Artist

Tropical Fuck Storm

Australian rock band

Melbourne, Australia · Formed 2017

Tropical Fuck Storm is a music group from Melbourne, Australia, active since 2017. Their discography on Gatefold includes 16 records.

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Albums tracked

In collections

2017

Since

Biography

Gareth Liddiard tracks at Dodd's Creek in regional Victoria with bent guitars, antique tape gear, and cheap solid-state amps pushed until the transformers glow red. When The Drones hit a wall, he and Fiona Kitschin recruited High Tension drummer Lauren Hammel and MOD CON's Erica Dunn to strip away traditional pub-rock weight in favor of broken hip-hop breakbeats and fried R&B textures. It sounds like art-punk dragged through a swamp and wired up to blown speakers. Holy shit, the sheer tension in those early takes. They don't use clean overdubs. Everything bleeds across the room, leaving the rhythm section sounding like chopped-up samples while Liddiard and Dunn trade razor-wire Fender Jag riffs and yelled chorus lines. It is frantic, claustrophobic, and completely unpolished by design. A band built explicitly to sound like the wheels are falling off at eighty miles an hour.

Bio from The Clerk

The Arc of Tropical Fuck Storm

The pivots — what forced Tropical Fuck Storm to reinvent.

The Drones Aftermath & Meatspace
When The Drones went on hiatus after Feelin Kinda Free, Liddiard and Kitschin pulled in Lauren Hammel and Erica Dunn to ditch guitar-hero bloat for serrated drum patterns and noise-funk. They debuted on their own Mistletone-backed imprint with 2018's A Laughing Death in Meatspace, recorded live off the floor in Nagambie. The songs ran on caustic funk rhythms, distorted bass, and apocalyptic satire. You can hear a brand new band testing its brakes on every corner.
The Gizz-Fueled Psych Meltdown
By 2019's Braindrops and the lockdown follow-up Deep States, the band leaned hard into tape manipulation, sample loops, and collaborative chaos with their Flightless Records peers. The Melbourne scene was feeding on itself, leading directly to the wild Satanic Slumber Party joint sessions with King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard. Synthesizers took up more space, the beats got filthier, and the arrangements went full surrealist nightmare without losing the pub-floor grit.
The Long-Form Freakout & Fairyland Codex
Starting with the extended cover jams on 2023's Submersive Behaviour, they stretched track lengths and stopped caring about conventional hook structures entirely. That sprawl fed straight into 2025's Fairyland Codex, where the noise collages finally overtook the garage riffs. The jagged vocal trades between Dunn and Liddiard remained the anchor, but the backing turned into pure dub-damaged post-punk.

Influences

The Birthday Party — Liddiard has spent decades openly citing Nick Cave and Rowland S. Howard as the ground zero for abrasive Australian rock. You hear it in the frantic, unhinged slide work and the unvarnished gallows humor all over Meatspace. It is the gold standard for Australian swamp noise.
The Stooges — The band tracked a filthy, warped cover of 'Ann' on early 7-inch releases and in their live sets. James Williamson's blown-out Raw Power amp tone is the exact sonic footprint Dunn and Liddiard chase across their entire discography. Pure Detroit dirt transplanted to rural Victoria.
Talking Heads — Liddiard routinely credits the polyrhythmic paranoia of Remain in Light for changing how he built guitar rhythms. Hammel's syncopated drumming on tracks like 'Chameleon Painter' borrows directly from the Eno-era funk templates. It is anxiety you can actually dance to.
Can — The band's Dodd's Creek studio ethos mirrors Holger Czukay's cut-and-paste tape editing from the Inner Space days. You hear it in the sudden rhythmic dropouts, looped bass figures, and hypnotic grooves that anchor 'Braindrops'. Groove as endurance test.
Sly and the Family Stone — Liddiard heavily referenced There's a Riot Goin' On while producing Deep States, aiming for that record's murky, drum-machine-decayed funk. The slowed-down, submerged low-end on their later records comes straight from Sly's darkest era. A masterclass in making groove feel threatening.