FROM THE INSIDE
I've been in this scene since April 2024. I've written about it for two years. I've documented gigs that other people forgot happened. I've interviewed bands that don't exist anymore. I've been to community halls in suburbs that people who claim to know the scene couldn't point to on a map. I've watched, bands get started, bands die, friend groups form, friend groups collapse, and through all of it I've been the one writing it down. Not because anyone asked me to. Because it needed to be written down and nobody else was doing it.
This is not a history. Breakbone already published a history. This is a diagnosis. The scene in May 2026, what it is, what it isn't, what it could be if people stopped pretending and started building.
THE LINEAGE
You cannot understand where we are without understanding where we came from. The Saints at 4 Petrie Terrace, 1976. Ed Kuepper's buzzsaw guitar, Chris Bailey's deadpan snarl, Ivor Hay's nuclear drum fills in a room where the kit nearly touched the walls. Some fucker threw a brick through the window. They boarded it up and painted 'Club 76' on it to make it official. That's the DNA. That's the template. You don't like what exists, you build your own thing and you don't apologise for it.
Forty-three years later, Kaleb Collings saw the same void. A 14-year-old kid with a band called Absolution, a Donald Duck logo with the eyes crossed out, and a willingness to rent community halls and just play. Casualty Records. 2019. He didn't ask permission. He just started booking. King Lear's Throne, 27 June 2021, benefit gig for Bravehearts, Private Function headlining. Then the Wooloongabba Substation. Then the Albion Peace Centre. Then Paddington Hall, the same hall The Saints' crowd bounced off the hardwood floors of in the seventies.
Ixara Dorizac of Antidismal. George Roberts of Project Punk. Braxton Hunt-Nissen of Deadtrigger. Arran McKenzie and Johnnie Campbell of Gormless Records. Each one looked at what came before them and said the same thing Kaleb said, the same thing The Saints said: I can do this. And they did, for a time. Project Punk put on raucous, head-on gigs that drew in a crowd that wasn't school-band types anymore but actual alternative kids who wanted to feel something. Gormless Records gave one last hurrah for proper punk in community halls. Antidismal brought mainstream attention. Deadtrigger brought scale. SkatePUNK at Capalaba Skatepark in April 2024, two hundred people on a Monday, seven bands, fully free entry, food, drinks, funded by the YMCA. That was the peak.
Every single one of those entities is either dead, dormant, or unrecognisable.
THE DEATH
Casualty Records ended when Kaleb got scouted by the Broncos. Fair play. Project Punk committed what George called 'rock and roll suicide', picked up the phone, said their message, hung up. Antidismal pivoted to indie pop when they saw a ship that promised them the treasures of 'the industry' and jumped aboard. The punk label that once championed DIY community hall gigs became another Triple J Unearthed hustle. Gormless saw the community halls jacking their rental fees, bond payments and terms to the absolute limit, watched people show up to gigs just to get on it and fight, and the gigs dried up.
Deadtrigger cancelled DeadFEST. What Braxton did was significant and carrying the scene on your back is a big load. But overextending yourself causes issues and sometimes you step back.
What filled the vacuum was worse than nothing. Gigs run by 'organisations' that feel like a corporate teambuilding exercise. All-ages slots at pubs in the Valley where the only people who understand what's going on are the band members' parents. Interstate bands playing to art school dropouts and West End hipsters in their twenties and thirties and calling it 'all-ages' because technically no one checked IDs. Bands that look the same, sound the same, act the same because they're all trying to sound like Nirvana or some pop starlet they've never met. Landfill indie. Beige. The industry got the message and hung up the phone.
The scene didn't die because people stopped caring. It died because the people who built the infrastructure burnt out, sold out, or aged out, and what replaced them was not built by kids who needed it to survive. It was built by adults who saw an opportunity to feel good about themselves.
WHO'S STILL STANDING
So who's actually doing shit in 2026? Not who's got the most followers or the flashiest merch or the right connections. Who's playing, writing, organising, building, with the same energy that Kaleb had when he rented his first hall?
Findaway. Guy Di Mattina, Sam Thornton, Taylor Clifford, Steven Labanne. Named after a Silverchair track because that's how Brisbane works, everything traces back to something that came before it. They released their debut album "Intertwined" and they are, without question, the most important band in this scene right now. Not because they're the most technically proficient or the most marketable. Because when they play, the room changes. I have seen Findaway play and felt the entire weight of whatever I was carrying that week lift off my shoulders for three minutes and forty seconds. That is not hyperbole. That is what rock and roll is supposed to do and they do it every time. They came up out of Wynnum-Manly, a suburb that's produced more scene-relevant bands per square kilometre than anywhere else in Brisbane. If the Redlands was the scene's second city, Wynnum is its beating heart.
Ember. New faces. Gaining traction fast. Dual guitar attack that fills a room without needing volume to compensate for lack of substance. I saw them at Coorparoo Hall on May 15th and their set was when the pit kicked off proper. Wall of death, circle pit, push pit, hardcore dancing. When every other band on the bill is warming up or cooling down, Ember is the ignition point. Watch them.
Palinola. These lot came all the way from Oakey, a town outside Toowoomba that you've never heard of because nobody has. Started at Oakey State High School in 2022 for a Triple J Unearthed competition and ended up making their Brisbane debut in 2024. Alt-rock, metal, post-hardcore, pop-punk, whatever you want to call it. They released their debut EP "Static Divide" in 2025. What matters about Palinola is what they represent: the scene is not just Brisbane. Kids in regional Queensland are watching what's happening here and building their own version of it. That's the handing-down process working exactly as it should.
