A playlist can tell you where a band came from more honestly than any press release ever could. This time around, Radio Free Alice skipped the usual parade of chart-toppers and instead just laid out their Melbourne friend group for everyone to see—the playlist is called "Melbourne Friends," and it's packed with Dumbhead, Rain Dogs, HighSchool, and The Belair Lip Bombs, who've had their own turn on The Cover. This isn't some algorithm's recommendation—it's a band saying: we grew up out of this crowd.
The four-piece Australian indie outfit is the star of this week's NME The Cover (October 19), with the feature written by Jordan Bassett and shot by Tom Oxley. The playlist dropped simultaneously on Spotify and Apple Music, and the timing couldn't be better—Radio Free Alice's debut album "What's In Between" lands October 30, meaning the playlist doubles as a warmup act for the release itself.
In the feature, frontman Noah Learmonth and guitarist Jules Paradiso looked back on how they met as teenagers. "When you're 14, 15, finding someone you can just freely make music with and mess around with—that's a big deal, and exciting too. It beats grinding away alone," Paradiso said. He added that after years of working together, it eventually clicked: "Oh, shit, okay—maybe we actually have something worth pushing forward with."
That early chemistry eventually grew into real ambition. Learmonth didn't hold back in the feature, calling out how a lot of similar bands are too scared to admit they want to make it big—"afraid it'll be embarrassing if you say it and then don't deliver"—which just means nobody actually chases it, and everyone keeps passing around mixtapes to hipster friends in share houses, never really breaking through. "We've never felt the need to pretend we don't have ambition, because there's already too many people in this scene faking that."
To read the full Radio Free Alice Cover story, head over to NME for the complete feature and a list of other artists who've been on The Cover.
