'Halfway' To Fame: Swapmeet's Soaring Success

From the likes of humble stages across Adelaide, including The Crown and Anchor Hotel and The Hotel Metro, Swapmeet have skyrocketed. Buzzing with alternative indie rock, nods to '90s grunge textures, and whirring slowcore sounds, the four-piece have announced extensive tour dates across Australia, Europe, the UK and North America alongside the release of their debut album Mount Zero.

Formed in their final year of high school in 2020, the four friends quickly made the band a priority, agreeing it was something they were all going to take very seriously. Going by their original name Sour Sob, the quartet began playing locally, with other bands in Adelaide.

"We've been so lucky," Maxwell of Swapmeet says on their upbringing in Adelaide's music scene.

"We played our first gig and haven't stopped since. Never had a problem, ever!" he states with an honest smile. Venus, lead singer and guitarist, pokes in, "Well, except for one," referring to legal threats the act received from local artist Soursob Bob, a small scandal that inspired the change of their band name to Swapmeet.

"That doesn’t even count," Maxwell says.

To record their album, the band hunkered down for about a week in Port Noarlunga, at bandmate Jack's partner’s parents' house last year.

"It was perfect, and we got into a zone. Things that we weren't quite happy with before, we finally had the space to fix. I think we were also able to understand and view [the album] as a full body of work."

Swapmeet have honed in on their sound. Springboarding off their first EP Oxalis, Mount Zero builds on that soundscape, while exploring different avenues of experimentation. From spacey sweeping guitars and dreamy layered effects to gritty, gut-punching intensity, and verses that follows coming-of-age themes like nostalgia, heartbreak and the transition from childhood to adulthood. The album is as sonically cohesive and thoughtful as it is refreshingly original and eclectic – which is what sets Swapmeet apart.

The title of the album has also become increasingly significant to the band, especially as they continue to grow and evolve.

"There's a Jeff Tweedy quote about feeling like a song lyric has come out of nowhere, and it doesn’t make any sense, but then he realises a couple of years later exactly what he was writing about. I feel like we’ve kind of had that with Mount Zero," Venus says.

"[Mount Zero] was a sign that we would pass on the way to Melbourne and back. At first, we just thought 'oh, that’s a cool name', and now I've realised the significance of how prevalent that idea is in our lives.

"It became symbolic of a lot of things. We find different ways to connect to the title and the idea of Mount Zero," Venus and Maxwell agree, but particularly that the mountain itself is "a place you pass but never go to, like a symbol of people you'd see but never meet."

READ MORE: Culture Wars: A Debut Album Crafted In Stadiums

This relates to them as "20-year-olds that meet a lot of people and are presented with so many different avenues which we can't follow because we're committed to this."

"Also, it's just like a big mound of nothing," they shrug.

"That all sounds awfully scary," I comment.

But not to Swapmeet; they know they're exactly where they’re meant to be, and they embrace everything as it comes. Even the crazy stuff that makes them go, "What the fuck are we doing here?"

Venus and Maxwell laugh at the craziness of touring overseas with their bandmates, not quite knowing how they ended up in such an incredible position.

"We were playing at Phoenix Central Park in Sydney, and Maxwell described us as 'kids from District 12 playing for the Capitol'," Venus laughs.

"I'll sound like a wanker for saying this," she prefaces, before reflecting on truly out-of-body moments. "We were in New York, and we did an interview for Rolling Stone in their head office after just meeting Diplo in the foyer. We were answering questions, and I look over, and there was a window with the whole [view] of New York City. Suddenly it all clicked, I thought, 'woah, this is mad'."

She also reminisces on more candid moments, "it was four years ago," she says, "the time we wrote a really bad song called 'Coinophobia'.

"It had this one riff, and I just thought, 'we have the best fucking band in the world'. We fully believed it…in retrospect, oh my god, [the song] was terrible."

Whether it really was terrible or not we shall never know. But what we do know is, Swapmeet are going places.

I was lucky enough to see the band play at their instore performance and signing night at Clarity Records on July 16. An audience of fans, friends, and family poured into the store, spilling out of the front door, even watching from outside on the street; the venue simply could not accommodate the amount of Adelaidean Swapmeet lovers.

It was my first time seeing them live, and I couldn’t help but shake an overwhelming, intuitive, gut feeling I had; I just couldn’t stop thinking, "These guys are going to be huge."

Listen to their album Mount Zero, out now, and brag about being the nichest person in your friend group. Catch Swapmeet on September 4 at Rhino Room in Adelaide with support act Dogworld. Tickets on sale at oztix.com.au.