Radio Free Alice walk into Copenhagen’s Ideal Bar at VEGA tonight with a debut album barely five days old and a year of sold-out rooms behind them.
The Melbourne four-piece released What’s In Between on October 30 via Atlantic Records, an 11-track record made across three continents with producers Peter Katis (Interpol, The National), Ewan Pearson (Depeche Mode, Franz Ferdinand) and Finn Billingham.
Tonight’s show opens a European and UK headline run that reaches Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne, Amsterdam, Brussels and Paris before crossing to Bristol, Birmingham, London’s Electric Ballroom on November 17, Leeds, Manchester, Glasgow and Belfast, finishing at Dublin’s Button Factory on November 24.
It is the kind of itinerary bands usually earn on album two. Radio Free Alice have got there on momentum alone.
Frontman Noah Learmonth, guitarist Jules Paradiso, bassist Michael Phillips and drummer Lochie Dowd spent February supporting Geese across Australia, then made their Governors Ball debut in New York and played Reading, Riot Fest and Austin City Limits, according to Rolling Stone AU/NZ, which put them on its Future of Music 2026 list.
The sound is unapologetically Anglophile: angular guitars and big, melodic basslines that the band have tied to New Order, The Jam and The Housemartins, telling NME at Reading that the record is a “coming of age” album with “a theme of ‘dispossessed young person’”.
That theme lands squarely on the tracklist. Rolling Stone AU/NZ reports that “Bottleshops” follows a broke thirty-something living in a parents’ basement, “Undressed” takes aim at tabloid culture and closer “Waiting” stews in a life that refuses to move forward.
“The Intersection”, which arrived with a video on release day, is, Learmonth said, one of the band’s most openly melodic releases yet: “It’s a love story, really. It’s a love song,” he told the magazine, describing a relationship kept alive while one partner is in a mental hospital.
Elsewhere, “Crying With You” was written on a desert retreat in Joshua Tree at a property owned by producer Nicolas Vernhes, Learmonth told NME, and “Big Ideas” brings in Rachel Brown of Water From Your Eyes.
There is a practical edge to the London dates, too. Several members have already moved to the city, and Learmonth, now living in Bow, admitted to NME that “rent is tough”; the band are openly hoping the album sells well enough to cover it.
In a year crowded with guitar bands chasing the same post-punk reference points, Radio Free Alice stand out for the warmth under the wiring: hooks first, gloom second, jokes throughout.
Catch them in these rooms while they still fit.
Image: MIDDERMUSIC collage based on “Electric Ballroom Boarded up in Camden” by hughepaul (commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Electric_Ballroom_Boarded_up_in_Camden.jpg), CC BY 2.0 (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), cropped and tinted. Background: Melbourne Laneway by cogdogblog (CC0), via Wikimedia Commons.
