Despite the country’s remoteness, Australian metal music has remained largely in line with developments in metal music globally. Practically every major chapter in metal bears a timely parallel Down Under, and the Australian adoption of these global movements, from metal’s late sixties advent to the commercial success of contemporary metalcore, is rarely relayed without some distinctive variation. Exactly what common qualities one could ascribe to these myriad and diverse musics is at the heart of a growing scholarly literature on Australian metal, often contained within the broader question of the music’s Australian identity. This literature comes at this question from various angles. Most scholars, oftentimes echoing the larger precursory literature on Australian popular music more broadly, examine the cultural tropes which underpin the music’s development and character. They identify irreverent humour,¹ working-class masculine identities and a predominance of white performers as common traits.² Some look at how these characterisations are implied or explicated in paramusical³ texts, from incendiary political or ideological materials,⁴ to provocative record titles and deliberately offensive lyrics, and the juxtaposition of the brutal and the mundane.⁵ Some scholars, albeit a limited subset, consider the musical texts themselves, expounding on themes of stylistic hybridisation and pushing at the limits of convention, both in style and intensity.⁶ Although offering a multifaceted sense of this music, this literature is young, and there is abundant space and scope with which to develop understandings of Australian metal moving forward.

Australia, as a country, is notable for being dominantly Western in its culture but geographically isolated from its Western counterparts. Further, it is a country where major population centres are spread farther apart than many European countries, and where scenic hubs are likewise scattered and isolated. It has historically been unavoidable for Australian metal artists to negotiate with distance on both international and national scales. A manifestation of this relationship is artists who, because of their isolation, are removed from the pronounced scenic pressures in metal music hubs worldwide, and whose music is accordingly singular and challenging of norms.

This chapter explores how this circumstance, alongside aspects of Australia’s culture, has instigated unique artistic statements in many of its most prominent metal artists. There are instances of such artists spanning the history of Australian metal in myriad substyles and scenes, and while not wholly unique to Australia, this quality’s presence across time and style establishes it as a useful concept through which to frame Australian metal. This chapter will cursorily explore the history of Australian metal, focusing on three diverse bands who demonstrate varying negotiations with this quality in different periods. These bands are Buffalo, a rough and provocative Sydney-based proto-heavy metal band from the early seventies; Sadistik Exekution, an extraordinarily heavy and influential Sydney-based death metal band formed in the mid-eighties; and Ne Obliviscaris, a sophisticated and innovative Melbourne-based progressive extreme metal band with a career spanning the 2000s to the present.

The Emergence of Australian Heavy Metal

Australia is a vast and sparsely populated island distanced from its Western cultural counterparts, and indeed most places, by days on a plane. Its population, around 25 million at the time of writing, are spread out across a landmass a little under 80 per cent of the size of the continental United States. Its sparse population and geographical diffusion have had a profound impact on the development of its music industry, often portrayed as hinderingly careful and conservative.⁷ While each of Australia’s eight states and territories has a capital city, two amongst them – Sydney (New South Wales) and Melbourne (Victoria) – currently bear approximately 50 per cent of the Australian music industry,⁸ although the former has had significantly less governmental support than the latter in recent years.⁹ These two have historically been represented as rivals.¹⁰ In a musical example, Rosemary Overell describes Melbourne’s grindcore scene as being constructed in part by their distance from Sydney’s counterpart scene, the latter being portrayed tendentiously by Melbourne scene members as weak, inauthentic and feminine.¹¹ Next to Sydney and Melbourne in population size are Brisbane (Queensland) and Perth (Western Australia), the latter being particularly isolated with almost 2,700 km (by car) of desert distancing it from its nearest major city-neighbour, Adelaide, the capital of South Australia. Smaller still are Canberra, Australia’s capital city situated in the small Australian Capital Territory, Darwin in the sparsely populated Northern Territory, and Hobart in the small southern island of Tasmania. All these cities and their respective states have produced metal bands and scenes of varying influence and success.

