It’s a rain-spattered Saturday at Reading Festival 2026, and Radio Free Alice are playing to a jam-packed tent at the Ballroom Stage. Beneath somewhat incongruous chandeliers – Reading not a fest readily associated with glamour – sweat-streaked kids lose themselves to the piledriving rhythm of ‘Johnny’ and pound the ground to the frenetic ‘(I Gotta) Fall In Love’. It’s a standout set from the festival’s best edition in years. Backstage later, the Aussie four-piece debrief on the chaos with NME. “We were really happy,” beams frontman Noah Learmonth. “There was a full tent, so that was crazy.”
Just two years earlier, the picture was very different. “The first show we played in London was to zero people,” Learmonth remembers when NME next catches up with the band over video call. The venue in question for that early gig was the back room at east London clothing shop Paper Dress Vintage. It holds fewer than 200 people, but capacity was no issue that night. “[It was just] our manager and Jules’ cousin.”
When Radio Free Alice released tickets for their next London show the following summer, however, “it sold out immediately”. The same thing happened time and time again after that – much to the band’s astonishment. It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to work out what had happened, though. One spin of ‘Polyester’, the gang’s second EP, released shortly after the clothing shop gig, tells you everything you need to know about their appeal. Filled with slinky guitar, urgent lyrics and coiled with propulsive energy, it harked back to classic indie from the preceding four decades while signalling confidently to the future.
Now, Radio Free Alice have come good on that record’s promise with their much glossier but no less immediate and emotional debut album, ‘What’s In Between’. Expanding on their signature sound with widescreen ambition, it’s all chiming riffs (see ‘Bottleshops’) and a rhythm section so tight it sounds like it could snap at any moment (‘Four Leaf Clover’). Yearning lyrics are threaded through every track; as a lyricist, Learmonth is a keen observer, weaving melancholic tales from afar. On ‘Rule 31’, he reimagines a traumatic incident from his father’s childhood, while the soaring title track depicts a put-upon waitress who fantasises about murdering a customer. Yes, he’s been listening to the Smiths.
The band – completed by Jules Paradiso (guitar), Lochie Dowd (drums) and Michael Phillips (bass, saxophone), and who, with pleasing symmetry, are all 25 – previously told us about their love of New Order, The Jam and The Housemartins, while Learmonth waxes lyrical about Jarvis Cocker. Yet their debut might actually put you in mind of The Killers’ ‘Hot Fuss’, another enormous first LP made by unashamed anglophiles.
‘What’s In Between’ was mostly recorded in the Connecticut studio of producer Peter Katis, who’s helped to capture similarly cinematic levels of emotion with The National and Interpol. The album’s shimmering sound, says Phillips, is down “in decent part” to its producer’s influence: “We had a lot of conversations and arguments about how big we really did want it to sound.” Radio Free Alice “have quite cathartic songwriting tendencies to begin with,” he adds, but “were also conscious, in some cases, to limit quite how big and dramatic it was”.
This, perhaps, is why the record sounds not overblown but arena-sized (not bad for a band generally playing 500 to 1,000-capacity venues); the newly epic style augments Learmonth’s narrative-led lyrics, rather than imbuing them with an unearned sense of importance. It also speaks to the band’s commercial sensibilities, as the frontman points out.
“In the genre we’re in, alternative rock, there’s this idea that to be ‘cool’ and ‘credible’ is to be small and lo-fi,” he says. “Going into the album – and the whole time we’ve been a band – that’s not something that we really subscribe to. A song’s a great song, and if it sounds big, that doesn’t make it any less ‘edgy’, or something. We wanted to make a big, ambitious record.”
The danger of being this refreshingly open about your ambition, of course, is that you could very well fall short. That’s more exposing and potentially embarrassing than simply pretending you never cared in the first place.
“I think that’s the problem with this genre,” Learmonth agrees. “There’s a lot of people who don’t want to say they wanna be a really big band and then not be a big band and” – he laughs – “feel awkward about it. But then, as a result, no one manifests it, and everyone’s just making cassette tapes played in share houses to hipsters, so they’re not getting big. It’s this self-fulfilling prophecy. We never felt that we had to pretend not to be ambitious because there’s too many people in our genre pretending not to be.”
“In alternative rock, there’s this idea that to be ‘cool’ and ‘credible’ is to be small and lo-fi. That’s not something we subscribe to” – Noah Learmonth
Perhaps surprisingly, given their naked ambition, the band formed in north Melbourne’s avant-garde music scene, which was more in awe of Nick Cave’s distinctly uncommercial early group The Birthday Party than Learmonth’s beloved Pulp. Radio Free Alice’s sound, explains the singer, “was too poppy for the Melbourne arts scene and it wasn’t poppy enough for the broader Australian music scene”.
