Swapmeet take you for an emotionally charged drive with ‘Mount Zero’.

By Hard of Hearing on July 22, 2026

With their new album, the Australian up-and-comers insist on experiencing everything to its full.

Photo: David Milan Kelly | Words: Eve Morgan

The highs and lows of young adulthood are to be neither avoided nor romanticised, but instead dived into fully, with disregard for the hurt that could follow – or so say Swapmeet on their debut album ‘Mount Zero’.

A four-piece from Adelaide, the band formed in 2020 during their final year of high school and have since carved out a defined sound and commanded acclaim within Australia’s indie scene. After the release of their debut EP, ‘Oxalis’, in 2024, Swapmeet went on to play BIGSOUND and SXSW Sydney, as well as winning Best Release and Best Song (for ‘Ceiling Fan’) at the South Australian Music Awards. Now they’re back with their full-length debut, a lyrically exploratory record that captures the essence of early love and heartbreak: uncertainty so inevitable it can barely even be deemed chaos.

The album was partly crafted during a two-week beach house stint in Port Noarlunga, where the band pooled their talents and vision in full view of the ocean. What emerged is a grounded, touching sound that brings slowcore into the twenty-first century. It is this playing around with hierarchy, the refusal to demarcate restrictive roles, that fuels the album’s freshness and honesty. That cohesion was a pivotal part of the recording process: tracks would be layered on top of one another, even building a stack of hundreds at a time, before being whittled down to what remains on the record. The result is a tender but punchy selection; maximalism disguised as effortlessness, which skips from jangling ease into the shelf break with little warning.

Lead single ‘I Know!’ sets things off with an anticipatory build, a clean and gradual layering insisting on your attention. It feels saturated and unstable, teasing a fuzzier intensity of guitar woven through the record. The song is cut off as though mid-riff, mirroring the sharply severed expectations of young adulthood, with all its promises of greatness. Title track ‘Mount Zero’ transports you to the back of the car for a road trip in the Australian heat, steady and half-expectant, but with little impetus to settle. Maxwell Elphick’s hoarse vocals lie across soupy instrumentation, as lines intersect one another impatiently, each lyric almost cutting off the one previous. There is a sweetness in how Venus O’Broin’s voice intercepts, before she’s overcome by a crescendo of heavy, gritty guitar reverb that sweeps through the song like a wave, leaving only delicate fingerpicking in its wake.

‘Bonny’ could easily be the album’s earworm. The track warms up the listener to matters of a more fragile heart, thrown into harm’s way not because it can handle it, but because that’s just how you live when you’re a few years into your twenties and desperate to feel. “Promised you would come to the show / I know you, I know you won’t,” Jack Medlyn sings, over singed garage guitar. For all its apparent high stakes, the song is upbeat and denial ridden. The album’s production (a duty shared by the whole band) really shines here, with a crisp, playful bridge, aware of its own proximity to self-indulgent angst.

The story behind the album’s name secures it as both a checkpoint and a first step; Mount Zero is a hill between Adelaide and Melbourne. As the band would make the journey towards the promise of a gig, an opportunity, their future, passing Mount Zero would mean they were halfway there. This intermediate-ness, the straddling of where you’ve been and where you’re about to be, is encapsulated precisely in ‘Halfway’, with its boldly woven images of distance. The song explores the tension between two lovers who no longer know one another, even as their history and memories remain. O’Broin evokes the lasting shadow cast by intimacy with Lenkerite fragility in her vocals, singing ‘I thought about the house / That we almost lived in’. It’s a track that could only be about the breakup of an early twenties relationship, the catapulting of dreamy youth into heady seriousness, and a wistful remembering; what the sensation lacks in regret, it makes up for in stakes.

‘2 C U’ grounds the record in innocence, with a mercurial swinging guitar and delicately balanced vocals. The beloved precarity of youth is captured precisely, with O’Broin singing, “I’ve been to heaven/I liked it just for the day”. On bass, Joshua Doherty lays the foundation for a song that feels blurrily nostalgic, evoking a past feeling rather than a specific era. The song carries the early excitement of an early relationship that refuses to get carried away with itself. Like its companion tracks, the lyrics are simple but elevated, stifling a smile in the face of a mutual connection.

In its dedication to untapered feeling, ‘Mount Zero’ is triumphant. The album makes a memory of the present moment, promises you’ll be okay after all of this coming of age nearly a decade late. It’s an outpouring of affection, where every moment has the poignancy of the decade’s first crest, leaving Swapmeet’s high potential firmly within reach.