Australian music artists negotiate with a host of challenges due to their location: it is expensive for them to tour internationally or nationally beyond the largest cities, the country has had a historical dearth of quality recording studios,¹² and it has been traditionally challenging to disseminate Australian music worldwide, especially outside of the ambit of major labels. Moreover, compared to its UK and European cultural counterparts, Australia has had relatively little national or state governmental support for developing its musical exports, especially compared to other forms of media like cinema, where there has been a more tangible project of developing a ‘national film culture’.¹³ Australia’s policy support for its music industry has remained, since the late sixties, cautious, exclusive and occasionally corrupt.¹⁴ It has taken the rise of a handful of globally successful musical exports over the span of decades – the Bee Gees, INXS, etc. – for Australian popular music to be treated as a ‘site for national cultural assertion’.¹⁵

Considering the span of this industry and its capitalist stakes, it is little surprise that promoting an Australian identity – whatever that might mean – has been a low priority for record companies. Resultantly, many of Australia’s biggest musical exports, especially prior to the advent of the internet, have been arguably stylistically alike to their counterparts in the United States and UK.¹⁶ Of course, this industry prudence and emphasis on reinforcing a global, saleable standard over stimulating more original directions in this music filters down in even more concentrated manners to less commercially viable musics like metal. Nevertheless, while relatively few Australian metal acts have reached the upper tiers of commercial success, the country has always had a persistent and reasonably influential metal music underground.

Paul Oldham dates the earliest characteristics of a proto-heavy metal musical style in Australia to around 1965.¹⁷ In this period, Australia’s remoteness precluded it from the touring schedules of American and European artists, and so a handful of acts rose to occupy this space. The earliest Australian proto-heavy metal acts, for the most part constituting Australia’s celebrated Oz Rock or pub rock lineage, were Lobby Loyde, Billy Thorpe & The Aztecs, and Buffalo. Loyde, who first led Melbourne-based hard rock bands the Purple Hearts and the Wild Cherries in the mid to late sixties before forming the highly influential Coloured Balls in the early seventies, is lauded as Australia’s first rock guitar hero.¹⁸ Coloured Balls’ music is muscular, tongue-in-cheek and experimental. Although founded in blues, it shows prototypical strains of punk and progressive rock and acts as something of a bellwether for the forming pub rock movement’s heavier contingent. Heavily influenced by Loyde, with whom he collaborated and from whom he received guitar lessons, Billy Thorpe & The Aztecs would perform blues-derived hard rock music remembered for its ear-splitting volume due to Thorpe’s amassing and combining of PA equipment. Thorpe, nicknamed ‘King Yobbo’ at the time – a term inferring a boisterous and brash character – would become the infamous star of pub rock, often arrested for profanity and raucous behaviour on stage.

The latter, Sydney’s Buffalo (formed in 1971 in Sydney out of the ashes of Brisbane-formed band Head), have the strongest claim at being Australia’s first heavy metal band,¹⁹ personifying a style reasonably alike Black Sabbath, who had formed three years prior. Buffalo released their debut album, Dead Forever (1972), through Vertigo, an imprint of Philips/Phonogram, the home of proto-heavy metal bands like Black Sabbath and Status Quo; prog rock bands like Gentle Giant and Van Der Graaf Generator; and later, Metallica. Buffalo were the first non-European or British band to be signed to this label, arguably a failed attempt by A&R Dermot Hoy to establish an Australian identity in the label’s Sydney base. It saw little promotion in Britain, although it was distributed to several Western European countries, and the band remained mostly unknown on the isles.²⁰ Despite these circumstances, the band’s debut managed to sell 25,000 copies²¹ and achieve a limited following in Europe. Interestingly, this route, including signing to a European record label, would be repeated similarly in the eighties by thrash/death metal bands like Hobbs’ Angel of Death and Mortal Sin. This period is discussed in the next section.

Buffalo’s music is reminiscent of British blues-derived proto-heavy metal, although bearing some notable musical properties. Guitarist John Baxter, called ‘the heart and soul of [Buffalo]’, purportedly had no instinct for, nor interest in, the blues, which founded the band’s earliest stylistic practice.²² This imprinted on the largely harmonically static and rhythmically pummelling character of Buffalo’s mid-seventies work. Their music, even within its more psychedelic and exploratory elements, retains a harder, more overtly masculine edge than much European or North American psychedelic music in the period, practically bereft of the folk leanings, spacey extemporisations, or studio effects manipulations respectively common to many of the most prominent bands in this style.

