Gut Health, a six-piece band from Australia, is known for their energetic blend of dance-punk. The band incorporates diverse musical styles into their music, ranging from noise to folk, punk to jazz, and soul. The foundation of the band’s sound is physical in nature and revolves around creating and releasing energy. The genre that they attached themselves to is post-punk, which represents less of a reference to genre and more to a place in time when everyone was trying to tear everything down and redefine it.
Gut Health spent much of their time building the band’s sound in a storage unit in the Melbourne suburb of Brunswick, where they rehearsed and recorded their 2022 debut EP ‘Electric Chrome Party Girl.’ The EP features a jittery, frenetic sound that anticipates the band’s latest album, ‘Stiletto,’ set to release in October 2024. The album is a tense but ecstatic marriage of blistering noise that heaves wildly over incredibly danceable bones. It features Markmann’s spindly basslines that lock into Wallace’s muscular but loose drumming, while Murphy-Hill and Willmott’s guitars clash above and aggro electronics sputter like junked machines on the fritz.
The album’s title track is an epic, nearly eight-minute song that starts with hypnotic, snaking bassline and drums, and Uh oh’s vocals punctuate each syllable with drama. The song then ramps up in intensity with a noise bricolage of synths and guitars washing over it, and the final few minutes collapse into glorious discordance, complete with a saxophone by Chen. The build and release are central to a concept of the “healing qualities of consensual rage,” tapping into anger in a way that’s collective, generative, and nourishing.
Gut Health’s emergence comes during a particularly fruitful moment for post-punk in Australia. Bands like Gut Health, RVG, Body Type, Screensaver, and Loose Fit are turning rock’s conventions on their head. Gut Health coalesce the groove of ESG, the rawness of Kleenex/LiLiPUT, and the thrilling weirdness of Pere Ubu. The band channels the spirits of both the most violent hardcore shows and the most euphoric raves to create an egalitarianism of collective energy, where ego is sacrificed. Their hope is that people will dance liberally and feel free while accessing their rage and violence in a way that’s conducive to something positive.
Gut Health has been on tour for much of 2024, their first time overseas, and has finished their second European tour. The band played alongside garage-rockers the Judges at a festival organised by leftist German football club St. Pauli, and finished their tour with a show at Paris club Supersonic. Gut Health is starting to think about preserving energy and passion and steering toward what’s essential while taking deliberate steps and turning down opportunities that don’t serve them. The band’s goal is to acknowledge and respect the opportunity that exists within the six-people band and not waste that
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