Fucking sick to the stomach touching cat pus and chunks of necrotising skin approaching the point where they slough off onto fingers with the texture of day-old red wine vomit under the jet setting of a hose nozzle. Sat on wet ground by the train tracks and now I’ve got a wet ass and it’s pushing me further and further away from myself. I’m losing my goddamn edge. RAPID DYE is some trve unhinged in the brain type shit, like what would happen if you got a nosebleed over a turntable playing Spike in Vain - though thank fuk this lot never tried to lay their hand at funk - or that Killed in Finland comp and the needle kept sloshing around in the ensuing soup of platelets and snot. Real Hoax-y type mess in that filthy Sydney way where people actually go outside instead of getting into technical death metal. I’m cross already and it’s only seven-thirty.

Shoulders collide themselves together as the wheels spin backwards in time towards The Saints. Every upwards chord swing is met with an ocean of proto-drunk limb-based ejaculate. CASINO raise an ultimatium to the trajectory of so much guitar based music flopping itself up on the shores of bandrooms across the city. Helmed by lifetimes immersed in this nonsense, the rapid delivery of that unique Oz-tray-lyana frenetic with desertification and backmasked austerity flies like a kick to the neck against all that aspirational how-fuckin-good-is-Birthday-Party bullshit that seems to still be buried in the bloodstream like a mutated prion. Both rock and roll enmesh in the forthrightness of Ariel’s vocal delivery, a sure-fire hard-times preacher backed by disciples to form and function kicking out jams that make you wanna blow up your radiator on a big drive and then fuckin leg it away from the traffic jams you cause.

“Let the beat control your body” (A. Coco, ROMANSY, The Toe Hotel, 2025)

In the toilet after the PHANTASM set I put my lipstick back on and say I’m going to “fucking sue Bernie” for writing lyrics so good they muzzle-blast my vocal cords because I’m unable not to sing along. Phantasm feel akin to walking in on your weird aunt holding a seance and backing away slowly so they don’t hear you closing the door. I have compared them previously to Contropotere, but I feel never acknowledged the shared sense of summoning that occurs in the sonic space of breath exhales that happens in the gaps between the two. Watching Bernie feels almost wrong, as though you are being drawn into some private aspect of her personhood which you have no right beholding, and yet that is the most central aspect to the entire dance. Reality unfortunately is just what happens to you, and so long as you’re living it won’t go away. It’s an unfortunate nature of this space that many of us do want to be dead, but rather than address it we just sort of jump up and down and then be really awkward about it. The crux of the difference though is where the Italians can’t help but bring art into everything, the band before us simply doubles down into a fractious melee of unstoppable fervour. More of this more often and we might all be alright.

Back in full swing of myself in preparation for RAPID DYE, I put my glasses down in the stash-spot next to the stage and proceed to fall flat on my front trying to make my way back up the stairs. The bandroom isn’t packed yet but I’m drunk enough to feel like it might be so I’m slamming myself right up against the lip of the stage and blaming it on the fact that I can’t see. This leaves me in spiritual kinship with Josh, who has to hold the setlist against his nose to have any shot of ascertaining the next song. Kings of punk, masters of hardcore, and if I’m guessing it right, Sydney’s biggest Poison Idea groupies, the band clatter about with record accuracy, by which to say it sounds like I’m listening to the set through a phone speaker held up to one of those metal trash cans I’ve been chucked inside. The defining strength in simplicity so central to the hardcore from this specific side of that specific city bandies itself around me. What makes Me feel safe right now is knowing I’ll wake up tomorrow with my guts punching me in the earholes, pent up with re-digested sustenance from this process of storytelling our shared reactionary natures in the Massappeal-ing clamour. That characteristic drum intro of Jimmy’s Street comes jumping out and before I can stop myself I’ve swung my arm up under Max’s reticent one as the song that first bonded us on that fated car trip buoys itself up on its lumbering beast of a bassline. Full throttle astral ejection, Coco comes up and gives me a pat on the back, but I’m caught up waving my arm around as though there is a dead cat on the end of it and I am in need of a quick and accurate way to judge the space of a room. This is some vile stuff, both in terms of sonic reference points and in texture. Saying hardcore for hardcore over and over again is like conjuring Bloody Mary yet there was always one kid in class who swore one time, when there were no witnesses, it worked. Tonight that child may be me.