The more notable element of Buffalo’s work, though, is the character of their paramusical material: album covers, lyrics and song titles. The band were ignored by radio and so needed to capture attention in different manners. Their answer was provocative imagery, like the album art of Volcanic Rock (1973), where a fully nude androgynous figure holds a statue of what appears to be a penis over their head while standing on an erupting volcano, itself reminiscent of a menstruating female figure; or the cover to its 1974 follow-up, Only Want You for Your Body, which shows a woman strapped to a torture rack with her dress hiked up to her neck. Buffalo’s lyrics are celebratory of conservative concepts of hetero-normative masculinity and misogyny: sexual conquest, machismo, ideation of domination and power, and light homophobia. Most of these qualities are represented to varying degrees in concurrent global hard rock and heavy metal music, but Buffalo’s demonstration of these themes and their provocativeness seems especially deliberate. Indeed, the act of being confrontational and incendiary was a proclaimed goal of the band; its effect justified as necessary to garner attention in an otherwise conservative cultural milieu. But it was avowedly light-hearted. This quality, using the jocular intention of something to soften or justify its provocativeness, proves reasonably common in discussions of Australian metal music and will be problematised further in the next section.

Buffalo’s negotiation with distance is multifaceted. In their hometown of Sydney, they were effectively a local band, relegated, due to both relatively low demand and draconian liquor licensing laws, to gigs in schools and municipal halls.²³ The sites of performance would move to pubs through the early seventies alongside a broad liberal cultural shift, but the band’s (ample) national touring remained limited to the scope of this underground scene, despite their record deal and overseas sales.²⁴ Buffalo’s isolation is an important factor in their global uptake, but the more interesting scope, at least in terms of the band’s sound and character, is their engagement with local music institutions. Their assiduously provocative paramusical materials were ostensibly a direct result of being ignored or cast aside by Australia’s own music media and radio. Their contrarian-charged attitude of avoiding the trappings of pop stardom, too, seems custom-made for the idiosyncratic space they occupied in the Australian music industry. Perhaps this embodies an engagement with the mounting modernist discourse in rock music in the late sixties and early seventies: the pervasive sense of being individualistic, artistic and uncorrupted by capitalist machinations.²⁵ In Buffalo’s case, though, the theme bears a more comedically rebellious tone invocative of the Australian larrikin, an archetype explored in the next section.

The late seventies saw Australia’s answer to the New Wave of British Heavy Metal steadily emerge, reaching a high in terms of both the number of acts and their respective prominence in the early to mid-eighties. This was something of a watershed period in Australian metal’s development, offering a host of stylistically diverse bands in varied metal substyles spanning the country’s capital cities, from the progressive metal of Melbourne’s Taramis to Canberra-founded proto-death metal act Armoured Angel, to Melbourne speed metal pioneers Nothing Sacred, and dozens of others. The profusion of new bands and growing underground interest was supported by several important individuals and institutions, which provided limited platforms for their distribution. These included radio shows and deejays like Allan Thomas from 3RRR in Melbourne; record stores like Sydney’s Utopia Records and Melbourne’s Central Station Records, which acted as scenic hubs as well as distributors; and eventually concerts like the famed yearly event, Metal for Melbourne, which started in 1981 and which – for five non-consecutive instalments ending in 1986 – acted as the premier Australian heavy music festival.²⁶ These identities and circumstances laid the groundwork for several more idiosyncratic and unique stylistic trajectories to develop throughout the eighties with an increasing presence in, and influence on, the global metal scene. The following section will explore the case of Australian extreme metal in the mid to late eighties and specifically the challenges faced, and the imprint left, by Sydney’s Sadistik Exekution.

Australian Extreme Metal

The advent of extreme metal in the early to mid-eighties embodied a significant shift in the character of metal music up to that point. Key extreme metal scenes and bands included British grindcore led by Napalm Death (formed 1981); the Bay Area death metal scene led by Possessed (formed 1983), Floridan death metal (the Tampa Scene) including Morbid Angel and Death in the mid-eighties; contemporaneous Swedish death metal including Morbid and Entombed; and the formative embodiment of Norwegian black metal, Mayhem (formed 1984). All these substyles were underground musics entrenched in paramusically transgressive and widely sonically unpalatable genre markers. Both Australia’s first extreme metal act, Slaughter Lord, and their most successful extreme metal export at this time, Mortal Sin, formed throughout 1985, essentially concurrent to these global developments in extreme metal music.

