toll are more subtle, careful in their approach towards Antipodean malaise, extracting something true-to-the-collective from the alienation of riding the bus home late at night and forgetting to put the bins out when you get home. It’s a contemplative mid-strength beer enjoyed alone at the end of Summer, mattress stains, shoplifting, clotheslines creaking, a neighbour shutting their windows at the smell of joint lingering in backyard.