Shady Nasty drop anticipated debut album TREK + supporting Shame, album tour this April

Photo by Shady Nasty
February 21 2025

PRAISE FOR Shady Nasty

“Shady Nasty’s music has always sounded like an engine revving: all menacing snarls and noxious guitars through a pungent fog of exhaust”

The Guardian Australia

“The trio’s sound is as inscrutable as ever: lyrics are written like text exchanges between gym junkies while the instrumentals are jenga towers of hip-hop beats, slowcore guitars and punk vocals”

NME

“Jittery and tense blasts of sketchy rock that sounds like kids born in the late 90s have discovered some early Helmet or Mark of Cain records. This is good rowdy stuff”

VICE

“The Australian trio's sound can turn on a dime between ethereally pretty and menacingly dark”

Kerrang!

“The atmosphere is unsettling in a similar way to Show Me The Body’s songs”

Stereogum

“CAREDBRAH has one of my favourite lines to come out of a release this year”

Luka Muller (triple j)

“Shady Nasty are a glitch in Australia's music industry”

To Be Magazine

“This trio sounds like no other band on the planet. Shady Nasty are on the rise, that much is “clear as fuark'.”

Beat Magazine

TRACKLIST
G-SHOCK
HARDSTYLE
HESITANCE
SCREWDRIVA
AE86
I.D.W.L. (I Don’t Wanna Lose)
CAREDBRAH
2008

TREK by Shady Nasty is out now, buy/stream it here.

TREK, Shady Nasty’s triumphant debut album has arrived today, ahead of their album tour this April. Tickets are on sale now for their second Sydney headline date, with Melbourne sold out and Brisbane dates selling fast. LISTEN HERE + BUY TICKETS HERE.

Rumours of Shady Nasty’s debut full-length have circulated since the group first gained cult notoriety in 2017. The classically trained musicians, ditching the orthodoxy, arrive today with a vision clear. With production from The Presets’ Kim Moyes, TREK captures the band at their most creatively forthright. While earlier releases painted heavily stylised portraits of contemporary Sydney life, this album offers a candid retelling of their trials, tribulations, and obsessions.

The sum of all parts Shady Nasty have endured in its making, TREK is a stark reckoning with the reality of what it takes to reach any goal or destination. Enhancing the impressive world-building of their seminal EPs, TREK is a lean and potent eight-track debut – unashamedly honest about the less-than-glamorous grind of keeping afloat while chasing ambition.

Speaking on the record’s production, Kim Moyes shares, “Hard to draw comparisons with a band like Shady Nasty. They hold a unique place in Sydney and have built something they can truly claim as their own. It’s a universe that is inspired, oftentimes challenging, and yet somehow always fulfilling. Their commitment to developing their own sonic skid-mark combined with such a brilliant visual identity—an uncompromising pursuit of individuality—is undeniable. I’m proud to have played a small part in this chapter of their story. Love those guys.”

Vignettes of their world told through Shady Nasty’s singular harbour city twang: horizons “clear as fuark” in ‘SCREWDRIVA’ to the slang-laden ‘CAREDBRAH’ and ‘HARDSTYLE’. In the corporate playground they call home – marked by cost of living and housing crises – familial and social expectations loom large and can really put dreaming into perspective… What if pursuing something at any cost might actually land you nowhere at all?

A growing rift between old friends lies at the heart of ‘HESITANCE’, where letting go is sometimes straight catharsis. The sharp interlude ‘AE86’ reimagines the legend of the Toyota Sprinter car made popular by the Initial D anime series while TREK’s most forlorn moment, ‘I.D.W.L. (I Don’t Wanna Lose)’, drapes Shady’s heaviest autotune armour over beating-heart percussion, unveiling a psyche burdened by the expectations of loved ones. The album’s comedown ‘2008’ yearns for a time before hyper-connectivity, when suburbia was the fabric of our social lives.

Shrouded in metaphor and symbolism, TREK reconciles with rites of passage to birth a group confident in bleeding authenticity. Their signature oddity and intrigue maintains the utmost respect of the underground as affectionately as it courts interest from the industry. A departure from the impatient optimism of their younger selves, TREK chronicles the evolution of Shady Nasty’s individual lives – an uncompromising journey toward breaking free from the shackles of expectation.

Experience TREK live as Shady Nasty debut the record with an all new live show across Eora / Sydney, Naarm / Melbourne and Meanjin / Brisbane in late April-May. See all tour routing details and tickets BELOW.

Inspired by the likes of King Krule, Low Life and Show Me The Body and informed by backgrounds in jazz and classical music, Shady Nasty subvert expectations. A world bound by modding cars, immigrant heritage and digital obsessions, Kevin Stathis, Haydn Green and Luca Watson craft a left-field breed of punk that recalibrates their formal training to its most uncustomary extremes. Their second EP, CLUBSMOKE, a blurry-eyed meditation on vlogging, gymming, clubbing and clout, earned them international acclaim from NME, Stereogum, Kerrang, DIY, New Noise, BPM and locally from triple j’s Home and Hosed and Unearthed, fbi.radio, RTR FM, 2Ser, RAGE and more. Such buzz led to their debut UK/EU tour, which was kicked off by a sold-out Oxford Art Factory home show. Since then, the group has shared stages with High Vis, Amyl and The Sniffers, and performed at Parramatta Lanes and SXSW Sydney. No matter where they play and no matter the size of the venue, devout adherents clammer to propel a heaving mosh.

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