Young guitar bands frequently inherit a habit of defensive irony. In independent music, admitting that you want to play to massive crowds can invite skepticism, as if taking your own prospects seriously risks diluting your credibility. Melbourne four-piece Radio Free Alice have chosen to abandon that familiar posture. With their debut album What’s In Between due to arrive on October 30, the group are being explicit about their desire to grow as large as possible, while taking care to shine a light on the peers who have surrounded them along the way.
To map out that local network, the band have assembled a streaming playlist titled Melbourne Friends, available on Spotify and Apple Music. The tracklist is an affectionate roll call of acts currently working in their immediate orbit, including Dumbhead, Rain Dogs, HighSchool, and The Belair Lip Bombs. By gathering these names into one place, Radio Free Alice present their own rise not as an isolated stroke of fortune, but as part of an active community of musicians sharpening each other through proximity.
The foundation of Radio Free Alice began years before any formal release, rooted in a teenage bond between frontman Noah Learmonth and guitarist Jules Paradiso. Meeting at fourteen or fifteen years old, the pair began collaborating and trading ideas long before they had an audience. Paradiso has reflected on the importance of having that kind of partnership during those formative years, pointing out how much easier and more exciting it is to create alongside someone else rather than trying to build music in isolation. After spending several years testing sounds and messing around with songs side by side, they realized that the partnership held a genuine spark that could serve as the foundation for a proper band.
That school-age creative rhythm ultimately expanded into the full quartet preparing for the arrival of What’s In Between. Releasing a debut full-length often forces a young act to reckon with cautious self-preservation, but singer Noah Learmonth is outspoken about the pitfalls of holding back. In his view, a fear of embarrassment keeps many guitar acts from acknowledging what they actually want from their work. Musicians dodge admitting they want to become a huge group because failing publicly feels humiliating, yet that reluctance leads straight into a trap, leaving artists stuck in share houses showing off cassette tapes to hipsters rather than testing how far their songs can travel.
Rather than adopting the standard indie defense of pretending not to care, Radio Free Alice have chosen to be transparent about their scale of ambition. With What’s In Between set to land on October 30, the band are not treating their goals as a private secret or an artistic liability. By pairing that drive with a visible commitment to their fellow Melbourne players on the Melbourne Friends playlist, they are heading into their first major release cycle with their origins in full view and their sights set firmly on the horizon.
