For The Belair Lip Bombs’ hooky indie rock, simplicity is key
The first Australian signing to Third Man Records are making unpretentious rock’n’roll that puts live authenticity front and centre
Words by Spencer Hughes
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Words by Spencer Hughes
There’s no other word for it: the Belair Lip Bombs are just fucking cool. Their formula is so simple: keep the production slick, arrangements streamlined, hooks catchy as all hell. The drums should be dry and motorik, the guitar either skeletal or desert-dusty, the bass taking lead from time to time, and extra ingredients added only when they sound undeniably badass (like the Irish fiddle in the opening track of the band’s new album, ‘Again’). In the music video for recent single ‘Hey You’, the band perform on a rooftop, dressed in suits, and guitarist Mike Bradvica, with his shades on, lights up a cig like he’s in Reservoir Dogs. It turns out, in 2025, you can still totally sell the most cliché of rock’n’roll cool signifiers, as long as you sound like this. It helps, of course, if you’re Australian.
This type of tasty, bread-and-butter rock is so rarely done well these days, and it’s made the Lip Bombs one of the most promising bands to come out of the buzzy Melbourne indie scene in recent years. They’ve had glowing press, toured around the UK and the US, and become the first Australian act to sign to Jack White’s Third Man Records, which has been expertly tastemaking over the last few years with signings like Hotline TNT, Island of Love and recent Cover stars Die Spitz.
Of course, it only makes them cooler that in conversation the half of The Belair Lip Bombs we speak to are laidback and self-effacing. They Zoom in from understated settings: vocalist/guitarist Maisie Everett is grabbing a bite to eat outdoors at a cafe, while Bradvica is in a nondescript hotel room for a work trip (this being the music industry in 2025, they still have day jobs). As NME digs deeper into their philosophy on songwriting, trying to pinpoint what drives this revelatory sound, their answer is unpretentious and somewhat utilitarian.
“I think we’re conscious to keep it so that we can still play the songs live as a four-piece, and it not sound completely lacklustre. Oftentimes, I’ve seen bands live after hearing this amazing record, and it doesn’t deliver very well live,” Everett says, leaning back and tucking her legs up on the cafe seat. “We’re not that into putting synths in songs. I think we wanted to just make a record that hopefully has a lot of re-listen value. You don’t wanna make an album that’s cool but doesn’t age well.”
While Melbourne may be one of the world’s capital cities for indie rock, the members of the Lip Bombs all grew up just outside it, in a suburb with a “coastal, surfy sort of vibe” called Frankston. Everett and Bradvica met in secondary school and formed the band shortly after graduation in 2017. “Me and Mais are young for our year, so we were still underage when we did our first few shows,” Bradvica recalls. “We played at Cherry Bar, this iconic place in Melbourne, and got kicked out as soon as we finished.”
“You don’t wanna make an album that’s cool but doesn’t age well” – Maisie Everett
There wasn’t much happening culturally in Frankston, but one piece of infrastructure that it did have was a humble DIY space called Singing Bird Studio, which hosted recording studios, rehearsal spaces and eventually live shows of its own. “For the first five or six years, that was our home base,” Everett says. “We wrote all of our songs there, we recorded all the first EPs there, and played a bunch of gigs there. It’s one of the only places in Melbourne that does all-ages gigs, so it’s a place for people who are under 18 to be able to start bands and meet other people that are into music as well.
“I know at least for me, when I was in high school, [not] having other people that are like-minded, you can feel quite isolated. So I think having a space for kids to be able to go and be themselves and meet other people that are doing music is super important. It’s this really strong little community down there.”
Spurred on by the community at Singing Bird Studio (where the band still rehearse to this day), the young Lip Bombs released a self-titled EP in 2018, followed by another, ‘Songs To Do Your Laundry To’, in 2019. They were somewhat aimless for a few years, they say, but that changed when they made their first album, 2023’s ‘Lush Life’. “People really liked it,” – including NME, who proclaimed it a “thrilling debut” – “and that gave us the confidence to take it a bit more seriously,” Everett says.