Corkscrew. Sunshine Coast. Bassist Isla. Another example of the scene's influence radiating outward. When bands from outside Brisbane start playing Brisbane gigs and Brisbane bands start playing Sunshine Coast gigs, that's not a scene. That's a MOVEMENT. Corkscrew deserve more attention than they're getting and I'm putting their name in ink right here so that when people look back, they know who was there from the start.
Rupture. Organised May Metal Mayhem at Coorparoo Hall on May 15th. Hired the hall themselves, booked the bands themselves, ran the door themselves. No YMCA funding. No organisation backing. Just a band who wanted to play and knew the only way to make it happen was to do it themselves. That's Saints DNA. That's Kaleb DNA. That's the spirit this scene was founded on and Rupture brought it back when everyone else was waiting for someone else to go first.
THE INFRASTRUCTURE
Bands are only half the equation. You need places to play and people to organise.
Schema Collective have been doing this longer than most people in the current scene have been alive. Stoyan Stoyanov built a non-profit that unites musicians, raises money for mental health and social causes, and puts on proper events. SCHEMA Festival at The Valley Drive In, The Brightside, The Zoo. Forty-plus bands across two days. That's not a gig, that's an institution. Schema put on the Paddington Skatepark gig on April 18th that featured Whitts End, Change Correction, and Liasis. Community hall energy under open sky. They're proof that this model works when the people running it actually give a shit about the music and the community, not about their LinkedIn profile.
The Tribe Clubhouse in Redcliffe. Ryan Elson started it in 2018 as a social enterprise, low-cost meals, live music, a space for people to exist without being charged nine dollars for a flat white. They work with ten thousand people a year. Redcliffe is far from the city, true, but The Tribe is doing something nobody else in Brisbane's youth scene is doing right now: providing a consistent, affordable, accessible space where music happens regularly. That matters more than one-off gigs at venues that change their booking policy every six months.
Brisbane Music Spew. Natasha Ellis. Started her zine in December 2023 after stumbling onto the scene through Findaway. She covers gigs, bands, releases. She's been doing this since before most of the current wave of bands even had names. She and Breakbone are the only consistent documentation this scene has. When everything else falls apart, the writing survives.
WHAT NEEDS TO HAPPEN
I'm going to be direct because nobody else will.
The scene needs gigs in the city. Not in Redcliffe. Not in Capalaba. Not in Victoria Point. In Brisbane, where the trains go, where the buses go, where kids from Mansfield and Paddington and Wooloongabba and the northside can actually get to on a Saturday afternoon without their parents driving them an hour each way. Community halls. Coorparoo, Paddington, Albion, Wooloongabba. The same halls that The Saints played, that Casualty booked, that Project Punk filled. They're still there. Someone just needs to pick up the phone.
The scene needs bands who organise their own gigs instead of waiting for a label or an organisation to hand them a slot. Rupture did it on May 15th. It worked. The barrier to entry is a hall booking and an Instagram post. If your excuse is that it's too hard, you don't want it enough.
The scene needs to stop cannibalising itself. Cliques, drama, gossip, fake personas, people going to gigs to be SEEN instead of to LISTEN. The ramp at King George Square used to be where you'd meet ten new friends in an afternoon. Now it's where established groups sit in circles and ignore anyone they don't already know. That's how scenes die. Not from lack of talent. From lack of generosity.
The scene needs to remember what it's for. Not networking. Not 'building a brand'. Not getting Triple J airplay. Not impressing A&R scouts who will never show up to a community hall in Coorparoo. It's for the kid who doesn't fit in at school, who doesn't have anywhere to go on a Friday night, who hears a band for the first time and realises that the thing they've been looking for has been right here the whole time. That kid is the entire point. Everything else is noise.
FROM THE INSIDE
I titled this piece "From The Inside" because that's where I've been. Not reviewing gigs from a press pit with a lanyard. Not covering the scene from a desk in Melbourne or Sydney. From inside community halls where the carpet stinks and the red light makes everyone look like they're in a David Lynch film. From inside mosh pits where you take an elbow to the jaw and thank the person who threw it. From inside the conversations at 11pm after the last band's packed up and you're standing on the footpath and someone says something that changes how you think about music forever.
I started Breakbone in May 2024 because I went to a gig and knew someone needed to write it down. Two years later, I'm still writing it down. The scene is not dead. It's dormant. The bands are there. The energy is there. The hunger is there. What's missing is the infrastructure and the will to build it without waiting for permission.
The Saints didn't wait. Kaleb didn't wait. George didn't wait. Arran didn't wait. Rupture didn't wait.
Document the scene. Distribute the scene. Demonstrate the scene.
If you're reading this and you play in a band and you've never put on your own gig, do it this month. If you're reading this and you go to gigs but you've never talked to the kid standing alone at the back, go talk to them. If you're reading this and you think the scene is dead, come to the next community hall gig and stand in the front row and tell me it's dead to my face.
People are hungry for something to snap the scene out of its slumber. I'm telling you, from the inside: it's already starting. You just have to show up.
From the archive. Feature · May 2026 · a state-of-scene roster essay, carried verbatim.