Shady Nasty lock palms with Kettama + Fred again.. on ‘Air Maxes’
PRAISE FOR Shady Nasty
“This is literally my favourite band in the world right now”
“Shady Nasty’s music has always sounded like an engine revving: all menacing snarls and noxious guitars through a pungent fog of exhaust”
“The Australian trio's sound can turn on a dime between ethereally pretty and menacingly dark”
“Shady Nasty are a glitch in Australia's music industry”
“The craft can’t be argued with”
‘Air Maxes’ by KETTAMA, Fred again.., Shady Nasty is out now, buy/stream it here.
Sydney’s boundary-pushing post-punk trio, Shady Nasty, join forces with global electronic heavyweights KETTAMA and Fred again.. on their new single ‘Air Maxes’. Out now via Steel City Dance Discs, the track arrives in two forms: the brooding, slow burn ‘Air Maxes (Ambient)’ and the adrenaline-fuelled club rework, ‘Air Maxes (KETTAMA Remix)’. LISTEN HERE + WATCH HERE.
After sharing the stage at HAZARD Festival in Sydney last January, Shady Nasty and KETTAMA jumped into a last-minute studio session where ‘Air Maxes’ was born. The demo landed in the hands of Fred again.. who added his signature finesse to the final track.
On ‘Air Maxes’, Shady Nasty trade jagged riffs for synths, without compromise. No less abrasive yet far more restrained, it’s the band at their most distilled: haunted, hypnotic, and disarmingly personal. Frontman Kevin Stathis delivers a measured vocal through the haze of ambient tension, offering a subdued meditation on ambition, burnout, and the phantom lives we imagine at red lights and empty intersections. The song’s refrain, “I need to be a doctor, not a popstar,” captures that split-screen tension between the life you live and the one you think you should’ve chased.
“‘Air Maxes’ is about losing sight of your ambition,” the band says. “Grinding toward something with no clear finish line can leave you wondering what might’ve happened if you’d taken a different path. Sometimes you need to hop in the whip and smoke the streets out just to remember why you’re putting in the hours. And sometimes, you need your mates to remind you to keep your head screwed on.”
The release of ‘Air Maxes’ follows their long-awaited debut album, TREK. Marked by a distinctive harbour-city twang, the record grapples with the less-than-glamorous hard graft of staying afloat while remaining creatively uncompromised in Sydney. Produced by Kim Moyes of The Presets, the record ventures into more textured, exploratory territory than ever before. Four months in, it’s resonated with longtime fans and newcomers alike, earning acclaim from fbi.radio (Album of the Week), RTR FM (Feature Album), triple j Unearthed (Feature Artist), NME Magazine, Ones to Watch, and more.
Following sold-out shows across Eora (Sydney), Meanjin (Brisbane), and Naarm (Melbourne), Shady Nasty have announced a fresh run of live dates, hitting Awabakal Country (Newcastle), Ngunnawal Country (Canberra), Dharawal Country (Wollongong), and their debut tour in Aotearoa/New Zealand this September, stopping in at Pōneke/Wellington and Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland. No matter the room size, their cult following shows up en masse, moshing to catharsis. Expect an invigorated live show with a full rollout of TREK cuts and special guests Jonny Chopps, Body Shirt, Heaven and MyRapScene.
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