Review - HEDGE BURNERS – Fall Out of the Future (Legless Records)

 

There is a certain hour of the night in Melbourne when the city seems to breathe a life of its own. The streets are empty, the traffic lights flash like the headlights of a ship that will never arrive, and the wind carries the scent of the sea even when you are miles from the coast. It is at that hour that Fall Out of the Future seems to take shape: not as an album, but as an atmospheric phenomenon.

And it is something deeply unsettling and magnetic that materialises. Fall Out of the Future does not merely describe the city: it inhabits it, traverses it, observes it as it crumbles under the weight of time, memory and its own contradictions.

Steph Hughes (vocals and guitar, formerly of DICK DIVER and BOOMGATES), Arron Mawson (guitar, active member of STIFF RICHARDS and SPLIT SYSTEM, with a significant history in DOE St.), Alex Gionis (drums, formerly of BOOMGATES and THE GREEN CHILD), together with bassist Jackson Allen, craft a work that seems recorded at the very moment when the future ceases to be a promise and becomes a place from which one is plunging.

Hughes’s songwriting retains the diary-like delicacy of Dick Diver; her voice is a whisper coming from another room, as if she were telling something that shouldn’t be heard, whilst Mawson’s guitar introduces a garage edge that pushes the songs out of their comfort zone. The rhythm section — solid, circular, never intrusive — transforms melancholy into movement, as if every track were a night-time stroll along an overpass. The result is a sound that never explodes, but remains in constant tension, like a neon sign flickering on the verge of going out.

Fall Out of the Future is not a debut in the traditional sense. It is a work that is born within a story, within a language, within a city. The Hedge Burners do not present themselves as an emerging band, but as the final link in an aesthetic chain spanning fifteen years of Australian music: from dolewave to its formalisation with Dick Diver, right through to its transformation into an urban, electric, layered language.

Fall Out of the Future is an album of concrete landscapes: bridges, shipping containers, wind, the industrial sea, concrete. There is no suburban nostalgia: there is a city that changes, that breathes, that moves even when the characters cannot.

The Hedge Burners do not describe emotions in the abstract: they channel them through places. Theirs is an album that walks, observes, records. The album does not describe Melbourne: it produces it. The city is not a backdrop, but a generative matrix.

The title Fall Out of the Future suggests a conception of the future not as a horizon, but as a residue, as what remains after the fracture. The album explores three thematic axes: unstable temporality, emotional and geographical distances, the future as an object in ruins. The city becomes a metaphor for a time that does not advance, but crumbles.

The lyrics function like blurred photographs and represent the true heart of the album. Each track is a scene captured in passing, an image that refuses to come into focus: “By Water” opens with a fall seen from afar, a body bouncing off the tarmac and disappearing into the water. It is a beginning that is already an epilogue.

“Fall Out of the Future” transforms the industrial night into a collage of headlights, smoke and cities shrinking in the rear-view mirror. “Twisted Vine” tells of relationships that grow crooked, like climbing plants seeking light and finding only walls. “As the Headlights Go” is a nocturnal journey in which one sees only what is immediately illuminated by the car’s headlights: the rest is intuition, fear, conjecture. “Angel Lee” introduces a ghostly figure, a name that returns like an obsession, a presence that is already absence.

In the second half, the album becomes more introspective, almost claustrophobic: “Long Time Listening” is a track of emotional surveillance, a listening that does not console but controls. “Strange Memory” transforms memory into a centrifuge that spins “again and again”, without ever stopping.

“Concrete Waterfall” is the album’s most powerful image: a concrete waterfall, an impossible place that nevertheless exists within the city’s emotional geography. “Wild Deep Blue” opens a window onto the sea, but it is a sea that swallows, not one that sets free. “World Behind” closes with a perfect image: a world that follows, that refuses to be left behind.

“Fall Out of the Future” is an album that works because it manages to hold together two worlds that rarely interact so well: the mature songwriting of dolewave, with its observational melancholy and its focus on the everyday, and the electric physicality of contemporary garage, which provides nerve, body and urgency.

The result is an album that does more than just sound good: it maps out an emotional, geographical and temporal landscape. A map of a changing city and of people trying not to lose their way whilst everything around them shifts.

Fall Out of the Future is an album that doesn’t want to be understood: it wants to be traversed. It is music that lives in the tension between water and concrete, between movement and stillness, between memory and erasure. A debut that no longer belongs to the dolewave, nor to post-punk, nor to suburban indie: it is a new form of Australian urban realism. An album that isn’t listened to: it is traversed, like a road at night, as far as the headlights go.

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