Swapmeet

Just over halfway between Adelaide and Melbourne looms Mount Zero. It takes about nine hours to drive from one city to the other along a two-lane highway that cuts across the southern tip of Australia. For hours, only grassy plains sprawl, until finally Mount Zero rises. The members of Swapmeet, a four-piece band from Adelaide, have never been to Mount Zero, although they've passed by the sign naming it many times. For them, the sign itself grew into a beacon: an indication that the landscape around them was about to get interesting, that they were nearing Melbourne, where they'd play a gig later that night. 

It's a funny name for a mountain, too, wrapping total absence and towering presence up into the same pithy phrase. When it came time for Swapmeet--Venus O’Broin, Maxwell Elphick, Jack Medlyn, and Josh Doherty; all vocalists, songwriters, and multi-instrumentalists--to name their debut album, Mount Zero was the natural choice. A sweeping, guitar-driven road trip that recalls and reinvigorates the slowcore and alt rock of the 90s and early aughts, Mount Zero marks the moment Swapmeet come into their own. 

"Mount Zero is a place you pass but never go," says Elphick. "It became a symbol for people we'd see but never meet. When you're always in a different city and trying new things, there are a lot of experiences you observe but never get to fully explore."

Though the members of Swapmeet often begin their songs by writing individually, the tracks on Mount Zero ended up circling common themes: first loves, first heartbreaks, first embarrassments, first disasters--the ways that the early years of adulthood can shatter your expectations about how life is supposed to go. These are years when every new choice can feel like a catastrophic mistake, when every responsibility and desire feels like it might wither, forever unfulfilled. Throughout Mount Zero, Swapmeet bottle up the tooth-gritting intensity of feeling yourself change at the cellular level under reality's unyielding pressures. It's a tribute to all the lives that can never be lived, all the paths that will never be followed--and an ode to the one that lies just ahead, too. 

Swapmeet have been playing together since their last year of high school in 2020. Elphick and Doherty were in a jangle-pop band together first; O'Broin took photos of the band and realized they lived around the corner from each other. Medlyn met O'Broin at a party on their very last day of high school, when all the graduating classes in the neighborhood celebrated together at the top of a local hill. Soon, all four of them started jamming together in Elphick's basement, and cut their teeth performing at a downtown pub called the Metro. The first time they ever played outside of Adelaide, they drove 15 hours across New South Wales to Wollongong, leading a convoy of their friends. "Half the crowd were friends that we’d brought from Adelaide," says Elphick. "We were like, this is great, we’ve got a good crowd. All our friends were there." 

As soon as they started playing together, Swapmeet wrote songs at a rapid clip. "We had so much music all of the time. I feel like we played our first gig with a whole album done," says O'Broin. "Every gig we were playing a new song. Maxwell, Jack, and I were all individually writing a lot. Whenever we would practice, we would show each other the new songs we were working on, and then instead of practicing, we would finish the songs and play them at the gig." 

In 2024, Swapmeet released their debut collection of tracks, a dreamy EP called Oxalis. They played at BIGSOUND in Brisbane that same year, then took home awards for Best Release and Best Song ("Ceiling Fan") at the South Australian Music Awards. The beginning of 2025 saw them embark on a national tour with the Murder Capital, as well as open for Suki Waterhouse at the Port Melbourne Industrial Centre for the Arts. That fall, Swapmeet sold out their first headlining shows and showcased at SXSW Sydney 2025, where they were declared Best Emerging Artist. 

While recording their debut album, they focused on honing their sound, combing through the particulate details of the music more than ever. Swapmeet spent two weeks together at a beach house in Port Noarlunga fully immersed in the process of piecing together Mount Zero. 

"It was a two-story house, and we had people writing upstairs, people recording downstairs, and people playing ping-pong in another room," says Medlyn. "Everyone was working towards something together, but in their own ways." Having the ocean in plain sight accentuated the creative atmosphere. "We had the beach to stare at, which was awesome. It was like, screen on one side, beach directly on the other," adds Elphick. "It was like the Swapmeet frat house. We had ripsticks as well. We’d ripstick around the ping-pong table for ages."

As they've done since their earliest days as a band, Swapmeet traded off instruments throughout Mount Zero and shared production duties as a foursome. They developed their sound by layering dozens (sometimes hundreds) of tracks within each song, then carefully removing elements until the production took a clear shape. "We like to put on the maximalist hat for a bit, have fun, and then put on the minimalist hat and take away everything that's too much," says Medlyn. The result is a record that arcs from crisp downstrokes to steam blasts of distortion in the opening earworm "I Know!", lets precise fingerpicking buckle beneath hammer swings of bass on the giddy "2 C U," and sways into breezes of clarinet and violin on the ballad "Personal (Don't Take It)." The piercing “Halfway” drapes its cinematic imagery and pointed witticisms in overlapping, mixed-fidelity guitar figures, while the delectably catchy “Bonny” molts its suntanned skin to crescendo in a Sonic Youth noise burst. 

Mingling airy sweetness with jagged surrealism, Mount Zero transmutes so many of the regrets and uncertainties of young adulthood into a burgeoning, newfound confidence. What do you do when the stories you told yourself in childhood start to buckle under the heft of real life? You fix your eyes on the road that’s actually right in front of you. You sink your weight into the gas.