TRIPLE J's weekly Like A Version segment has a history of making a career-changing impact on Australian acts.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Take The Wiggles' version of Tame Impala's Elephant, which made the children's entertainers the most unlikely winners of the Triple J Hottest 100 or DMA'S cover of Cher's Believe, still the Britpop revivalists' most popular song.
Bad//Dreems' appearance on Like A Version in November 2019 left a lasting impression on the Adelaide pub-rock band, but in way far deeper than Spotify streams.
On that day Bad//Dreems teamed up with Midnight Oil frontman Peter Garrett, Indigenous artist Emily Wurramara and Brad Bara and Don Murrungun from Gulf Of Carpentaria band, Mambali, to perform Warumpi Band's Blackfella/Whitefella.
Long after the performance's streaming analytics slowed down, the experience continued to resonate with Bad//Dreems. It helped inspire chief songwriter and guitarist Alex Cameron to delve deeper into Indigenous history.
Then last August the band were invited into remote communities in Arnhem Land by Mambali where they shared traditional music written about the Macassans from Indonesia, who traded with Indigenous people thousands of years before white settlement.
"On a number of levels that blew my mind," Cameron says. "One that the melody that he sang is hundreds of years old and then he went on to explain that other melodies are thousands or tens of thousands of years old as a form of story-telling."
Bad//Dreems' growing interest in Indigenous culture and history resulted in the band's fourth and most political album, Hoo Ha!
Never a band concerned with niceties, the single Jack is served like stiff undercut to the failure of Australia's education institutions to adequately teach Aboriginal history.
"No Truganini, Jandamarra, Billy Barlow/ No referendum, stolen children, Eddie Mabo/ No language, no treaty, no respect for the land," vocalist Ben Marwe spits with venom.
Elsewhere on Mallee they rip back the curtain on the Anzac Day mythology which is used "to sell warm beer at the footy and piss on their memory", environmental degradation and the treatment of Indigenous people.
Cameron says the band's near-death experience due to the pandemic, empowered them to produce their most honest work.
"At least personally, I reasoned that we've got the chance to speak plainly and really relish the opportunities and privilege we have to some platform," he says.
"When we got the chance, it was to speak plainly, that was the idea, both lyrically and musically really. Not to try and second guess anything too much."
The majority of Hoo Ha! was recorded at Melbourne's Soundpark Studios in early 2022 with Dan Luscombe, of The Drones, at the helm.
Cameron says Luscombe's biggest contribution was to capture the band's live energy in a sterile studio.
"The band has always felt most comfortable in a live setting," he says.
"It's weird, it's almost taken the fourth album to work out how to make that work in the studio.
"Part of it is a mindset thing, part of it is becoming better craftsmen and being good enough players to relax and deliver a performance."
Hoo Ha! is also easily Marwe's best vocal performance. Across the previous albums Dogs At Bay (2015), Gutful (2017) and Doomsday Ballet (2019) Marwe's ocker vocal and natural charisma ensured Bad//Dreems were among the most intriguing of Australia's yob-rock revivalists.
On Hoo Ha! he uses his voice to embody a motley crew of characters. There's the working-class preacher (Waterfalls), the anti-vax protester (Mansfield No.6), the suburbanite speed freak (See You Tomorrow) and an 30-something alcoholic (Shame).
"Sometimes it's representative of the type of person within us or sometimes it's an entirely fictional character," Marwe says.
"It was something we really did delve into more so on this record than any previous release.
"In the past I probably didn't give it much thought and Alex would just hand me a sheet of lyrics or I would have some scribbles in my phone and just scream it out in a couple of takes."
Hoo Ha! is out on Friday. Bad//Dreems visit Trash Cult, Bendigo (May 18, 6pm); Music Farmers, Wollongong (May 21, 6pm); Hiss & Crackle Records, Newcastle (May 23, 5pm) and Thrills, Byron Bay (May 24, 4pm).