Early Australian extreme metal artists and fans were able to remain abreast of developments thousands of kilometres away due primarily to two technologies: tape trading and zines. The former describes private mail distribution of demo tapes and bootlegs, often between ‘pen pals’ and sometimes through small-scale mail-order operations. The latter describes self-published, printed and distributed magazines. While facilitating the spanning of global distance, these avenues also influenced the emerging music, encompassing simultaneously curation and consumption. It was due to these technologies that many of Australia’s earliest extreme metal exponents were known outside of the country before they had any significant name nationally. Melbourne’s Hobbs’ Angel of Death, an early Australian death metal band, exemplify this situation. The band’s grisly output, styled as ‘virgin metal’ to allude to its purity and uncompromising nature, earned the band a record deal with German label Steamhammer and relatively strong sales abroad while remaining relatively unknown at home.

Sydney’s Sadistik Exekution (formed in late 1985) provide an especially compelling example of how isolation and obstinate ideals facilitated a singular and influential musical statement. The band formed alongside the burgeoning Norwegian black metal scene and were known to key players like Øystein ‘Euronymous’ Aarseth of Mayhem and Jon ‘Metalion’ Kristiansen, the editor of perhaps the most pivotal zine on the development of black metal in Northern Europe, Slayer. Kristiansen, a member of the infamous ‘inner circle’ of Norwegian black metal, claims that Sadistik Exekution was ‘the most important band in Slayer mag history’.²⁷

Sadistik Exekution’s output is as fierce and intense as that of any of their contemporaries in the late eighties and early nineties. Their music blends a hellish Norwegian black metal-styled tremolo-heavy guitar approach with a primal and ceaseless drum battery, largely constituted of blast beats. Their music, which they considered death metal, is sometimes taken to be prototypical of the ‘war metal’ substyle, merging black and death metal.²⁸ In addition to this hybrid foundation, the band have two notable elements which differentiate them from most contemporaneous extreme metal. First, their bassist, Dave Slave, often featured in a prominent melodic role in the band, is far more virtuosic and foregrounded than is normal of the time and style (an interesting parallel to draw with the next case study, Ne Obliviscaris). Secondly, their singer, Rok, covers a wide range of atypical vocal and lyrical approaches. Rok’s vocals veer from black metal shrieks and guttural barks to comedic yells, theatrical moans, and barrages of decisively Australian profanity and insults delivered in a thick Australian drawl. This vocabulary includes slang and expressions such as ‘drongos’, ‘how ya’s going?’, ‘bloody crook’, and myriad other instances of Australian vernacular and idiom. Viewed within the context of early extreme metal, such affectations are unusually self-aware, highlighting an intrinsic absurdity. This activity relates to Kahn-Harris’ ‘reflexive anti-reflexivity’: a concept in metal studies used to explain how metal practitioners and fans can simultaneously champion the thematic integrity of something while actually comprehending it as the opposite.²⁹ The difference in Sadistik Exekution’s work, as compared to most of their contemporaries, is the temerity with which they rejected metal coding, specifically its pursuit of thematic pretence and po-faced seriousness. Further, they considered this very seriousness and pretence as weak and inauthentic; to quote Rok: ‘we were Australian, not Norwegian, we were rough and aggressive, not thin and feminine sounding’.³⁰ In this late eighties and early nineties extreme metal milieu, no bands were as brazen as they were in highlighting and revelling in absurdity and madness (and its inherent comedy). This awareness of the ludicrousness of one’s approach alongside an effectively intense and thematically transgressive artistic output would later become a mainstay of much Australian extreme metal, from Ballarat’s Damaged to Melbourne’s Blood Duster and Frankenbox, and, more recently, to King Parrot, also from Melbourne.

