News Naminé

Along with Disney World, Australia was the kind of place that you’d dream of going to as a child. Holidays to Rhodes and Cyprus were alright and that – days spent by the pool, night spent drinking non-alcoholic cocktails and watch cabaret acts in a local bar and then home again – but Australia felt like it was from another galaxy altogether. A day on a plane! Koala Bears! Jesus, even Neighbours seemed like a glimpse of heaven.

Growing older provides you with many uncomfortable truths – Disney World is full of people dressed up as children’s cartoon characters, and they dare to give actual human beings the job title of ‘imagineer’ without a hint of irony – but that will to spend 24 hours on a plane should remain. Rather than wanting to go for a tour around Ramsay Street or annoy the locals with your terrible impressions of their accent, it the music scene over there that makes it such an appealing prospect.

Naminé come from Melbourne, but they make the kind of tracks that deserve to be heard in venues all across the world. A mixture of the shimmering hip-hop beats you’ve come to expect every time you log onto bandcamp these days and hazy, lo-fi honesty, the band trade on making tracks that both delight and dazzle. Stick a ridiculous chillwave name on them, get them out to Brooklyn and give them a decent American Apparel hoody each and you’ve got the latest act for A&R men will buy drinks for and frantically try get guestlist for on their shows.

In a world where everyone is aping the accomplishments of J Dilla, it’s exciting to here an act who step away from that, making something altogether more informed by dance music, whilst managing to dodge the whole Balaeric beats scene. There arw two EPs out already, both of them free to download and both of them arresting – synthetic beats and some capricious Garage Band editing are the main tools used , but the end result is something glowingly atmospheric. It’s enough to make you want to spend your months wages on a Qantas flight and forget about the consequences.