Austin in March moves at a kind of controlled chaos – gear being lugged down sunburnt sidewalks, bands downing their weight in tacos as they sprint between sets, and dusty alleyways pressed into service as makeshift venues. Swapmeet seemed to thrive in that churn. Across five days at SXSW 2026, the Adelaide four-piece played 13 shows. They swear it wasn’t a dare, even if it sure sounds like one. The band, who draw loosely from four decades of indie rock – from the Pixies’ explosive choruses to the hushed intensity of Big Thief – are nothing if not relentlessly eager. Their only regret from this year’s SXSW? “I wish we could have done more,” says bassist Josh Doherty, joining NME via Zoom with his bandmates Venus O’Broin (vocals, guitar) and Jack Medlyn (guitar, drums, vocals). “I feel like we’d have been better off doing 20 shows. All that extra time can be dangerous.”
The quartet (rounded out by Maxwell Elphick, who rotates between guitar and drums) aren’t prone to exhaustion – or wasting opportunities. Anyone who’s seen them live will recognise their knack for turning that restlessness into something electrifying. It often feels like they’re assembling the songs in real time when they’re onstage, and yet just as the songs threaten to collapse on themselves, they somehow manage to pull them back from the brink and snap them into shape. Swapmeet do it all at full tilt – members swapping instruments, ricocheting across the stage like pinballs.
That same restless energy runs through everything they do – even their origin story. O’Broin admits to poaching Medlyn and Doherty from another band on one of the last nights of high school. “I’ve actually got a drunken video of me filming Jack on that night, going, ‘You need to come jam with me and my friend Maxwell.’” And just like that, Swapmeet were born.
For all that momentum, their ascent hasn’t been as fast as you might have guessed. The band point to a few reasons: forming in 2020 at the height of COVID, writing a lot of “unlistenable” songs early on, and simply being based in Adelaide. The city’s isolation – an eight-hour drive from the nearest major city – made touring difficult, and the band’s lack of connections to industry hubs like Melbourne and Sydney made it even harder to get their music heard. “The only people who came to our gigs were our friends,” O’Broin says. “And the only gigs we went to were our friends’ gigs.”
The turning point came in 2024. After self-releasing their debut EP ‘Oxalis’ the year prior, Swapmeet were invited to BigSound, Australia’s premier showcase for emerging talent. O’Broin still remembers the rollercoaster of emotions from that day: the excitement of their first major festival slot quickly gave way to dread as the crowd thinned after the preceding act. “Everyone started leaving, and I thought, ‘Oh well, I guess we came all this way for nothing.’” But as the band finished setting up, the room filled again – tighter than before. “I was relieved,” she says, “but also wondering if they’d shown up for the right band.”
There was no mistake, and the unexpectedly rapturous reception at BigSound emboldened the band to make another bet on themselves: recording their debut album, ‘Mount Zero’, entirely independently. Similar to the process they employed for the EP, the band stitched together each song, voice-memoing ideas to each other and taking input from all four members. O’Broin frequently refers to their process as a collage, where songs are cut up, added to, and reconfigured into something new. The result is a kind of jubilant haphazardness, shaped as much by the band members’ disparate instincts as by touchstones that stretch from shoegaze stalwarts My Bloody Valentine to Chicago indie cult heroes Twin Peaks.
Pressed to describe their sound in a word, O’Broin eventually lands on “goofy”. It sounds flippant, but she’s not wrong. Even their most straightforward songs – like ‘Mount Zero’’s exclamatory lead single ‘I Know!’ – lean into an off-kilter charm: guitars sit just slightly askew, melodies feel improvised on the spot, and O’Broin’s vocals flicker between playful self-awareness and childlike naivety. It’s a looseness that comes naturally, much like their live show, often revealing a sharp instinct for hooks just beneath the surface chaos.
That ingratiating weirdness extends to the lyrics, too. O’Broin admits they can read like Mad Libs, a byproduct of the band’s unconventional approach to writing. While not quite as inscrutable as another one of their heroes, Pavement, Swapmeet will happily drop a reference to early-2000s sitcom Malcolm in the Middle (‘Bonnie’) without explanation – and trust it to land. More often than not, it does.
“The ethos of the band is just us four making whatever we feel like making together” – Venus O’Broin
Once the record was finished, the band had planned to continue independently. They assumed a debut album from a relatively unknown Adelaide band wouldn’t exactly be a hot commodity. But on a whim, they sent it to Winspear, the US-based indie label behind a new wave of effervescent, shoegaze-adjacent acts like Wishy and Winter. To their surprise, the label didn’t just bite – it made Swapmeet its first international signing, following a meeting in Los Angeles late last year.
Fresh off SXSW, Swapmeet now find themselves on the cusp of something bigger, with a debut album imminent and globe-trotting festival slots soon to be announced. Not bad for a band that started with a half-serious, half-drunken invitation – and still seems to operate on that same impulse. “The ethos of the band is just us four making whatever we feel like making together,” says O’Broin, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “There’s really no higher motive than that.” It hasn’t steered them wrong yet. How far they go from here is anyone’s guess, but Swapmeet seems to thrive when the odds are longest.
Swapmeet’s ‘Mount Zero’ is out on July 17 via Winspear.
