Swapmeet make music in service of a feeling
On the cusp of releasing their debut LP via Los Angeles label Winspear, Swapmeet reflect on making music without egos – and the prospect of letting go of their Adelaide roots.
Venus O’Broin says life at the moment reminds her of the hit television show Severance. Based on the novel by Ling Ma, it follows a team of corporate drones whose consciousnesses are cleaved between their hours in the office and their lives off the clock.
O’Broin’s band Swapmeet is about to release its debut album Mount Zero, just months after a whirlwind run at SXSW in Austin, Texas that saw them play over a dozen sets in under a week to rave reviews. They’ve received glowing international coverage from the likes of Rolling Stone, and soon the album’s release via Los Angeles-based label Winspear will send them back on the road with another tour taking in high-profile sets at Pitchfork Music Festival in London and Paris.
It couldn’t feel further removed from day-to-day life in Adelaide, where O’Broin and her bandmates Maxwell Elphick, Jack Medlyn, and Josh Doherty continue to work minimum wage jobs to cover the rent in their respective sharehouses.
"It’s like I clock into one life, and then I clock into a different life."
“It makes my concept of time really weird, and my concept of how I’m doing really weird,” O’Broin tells InReview. “A week where I spend half of it working and the other half on tour is not just like a week in my head; it’s like I clock into one life, and then I clock into a different life.”
Medlyn agrees. “I hadn’t worked for two weeks, until today,” he says. “And I really felt weird at work today. Like, this isn’t normal anymore.”
“It’s a reality check,” Doherty adds. “You come back from tour and you’re like, ‘Oh that’s what I really want to be doing. This sucks so much more now’.”
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“Halfway in, halfway out, broke the only thing I cared about,” O’Broin sings in a splintered whisper on the band’s latest single ‘Halfway’.
It’s the fourth track from Mount Zero, and a testament to what I have always believed to be one of her greatest musical talents: the ability to simulate the feeling of a secret being shared. It is a feeling she is able to convey to the listener whether they’re sitting across from her in a smokey sharehouse, or performing to a crowd of hundreds. Coupled with the group’s potent sound, and captivating charisma, it has helped mark them as a band to watch from the moment they started playing shows around Adelaide.
InReview catches up with O’Broin and her Swapmeet bandmates in the house Medlyn shares with Harry Blight, another local musician who can be heard behind the drumkit in the room next door rehearsing with singer songwriter Adela May.
Sipping from a schooner of cola, O’Broin says she is “not very experienced” in music. “The songs very much get formed by us as a group,” she explains. “I think we all know how to write in service of a feeling, an idea, and that’s what makes the boys so special, is that they’re able to do that.”
Elphick says there’s no hierarchy amongst the band members, and very little ego involved.
“I think it’s surprisingly natural,” Medlyn adds. “There’s no real butting heads. It’s like, if you have an idea, let’s try it.”
The group say their debut EP, 2024’s Oxalis, was recorded and released almost out of necessity, to allow the band to move on and enter their next era – many of its tracks dated to the band’s earliest performances under their former name, Sour Sob.
“I think at the time of releasing Oxalis it was like, this is standing in our way,” O’Broin says. “We don’t want to forget about these songs, but we have outgrown them, and the kind of natural thing is to release them, so let’s just do that.”
While Oxalis won the band many fans – and South Australian Music Awards for best song and best release – O’Broin says Mount Zero is a “a much more intentional body of work”.
“This record was written to be listened to rather than to be played live, which was also very different to where Oxalis was coming from.”
“I think it’s just better,” Elphick says. “Of course we’re going to say that because it’s fresher, more recent. But it just feels closer to what we wanted.”
Mount Zero is also informed by romantic breakdown, with O’Brien splitting with a former partner as the album was being written.
“The record definitely reflected my circumstances at the time, quite brutally,” she explains. “I guess that’s the way I write, to digest and to figure out ways to place uncomfortable things that are happening. But it makes me proud to be able to put unfortunate things into something that I think is magical – which is the point of any creative form.”
She adds, with a contented sigh, “I think so at least. The pain didn’t go to waste.”
Like Oxalis, Swapmeet recorded Mount Zero by themselves, but signing to Winspear means it is being released under entirely different circumstances and expectations – even if their growing international status barely registers on the ground in Adelaide.
“The reality is that our opinions are actually the only ones that actually mean anything,” O’Broin reflects of the disconnect.
“I don’t feel it,” Elphick says. “You see all the hype on Instagram anyway, so it doesn’t really feel tangible.”
O’Broin adds that she works at two different cafes when she’s off the road.
“I honestly love those spaces because they’re predominantly feminine and I’m working with women, and that’s very different to what it’s like on tour, or in the music industry as a whole… but it does feel like I get to work and I’m like, ‘What am I doing with my life?’”
Like the characters of Severance, Swapmeet have realised that living one life fully might mean leaving the other behind. Adelaide might have brought them together, and helped them find their initial audience and footing, but on the eve of Mount Zero’s release they all seem content with the likelihood of leaving the city.
Or, as Elphick puts it: “The world’s too big not to try.”
Mount Zero (Winspear) is out July 18. Swapmeet will perform in-store at Clarity Records on Thursday July 16, before launching the album at Rhino Room on Friday September 4.
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