They went into the studio to make their second album, ‘Again’, with a label budget to play with for the first time, having been approached by Third Man Records on their first trip to the US for SXSW 2024. “They showed a genuine interest and love for our music from the start, and everyone who works there is incredibly passionate about their work and all the artists they sign,” Everett says. The new arrangement did come with a certain amount of pressure, though. “I feel like there are songs that, if it was a couple years ago when we’d written it, we’d just probably have recorded it and put it out. Whereas this time I think we were like, ‘No, we can definitely do better than this, let’s keep chipping away at it,’” Everett affirms. “All the songs on ‘Lush Life’ were just what came out of us at that time. Whereas I feel like these songs, we maybe just have a stronger sense of identity as a band.”
“The rock music I grew up on is one guitar and it sounds like five. That’s what I try to do” – Mike Bradvica
Where ‘Lush Life’ was more indebted to the post-punk and psych-rock that’s trendy across Australia, ‘Again’ is straightforward and hooky. Opener ‘Again And Again’ is a bouncy, Strokes-y standout, while ‘If You’ve Got The Time’ has a Stones strut. ‘Another World’ and ‘Cinema’ have dreamier tones, while ‘Hey You’, with its throaty bass and hazy guitar, feels like peak Kings of Leon. On all of them, the live energy of the four-piece is palpable.
“We write all of our songs together as a band in a room,” Everett says. “I think there’s a lot of bands out there that’ll do the thing where they’ll write a song at home, demo it and send it to their bandmates, but I think we’re good at feeding off each other’s energies.”
“I try not to go too crazy with overdubs and all of that sort of stuff,” Bradvica adds. “The rock music I grew up on is just like, one guitar and it sounds like five. That’s what I try to do.”
In the past, Everett has jokingly described the band’s music as “limerence rock”, limerence being a pop-psychology buzzword that means a state of intense infatuation. While she’s now a little more cautious about defining it (“I don’t wanna pigeonhole it too much – I don’t even know what my songs are about half the time)”, it still seems as good a descriptor as any. She declares “I’ve been telling everybody I’m fine / But I’ve been thinking ‘bout you every night” (in ‘Again and Again’) and “I wanna be the one that you riff with / I wanna be the one that you kiss” (in ‘Another World’). This is cool music, but never nonchalant, particularly because the Lip Bombs are determined to write good hooks.
“Especially guitar bands that do pop nowadays, it’s so boring,” Bradvica protests. “I don’t wanna feel like an ‘old man yelling at cloud’, but it’s like, there’s no hook, no one really sings anymore. [We were] consciously trying to make pop music and still make stuff interesting.”
Ahead of ‘Again’’s release, the band tested out a few such songs on their recent first full tour of the US, supporting fellow Aussies Spacey Jane. They’ve been learning a lot about winning crowds over in unfamiliar places. “Sometimes [you get a good reaction in] the cities that you least expect it. It’s like, places that aren’t even on your radar, and there’ll be a really receptive audience,” Everett says. “We did a show in Portland, Oregon, which is somewhere I’ve never even thought of before in my life until we were there, and for whatever reason, the audience was really into it.”
That’s an experience the Lip Bombs will be having more and more in the coming months, with month-long tours of the UK and Europe, and North America on the books – and more besides, hopefully. “Hopefully the album is well-received and it all goes well, and it allows us to be able to tour more and go overseas again,” Everett says, as nighttime darkness starts to tint her Zoom window. “We’ll do all that and then probably start writing the next album, and do it all over again, I think.” This is typically understated, but as far as we’re concerned, there’s nothing cooler than the idea that the Belair Lip Bombs will keep showing up with great songs, again and again and again and again.
The Belair Lip Bombs’ ‘Again’ is out now via Third Man Records.
Listen to The Belair Lip Bombs’ exclusive playlist to accompany The Cover below on Spotify and on Apple Music here.
Words: Spencer Hughes
Photography: Ian Laidlaw
Makeup: Sara Rakhmetova
Styling: Chelsea Nguyen
Label: Third Man Records