Grace Chia has spent years helping other women find their confidence at a microphone. TEENS wrote their first album in a damp rehearsal room at the Royal Hobart Showgrounds. The upcoming bands and artists from Hobart worth knowing have stories like these: people making room for music, sometimes in difficult circumstances, and giving somebody else a reason to keep going.
This is a selection of emerging and underheard independent acts around nipaluna/Hobart, including musicians whose work reaches across Tasmania. Some are building on their first releases; others have a longer history that deserves a wider audience. There is bright guitar music here, confrontational hip-hop, restless post-punk and songs that leave enough silence for the birds. The city contains all of them.
Five upcoming bands and artists from Hobart to get to know
1. BOCCE: a soft spot for the hopeless romantic
BOCCE understand the affectionate comedy of having a friend who falls in love at full speed. Their July 2026 single Romancer turns that familiar figure into its central character, finding humour in the repeated disasters without giving up on the person having them. There is something lovely about a band choosing to tell a friend’s story with that much fondness.
The Hobart five-piece bring surf-rock brightness into an indie-rock sound with a taste for big, communal melodies. Romancer’s writing sessions with producer Jack Nigro encouraged a more direct, character-led approach. Think sun on the pavement, a head full of possibility and friends who know exactly how this might end. The band’s black-and-white portrait adds a playful dash of formality: suits, close quarters and hands getting between faces and the light.
That warmth has survived a less straightforward period behind the scenes. Their May hometown launch at Altar followed a year of moves and career changes, with The Pillars and B.C. Ferry joining the bill. Start with Romancer, then work back to Waste My Time. BOCCE offer an inviting way into the city’s guitar community, with enough feeling beneath the easy company to make you stay.
2. Grace Chia: finding her voice, then widening the circle
Grace Chia’s music has the precision of somebody who cared about words before she found a beat. Poetry led her towards rap and singing, and her Hobart practice now brings forceful bars, boom-bap rhythms and soulful R&B melodies together. Her writing can confront racism and expectations placed on women while making space for uncertainty, tenderness and the complicated business of being a person.
Her July 2026 album The Human Grey makes that curiosity its centre. Morning Fog and Dear Winter are useful entry points into its reflective world; the guest-filled Euterpe opens another door into her collaborative one. Blue hair, a direct gaze and relaxed sportswear give the supplied portrait a confidence that feels personal and unforced.
The community story matters just as much. In her 2025 Unearthed interview, Chia described organising inclusive hip-hop events after moving to Hobart, then watching more women step up to the microphone over the following years. She spoke about her younger sister finding confidence, too. That is a quietly moving measure of influence: someone sees you make a space and starts to believe they could belong there.
3. Dvrkworld: finding melody inside the fuzz
Dvrkworld’s name is pronounced Darkworld, but their musical invitation is more generous than that might suggest. The band folds shoegaze, dream-pop, garage rock and grunge together, putting melody inside layers of reverb and fuzz. For listeners drawn to the blurred edges of Slowdive or Mazzy Star, there is a promising doorway here: music with weight, haze and somewhere soft to land.
Formed in 2023, the group grew around Mary Shannon and Drew Farrant-Jayet, with Shawn Arnold and Ryan Unger completing the lineup. Their self-titled 2025 EP credits songwriting beside kanamaluka/River Tamar and in nipaluna/Hobart. That geography matters. They belong in this city’s musical conversation while remaining connected to places and collaborators elsewhere on the island.
Their June 2026 Twisted Lime bill paired them with visiting Brisbane band Dopamine, Isle Two and In Lieu: a small example of the rooms where those connections become tangible. Alex Pugh-Harris’s portrait catches the quartet in everyday clothes beside a timber fence, wonderfully removed from the grandness that psychedelic music can imply. Try Lotus or Sinking Ship from the EP, then follow STIMULATION. There is a whole small world behind the distortion.
4. TEENS: persistence with its teeth showing
TEENS have been releasing music for years, and their recent momentum has a long backstory. The Hobart trio of Shawn Arnold, Alex Davern and Jono Tate make abrasive post-punk where vulnerability and tightly managed tension sit close together. Their casual clothes, knit caps and graffiti-wall portrait suggest the practical wardrobe of people who have spent plenty of time around rehearsal rooms.
The band’s account of making their 2024 debut album gives that setting real weight. They wrote in a mouldy room at the Royal Hobart Showgrounds while people facing the housing crisis were living elsewhere on the grounds. Injuries and distance complicated the work. The story makes their persistence feel particular: songs kept taking shape while life kept making the process harder.
Negative Energy followed in September 2025, with a further vinyl edition in 2026 and an Australian tour this spring. Start with Like An Animal. Arnold also plays drums in Dvrkworld, a useful reminder that these scenes are built from overlapping lives. If our Melbourne discoveries sent you looking for small rooms and inventive guitar bands, keep TEENS on that list.
5. Tasha Zappala: songs that teach you to notice
Tasha Zappala offers a gentler route through Hobart’s independent music. The singer-songwriter and sound artist has an established practice, with a particularly intimate corner of it worth discovering now. Based in nipaluna, she brings environmental recordings into contemporary music and researches that relationship at the University of Tasmania.
Start with Forgotten Sweetness, recorded in Hobart and released in 2025. Its folk, ambient and field-recording elements offer an approachable introduction before the longer immersion of Weaving, Woven, released in March 2026. Those two extended pieces draw on recordings of northern Tasmania through dusk, night and dawn: insects, birds, moving air and the changing presence of a place.
There is care in the decision to give those small sounds so much time. Her forest portrait, seated on a fallen tree with a ukulele, earthy layers and a knitted cap, makes a fitting visual introduction. Zappala’s September performance update confirms an active season of shows, too. She is the discovery for someone who wants music to draw them closer to their surroundings, and who is happy for a song to move at the pace of attention.
Keep following the people
A scene becomes easier to explore when you start following these connections: a musician appearing in two bands, an MC welcoming new voices, a local bill giving visitors company. Hobart even joined a 2026 exchange with Christchurch in which participating bands shared homes, equipment and local knowledge. That kind of generosity deserves an audience.
Choose one release above and give it some uninterrupted time. Then read its credits, look up the support acts and buy a track or a ticket if something catches you. Our Perth feature offers another five paths to follow. Here, the next connection might already be sitting in an album’s liner notes.
Hero image: BOCCE, courtesy of the band’s official press gallery. POPTOPIC used AI to enhance exposure, colour and framing while preserving the people and setting.
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