Ella Ion borrowed a tape machine to record in the Adelaide Hills. Swapmeet took their work to a house at Port Noarlunga, with a view of the water and room for everyone to try things. Behind the upcoming bands and artists from Adelaide worth getting to know, these small arrangements matter: somebody lends equipment, shares a room or makes space for a song to become something larger.
This selection brings together emerging acts and underheard independent projects at different stages of that journey. There is restless indie rock, intimate folk, progressive metalcore, experimental art-rock and a hardworking pub band. Their audiences overlap in community radio playlists, local studios and venues, even when their records head in wonderfully different directions. Each has a story worth staying for.
Five upcoming bands and artists from Adelaide to spend time with
1. Swapmeet — four friends making room for the unexpected
Swapmeet’s early story has the pleasing untidiness of friendship: school connections, a party, discovering someone lived around the corner, then making music in a basement. The Adelaide four-piece share vocals, instruments and songwriting, which gives their indie rock room to keep changing shape. Sweetness, rough edges and bursts of distortion all belong in the picture.
For their debut album Mount Zero, released in July 2026, they spent two weeks working together at a Port Noarlunga house. Their label biography recounts writing and recording in different rooms, with ping-pong filling some of the gaps. That image is a lovely introduction to a record about the first heartbreaks, embarrassments and uncertain choices of adulthood. There is comfort in imagining those feelings being worked through with your friends close by.
Olive Rush’s portrait catches a similarly unforced style: everyday shirts, a cap, a vivid blue top and a brick wall. Start with Mount Zero and follow it into the album. The name came from a roadside sign the band repeatedly passed travelling to Melbourne’s music rooms. Their world is getting wider, but the shared curiosity at its centre remains an appealing place to meet them.
2. Ella Ion — tenderness you can hold in your hands
There is something revealing about Ella Ion’s affection for cassettes. In a June interview with frankie, she talked about enjoying the physical routine of inserting, rewinding and playing a tape. It is an invitation to give music a little time and attention, and a fitting way into her folk songwriting, which also draws on country and indie rock.
Liminal Archive gathers songs made across a period of touring and change. Its closing track, My Love, was recorded alone in the Adelaide Hills on a borrowed tape machine. Restrained acoustic guitar and aching strings frame its longing. Elsewhere, Mess In Your Eyes grew from a piano idea during isolation into a song offering gentleness to a friend. That movement from a private struggle towards another person gives her writing a quietly generous quality.
Her portrait, in a red top, checked skirt and cap beneath a pier, has the same tactile appeal: weathered surfaces, ordinary clothes, a person comfortably present. Start with Liminal Archive, released in June. Its credits preserve the small network behind the recordings, including co-producer Stefan Blair and sessions at Yorke Street Recorders. The songs may begin alone, but other people’s care helps them reach us.
3. LUMENS — heavy music with a human pulse
LUMENS make progressive metalcore that leaves space for both technical detail and emotional release. Formed in Adelaide in 2022, the four-piece move between intricate riffs, breakdowns, clean vocal melodies and screams. Those ingredients give them a broad expressive range: pressure can build through the instruments while a melody offers something to reach towards.
Their July 2026 single CYBER takes an unsettling approach to desire, speaking from the perspective of a craving that promises comfort and becomes destructive. The band’s own account of the song describes that pull through the friction between inviting vocals and aggression. It is a specific dramatic idea, and a useful starting point if you like heavy music to explore a feeling as well as deliver a physical jolt.
The press photograph adds another side: four faces squeezed together, grinning and pulling expressions against a blue background. That visible affection matters. In July, their Rhino Room bill with Caution:Thieves and Elision connected the Adelaide band with peers from Melbourne and Sydney. Follow CYBER into the 2025 self-titled EP for more of their search for identity and release. The noise has people behind it, and this photograph makes them particularly easy to warm to.
4. Anya Anastasia — letting the outside world into the song
Anya Anastasia makes experimental art-rock in the Adelaide Hills, bringing folk, psychedelic and desert-rock influences into music shaped by layered voices and unusual textures. Her earlier life in theatrical performance gives her a distinctive presence, but the tenderness of her solo songwriting is just as compelling. There is curiosity here about how to live, care and keep creating in a troubled world.
In a 2026 InReview interview, she named nature as her favourite collaborator and described recording sounds from the soil and forest during the Art For Takayna residency. She also pointed to a very human local network: engineer and collaborator Lucinda Machin, songwriter Jamie Lena and the femme soloist night We.Are.All.Ants at the Grace Emily. The music grows through those relationships as well as through solitary observation.
Begin with Burrow, whose cello, guitar and vocal textures offer a way into her sound, then seek out the new Takayna. Her contribution to ILA’s Art For Takayna programme brings cello and bass alongside forest footage. In Roman Wojtkowski’s live portrait, loose blonde hair, a black dress and electric guitar sit amid glowing stage colour. The visual drama feels welcoming: an invitation to look more closely at the life around us.
5. Fuselage — original songs beneath the pub lights
Fuselage formed in 2019, rehearsing beneath aircraft passing over their airport rehearsal space. It is an appropriately noisy beginning for an Adelaide band built around original rock songs, strong beats and melody. They are the more seasoned, quietly local discovery in this selection, with a fondness for the groove and swagger of older guitar music.
Their March 2026 account of playing the Wheaty is full of small details that make a scene feel real: loose cables, new songs opening the set, old gigging friends 4-Cats on the bill, and the band’s longtime photographer joining them for an acoustic song. The gratitude towards the audience is especially endearing. You get the sense of musicians who value the evening itself and the people who made time for it.
The supplied black-and-white stage photo keeps that introduction close to the room: a patterned shirt, a lamp, strings of lights and instruments taking up most of the space. Start with Golden Keys or Love Don’t Come Here No More, both 2025 releases available through their official listening page. A new favourite can be a band that has spent years playing nearby, waiting for you to walk through the door.
Follow the names around the room
Three D Radio’s Local Fruit And Veg offers another way into this world; its playlists have included both Ella Ion and Swapmeet among a much wider spread of local artists. Read the names on a support bill, follow a producer’s credits or spend an evening with a community radio show. Adelaide has plenty of musicians worth finding through those modest, personal connections.
For more introductions, our Sydney feature follows five other independent acts. Here, a borrowed machine, a shared house and a familiar pub are already helping people make music that travels.
Hero image: Swapmeet, photographed by David Milan Kelly and supplied by Winspear. POPTOPIC used AI to enhance exposure, colour and framing while preserving the people and setting.
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