Sadistik Exekution’s isolation explains much of this character. The band developed in a space largely bereft of stylistic contemporaries, thereby sidestepping the strict inter-scenic proliferation of codes like those seen in, for example, Norwegian black metal. Their tether to global scenes – zines and tape trading – provided a broad stylistic pallet embodying many global developments in metal music. But due to the band’s isolation, they experienced little pressure to follow any of these movements precisely, and so their output became distinctively hybridised, bearing the qualities of many substyles. The fact that they did this while maintaining scenic authenticity and respect from their overseas contemporaries is notable. One potential justification for this could be the sense of unpredictability and untethered chaos in their public personas, as though to insinuate that their breaks from metal coding are simply symptoms of being completely socially and culturally unhinged, a quality which is clearly celebrated in much of their media coverage.³¹

The character founding Sadistik Exekution’s persona, and echoed throughout the history of Australian metal and rock more generally, is that of the Australian larrikin.³² Although a constant figure in Australian folk culture, ‘larrikin’ has meant different things in different eras, from savage urban criminality in the early nineteenth century through to a pervasive and treasured vestige of contemporary Australian culture celebrating brashness, irreverence and roguishness.³³ Larrikinism is expressed in the idiom ‘taking the piss’ – a Commonwealth expression, which describes making fun of someone or something with a friendly redress, often to bring that thing or person down to earth. In this ostensibly light-hearted manner, larrikins push incessantly at convention and good taste. The implication is that the joke may be pushed far, but it will remain essentially harmless. Perhaps unsurprisingly, such a jocular attitude (observed, too, in the work of Buffalo) deflects from a host of potentially dysfunctional behaviours, rendering them as little more than idiosyncratic quirks of the Australian national identity despite sometimes concealing and even justifying more problematic activities, such as violence, racism and misogyny. While this persona is exemplified by myriad bands in all styles of Australian music, its situation in Sadistik Exekution’s brand is particularly obvious, justifying both the band’s raucous, hysterical and uncouth public persona as well as its wanton aversion to following the codes of extreme metal authenticity. The band’s distance from the origins of its style, the methods of the music’s arrival (and consequent dissemination), and the culture surrounding and suffusing the band members’ lives all play a part in this distinctively unhinged and chaotic musical statement and its, perhaps surprising, legitimation.

Contemporary Australian Metal and Ne Obliviscaris

The eighties saw the stylistic ambit of Australian metal broaden, but it proliferated far further throughout subsequent decades to the present. Indeed, there is a theme in international metal media that Australia’s current metal offerings are notably artistically and sonically varied. While the overall output of the country matches its population, a sizable portion of these bands occupy unique and oftentimes influential positions in global metal. Bands like Northlane, Voyager, Karnivool, Psycroptic, Twelve Foot Ninja, Dispossessed, Portal and Caligula’s Horse illustrate this diversity. Some of these bands, such as Karnivool and Northlane, acted as fountainheads for burgeoning metal substyles. All occupy singular positions in Australian metal, demonstrating little creative tether to contemporaneous scenes, local or global. Some employ distinctive musical practices while some explore paramusical theming which is novel and unusual in the context of global metal. While the distance-related pressures have been different for each of these bands, many of whom experienced at least a portion of their career with the presence of the internet, their location and output reveal parallels to their forebearers, namely them being stylistically idiosyncratic and dismissive of metal codes and authenticity.

Melbourne’s Ne Obliviscaris, formed in 2003, are an interesting case study in this regard. They embody a high degree of stylistic hybridity, melding styles which would regularly be taken as incompatible in discourses of (extreme) metal authenticity (for example, black metal and progressive rock), as well as perpetuating a confident and fully formed voice from early in their career without scenic contemporaries in similar styles to emulate. Ne Obliviscaris’s music is founded in extreme metal, and numerous extreme metal substyles find place in different aspects of their music. Drummer Dan Presland foregrounds ferocious and relentless death metal-derived double kick and blast beat patterns; vocalist Xenoyr utilises both death metal-styled guttural vocals and high-pitched shrieked vocals, more redolent of black metal; guitarists Benjamin Baret and Matt Klavins employ machine gun rhythmic riffing with a lineage to thrash metal by way of death metal, as well as more colourful and chord-based black metal patterns played either harmonically or as tremolo-picked arpeggios. These approaches are manifestly wide-ranging but still situated under the umbrella of extreme metal style markers.

