DEM MOB, the South Australian hip-hop group redefining what activism, education, and First Nations power can sound like from the country’s most remote corners, today release their new single and music video, ‘Frequency’, created in collaboration with the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA). LISTEN HERE + WATCH HERE.

Where much of DEM MOB’s recent work has been made on the road, ‘Frequency’ marks a deliberate return home. After years shuttling between Adelaide and the APY Lands, the group loaded a recording van and drove deep into the Lands to Wali Kutju — Basso’s family homeland, roughly an hour south of Uluru, and one of the most isolated pockets of the country. With no mains power on site, the entire session ran on a generator, the desert standing in for a studio. Basso’s father and uncle joined the sessions, folding three generations of family into a single recording.

For the group, place wasn’t incidental to the sound; it was the source of it. Removed from city studios and surrounded instead by Country, family, and culture, the rhythms and story of ‘Frequency’ took shape in a way that couldn’t have happened anywhere else.

WATCH: DEM MOB – ‘FREQUENCY’ (Official Video)

Thematically, ‘Frequency’ is a song about inheritance; what’s carried forward, what’s owed to the people who came before, and what’s passed on to those still coming. The song’s refrain calls on listeners to open their body, mind, and Kurunpa, the Pitjantjatjara word for soul, framing that openness as essential not just to individual wellbeing but to keeping culture alive across generations. DEM MOB describe the track as a “generational song” built around learning from elders, keeping the fire burning, and handing that knowledge forward.

Of the song’s meaning, DEM MOB says: “For Anangu, culture and knowledge have been passed from generation to generation for tens of thousands of years — young people learning songs, dance, language, Country and ways of living from their elders, before growing to become leaders and elders themselves and passing that same fire on again. ‘Frequency’ is about that continuum: respecting the past, understanding our responsibility in the present, and making sure that knowledge is still alive for the future.

That responsibility feels especially important now. Anangu culture has survived for thousands of generations without relying on a written tradition, while the outside world has changed life in the APY Lands incredibly quickly. The people living in the present are the link between what came before and what comes next. Culture has to be learnt, lived and practised now if it is going to be there for generations still to come.”

That idea sits at the centre of the song’s recurring outro, which calls on people to open their body, mind and Kurunpa. “It is about bringing the spiritual and physical worlds together and recognising that this connection is part of creating sustainability in culture,” DEM MOB says. “In that sense, ‘Frequency’ is a metaphysical call to arms.”

That call, the group is careful to note, doesn’t stop at the edge of Anangu culture. Performed live, ‘Frequency’ extends its invitation outward: everyone carries a Kurunpa, in the band’s telling, some people have simply drifted out of range. Reconnecting, they argue, matters for more than cultural survival alone.

The message lands with particular weight at a moment increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence and automation. DEM MOB point to culture as something that resists that kind of replication entirely, living not in files or feeds but in people, Country, language, song, and ceremony, passed hand to hand the way it always has been.

From there, ‘Frequency’ took an unlikely turn. Selected through a joint competition run by triple j, rage, and NIDA, the track earned DEM MOB a week in Sydney working alongside NIDA students to shoot the song’s official video — a sharp contrast to its off-grid origins and, the band says, a journey that makes the song’s arc, from a generator-powered van on remote Country to a soundstage in the middle of Sydney, all the more resonant. For DEM MOB, ‘Frequency’ is the most significant release of their career to date.