Indeed, much has been made of the fact that they’re out of step with their country’s surf-rock culture. Instead, the four-piece bonded over their aforementioned shared love of British rock and indie. It follows that the frontman should be so enamoured of Blighty bands, given that he spent the first 10 years of his life in the country, before his parents moved the family to Sydney. There, he and Paradiso met as teenagers, swapping notes on American grunge greats such as Nirvana and Mudhoney and starting an embryonic version of Radio Free Alice.
“When you’re 14, 15,” says Paradiso, “having someone that you can freely play music with or fuck around with is so important and exciting, as opposed to just doing it yourself. After a few years of doing it together, you start to realise: ‘Oh, shit, OK – maybe there’s a little nugget of something that we can actually move forward with.’” Evoking countless other creative partnerships formed at an early age (a certain Lennon–McCartney springs to mind), he says his friendship with Learmonth was “about being given the freedom to write songs, listen to music and share similar influences”.
The duo’s ambition took them over 400 miles across the country to the University of Melbourne, where the singer studied philosophy and the guitarist took up history and philosophy of science (Learmonth graduated; Paradiso did not). More important, it seems, was encountering Dowd and Phillips in north Melbourne’s thriving alternative scene.
“We started playing for hours and hours every day, the four of us,” says Dowd. “That’s what you’ve got to do as a young band: dedicate at least five days a week to more than three hours of practice. We just got so, so tight for those first gigs. It had to be undeniable that we were not terrible, at least.”
By the time they released ‘Polyester’, the band also had a keyboard player, Maayan Barnatan. He left last year, says Paradiso, to focus on his more experimental, trip-hop-inspired band Dumbhead: “He’s quite a talented and very productive musician. He’s got lots of projects in Melbourne. I think he wanted to focus more on [Dumbhead] and struggled with time between both. But it’s amicable – he’s always been a good friend of ours.”
Yet the band’s rise from hopeful upstarts to major label players (‘What’s In Between’ is released by Atlantic Records) hasn’t been as frictionless as it may seem. Earlier this year, they covered Usher and Pitbull’s ‘DJ Got Us Fallin’ In Love’ on Australian radio station Triple J, giving the EDM banger a moody post-punk makeover. “We’ve always felt that good songs don’t need good covers,” Learmonth told the station. “It’s bad songs that need good covers. This song is like the ugliest duckling of bad songs, I think – so we thought it was a fun challenge to see if we could turn it into a swan.”
“When you’re 14, 15, having someone that you can freely play music with is so important and exciting” – Jules Paradiso
The backlash was swift. On Reddit, one poster summed up the ensuing online furore as being about “a couple of white guys being pretentious and dismissive to the contributions of a black pop rnb [sic] artist”. The band posted an apology on social media, with Learmonth writing: “We didn’t consider the hurt our words about Usher’s song could have caused to Black artists and other communities.”
Today, he says the band feels the criticism was “justified”, noting that Radio Free Alice are still pretty new to the media cycle: “That experience was a really big learning curve for us.” For the first time in our hour-long interview, he struggles to put his words together. “Ultimately, we really do respect artists of all genres. It doesn’t matter if that’s alternative rock or pop or R&B or whatever – we respect what it takes to be an artist.
“The point I was trying to make meant something different to other people, and that was a consequence of careless use of words. The main learning thing for me was: if you’re gonna make a point – and particularly if it’s something a little subversive or irreverent, or you’re going to try and flip the script – you’ve gotta be really precise with your language.”
It’s a hard lesson to learn so publicly. Learmonth clearly finds the whole thing difficult to talk about, but does so anyway, reflecting the generosity and open-heartedness of the band’s music. ‘What’s In Between’ is vast in scope but beautifully specific in the everyday tales that Learmonth weaves. It’s an album you can imagine people turning to both in times of turmoil and celebration. What would he like listeners to take from it? For all his ambition, the frontman’s answer is simple: “I just hope people listening to it have a similar experience to those I’ve had listening to records I love: extreme levels of enjoyment.”
Radio Free Alice’s ‘What’s In Between’ is out on October 30 via Atlantic Records.
Listen to Radio Free Alice’s exclusive playlist to accompany The Cover below on Spotify and on Apple Music here.
Words: Jordan Bassett
Photography: Tom Oxley
Styling Assistance: Olivia Easton
Hair & Makeup: Callie Foulsham
Location: The Old Lace Factory
Label: Atlantic Records
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