Adelaide quartet Swapmeet formed on the very last day of high school, right as the world contracted under the weight of the coronavirus. It’s no wonder, then, that the group underwent something of a period of arrested development: their debut album comes after six years of relative quiet, punctured only by their lovely, large-eyed 2024 EP, Oxalis. But when I first heard “Halfway,” the fourth single off Mount Zero, I was sure this was a band I already knew. There is a distinct familiarity to the band’s latest release, something warm and fuzzy and unfakeable. It smacks of half-forgotten memories and reeks of the existential, essential doom that accompanies change. It’s shoegazey and self-indulgent, idling and roaring in turn like a car that won’t start quite right. It’s delightfully sincere, almost to the point of childlike naivety: the group, apparently, went celibate in order to record it.
Yet a eunuch’s album Mount Zero is not. It’s more a record of virginity, if anything. Shockingly, I mean that positively: the desperate, hair-pulling fantasies spun by the band hearken back to somewhere prelapsarian. As the album progresses, it unravels the heartaches of youth, cracking open and bleeding into the disillusion of young adulthood. “Mount Zero,” all buzzing guitars and muffled riffs, features what at first reads as Maxwell Elphick doing an impressive Alex G impression. The song blooms when Venus O’Broin joins in to duet—a common feature on the record—with a pained murmur: “I think I know who you wanna be / Fingers crossed and we all see / Longing for you while you’re laughing at me / Pleading to god I pull your sleeve.” The titular mountain, plopped halfway between Adelaide and Melbourne, is a place few ever go, more the idea of an adventure than the real deal. The LP that bears its name is an album of inaction itself: “It’s not like me to suggest / I wanna leave,” Elphick and O’Broin breathe back and forth on the title track.
“Sand” is a product of that same halting fear, a Slow Pulp-y guitar burn—perhaps a Winspear special?—that thrashes and flails as it barrels toward an angry descent. Many of the album’s songs climb a musical mountain themselves, starting tentatively then snowballing into a wall of sound. “Seeds,” a tune fronted by Jack Medlyn, punches outward into a muddy guitar lick at the one-minute mark after a Lendermanian intro, a hint at the tsunami of indie-rock strings that will drown the song’s latter half. It’s a neat bit of auditory parallelism, although it’s a trick that gets a tad repetitive by song seven or so. But that just makes the numbers that resist that structure all the more arresting: “My Heart Breaks II,” the album’s finale, is sparse and strange, with a haunted, achy toothiness. It hisses through a brash midsection into a Skullcrusher-esque invocation, with muffled electrics and reverb galore. “Forever to go / And nothing to say / And all that I fear arrives / And I do nothing,” O’Broin breathes, her voice equal parts chilled and broken.
The chasm between passive desire and real, head-rearing action makes up much of the album’s central tension, a feeling exemplified by its best song. “Halfway” was a song I held close to my heart upon first listen. It’s a twinkly, pleading number, epistolary and weepy in a way that feels like a sonic embrace. Gentle and atmospheric, the tune is about a love misfire—that unique hurt that accompanies an almost-was, which is to say, a never-will-be. “Love is simple, love’s a crowd,” O’Broin intones in one particularly affecting moment, as rainy strings and a mournful clarinet entomb her. It’s these endangered little sweetnesses that make the album so deliciously painful. On “Personal (Don’t Take It),” a loopy violin soars above some of the song’s most desolate lyrics: “Take it back / I can’t pretend like you are mine / Burn the plans / And drop the act like we are fine.”
Mount Zero, at its best moments, captures the impossible yet seemingly-eternal desires of the cusp of young adulthood. The album is one of contrafactual conditionals and unfulfilled desires, wants made impossible by the fears and needs that supersede them. The band, caught halfway up the mountain, are simultaneously tortured by the knowledge that they’re missing out on all the fun at the top and the nagging feeling that they ought to have stayed in their well-insulated homes. They push on regardless. Gauzy and needling, it’s a record made great by its openness to the world’s hurt. On the other side of the summit, Mount Zero seems to promise, is where everything worth feeling is. [Winspear]
Miranda Wollen is a staff writer at Paste and is based in New York City. Follow her @mirandakwollen or email her.