Of more interest, though, are the ways the band actively undermine these recognisable hybrid extreme metal qualities. Ne Obliviscaris employ a violinist, Tim Charles, who also acts as their melodic vocalist. Charles’s virtuosic violin, rather than behaving like a (reasonably normalised in metal) symphonic layer, occupies a role more akin to a lead guitar, establishing key melodies and countermelodies and acting, continuously, as an Apollonian foil to the brutality of the underlying metal music.³⁴ This is especially evident in the fiddle-like performative timbre often utilised, as well as a whole range of expressive nuances and articulations like harmonics, portamento (sliding between notes) and pizzicato (plucking with fingers rather than bowing). The fragile, human qualities of these techniques and others provide a distinctive contrast to the machine-like metal foundations of the band’s music. In a similarly creative approach, Martino Garattoni’s bass relatively rarely performs in unison with the guitars nor occupies the lower fundamental qualities of the song’s harmony. It often acts, instead, as another smooth melodic voice, foiling the music’s harshness and density. Moreover, Ne Obliviscaris generally convey the influence of non-metal musics like flamenco, Gypsy jazz and classic psychedelic and progressive rock, all compositionally situated to provoke the greatest drama by contrast to the band’s metal underpinnings.

Ne Obliviscaris sound like no other band in the metal landscape, and this uniqueness has attracted a significant underground following the world over. Regardless, the band often describe the same pressures experienced by essentially all Australian underground artists: cost of touring, less support from industry and policy in the country, and so forth.³⁵ Their answer to these oft-repeated issues was an unconventional one: crowdfunding. While the band are signed to an independent label, Season of Mist, they have, since 2016, been funded primarily by their fans through the American membership platform Patreon.³⁶ Over 700 fans, at the time of writing, contribute almost $9,000 AUD (the equivalent of around $6,500 USD) to Ne Obliviscaris each month. Although reasonably accepted now, Ne Obliviscaris were early adopters – as a metal band – of this avenue and were criticised by many for the approach at the time. The band continue to emphasise how necessary this approach has been to their longevity.³⁷

While the outrageous larrikinish character shared by Sadistik Exekution and many other Australian bands is not necessarily evident in Ne Obliviscaris’s identity, their defiance for convention is no less charged. On the one hand, their particular sonic hybrid, crystallising without scenic contemporaries or clear overseas antecedents, is brazen and original. On the other, their answer to problems catalysed by their geographical distance and underground scenic positioning is clearly built from a stubborn ingenuity, one echoed – albeit in parallel and sometimes contrasting manners – across Australian metal.

Ne Obliviscaris arguably do not embody an ‘Australian’ aspect to their sound, at least not in the same way bands like King Parrot, Twelve Foot Ninja or Dead Kelly might be said to through their direct (paramusical) employment of Australian accent and argot. This observation could be extended to many acknowledged Australian metal bands, perhaps more than the inverse, and so this marker has limited use in characterising Australian metal. Rather, what Ne Obliviscaris, Sadistik Exekution, Buffalo and many other Australian metal bands share is a negotiation with their mutual circumstances: isolation, distance from scenic hubs, and the absence of large or well-established local scenes. They also share in stubbornly surmounting these problems, often resulting in mutually inventive and novel sonic and aesthetic outcomes. In any case, these common variables have some effect on the bands’ identity and practice. Buffalo are largely characterised through their offensive and inflammatory paramusical materials, created as a response to a disinterested and conservative media and public. Sadistik Exekution are known for their tremendously heavy and out-of-control music made as a response to their estimation that pretence and authority, a pervasive target of the larrikin character, diminishes metal purity. Ne Obliviscaris forged a genuinely novel sonic hybrid and, after battling with geographical handicaps for over a decade, disseminated it through an equally novel funding platform, one which cyclically allowed and allows the band supreme freedom over their stylistic vision.

Conclusion

The history of Australian metal is dotted with novelty, with necessity driving invention and defiance plotting courses against convention. Considering just how varied, how hybrid and how singular many leading Australian metal bands are, defining common qualities is a difficult undertaking. This chapter considered, instead, some of the distance-related negotiations faced by Australian metal acts as a means of grouping and conceptualising their practice and situated this quality in the work of three key bands from across the music’s historical trajectory. While the particularities of this quality are respectively unique, negotiation with distance remains a pervasive aspect of Australian metal, one with broad and tangible ramifications across the style’s musical and paramusical developments. One cannot write the history of Australian metal without considering this ongoing negotiation.