The Subscene

Chapter 6: Wynnum Strikes Again

The heart of the scene has never stayed still, Corinda, the Valley, West End, Woolloongabba, and by 2023 it had moved to the bayside. Wynnum-Manly produced Findaway on metal, PIMP on hardcore and The Amphetamines on alternative rock, and a broader sound, emo and metal and pop-punk bleeding into one another, came to dominate as the punk bands that founded the scene aged toward their twenties and the all ages clock that comes for everyone.

In March 2023, at a Youth Week event supported by YMCA Queensland, a fifteen year old musician from the Redlands named Braxton Hunt-Nissen, of The Amphetamines, worked out his version of the founding move. The gigs he wanted were all an hour away in the city, so rather than commute he founded Deadtrigger Records through a partnership with The Link YMCA at Victoria Point, which gave him funding, resources and a room ten minutes from home, and held his first gig in June 2023. Deadtrigger championed the Redland Bay bands relentlessly, and in April 2024 it staged the purest event in this whole history, the first SkatePUNK at Capalaba Skatepark, completely free, entry, food and drink, two hundred people on a Monday watching Civil Disturbance, None The Wiser, OK-36, Findaway, PIMP, The Chimpeltons and Palinola. Strip every dollar and every age limit out of a gig and that's what's left, the open door rebuilt by a teenager because his mates couldn't get to the city.

In December 2023 a sixteen year old named Natasha Ellis, who had downloaded Instagram to talk to her friends and found the scene through Findaway, started the Brisbane Music Spew Zine, writing about local musicians, gigs and releases. It began with little attention and grew on the support of the bands themselves. Whether she knew it or not, she was picking up exactly where Batsy's BUMS had left off three decades earlier, the scene writing itself down from the inside, and for a while the Spew was the only consistent written documentation the Subscene had.

Kaleb's exit, when it came, was quieter than the legend that grew around it. In April 2024 Casualty Records posted its farewell, a note that opened with words to the effect of I don't know how to say this, and this feels weird. He'd started Casualty, he wrote, to release his first band's shitty music, and never expected it to go as far as it did; he was glad for what it gave him, Shedfest, the Peace Centre, the memories, and he was stepping back for now. He made a point of saying that Braxton, then still barely known, was doing good things with Deadtrigger Records and that people could expect to see his name come up a lot. They did. He wasn't leaving music either; he'd keep drumming in Bubblegum Haircut alongside bassist Java, and he teased a project called Miss Middle that people would just have to stay tuned for, though nothing much ever came of it. The scene flooded the post with thanks, five years almost to the day from 'Shit Day'. A better story went around afterwards, that he'd been scouted by the Broncos off a furious goal-kicking session and signed; it was a hoax, fed to this magazine during the research for the first edition by someone claiming to be a close friend of his, and the first edition printed it in good faith. It stands corrected here, because this record would rather be right than look right. Casualty described itself as paused rather than dead, which feels accurate; founders age out, all the way back to Kuepper boarding the plane, and the thing Kaleb built had long since stopped depending on him.

The wave he left behind kept building through 2024. Findaway released their debut album Intertwined in July. Short-lived Yellow Fever formed in June, bassist Dylan Ferreira messaging guitarist Iggy Bitburg, drummer Ethan joining after, Type O Negative running in their veins, part of a younger metal-influenced generation alongside Act Dumb, with Natasha Ellis on vocals, Corrosion Girls, Konjura and Vaider. Konjura was a small thing that died fast, its people landing in Delphic Afterparty, which had been going well before it. Gormless Records, founded by the members of Piss Off, put on bills that read like the scene's all star team which featured bands such as The Amphetamines, Shock Value, PIMP, Broken Milk Crates and Ambrosial. Harper Thomas, fifteen from the Redlands, started pulling crowds with indie folk. Antidismal signed distribution partnerships with GYROstream and DistroDirect, which made it a more real record label than anything the scene had produced.

In 2022 Kaleb described the scene as 'just kids who want to go out and do live shows', and noted it was 'starting to fracture up a bit now which just happens as it grows'. He was right on both counts before he was out of it.

Chapter 7: The Forgetting

Breakbone was founded in May 2024 by a southside kid rechristened Iggy Bitburg, a pen name taken to keep himself out of reach, given how personal the writing was going to get, that ended up becoming a scene name in its own right. He had stood in the crowd at the Big Takeover at Paddington Skatepark on 4 May, the day before his birthday, the all ages show PIMP organised, and decided within the week that what he'd seen needed documenting. The name came from the city itself, Bris from a Gaelic word for break, bane from an Old English one for bone, a coincidence sealed at that first gig when two bands pulled out over what the crowd swore was a broken bone. The logo was a hammer and a bone drawn on an iPad, the masthead typeface lifted from the spirit of Sniffin' Glue, and the motto was Document, distribute, demonstrate. Its first issue went up on 13 May 2024. In September 2024 it published the first edition of this history, which became the most read piece in the magazine's existence and the closest thing the Subscene had to a record of its own existence. The magazine's editor would be the first to tell you it did not consistently live up to the motto, and the proof is that the first edition of this book left Breakbone out entirely. It belongs in the record, so this time it's in.

The history that edition told ended in September 2024 at a low ebb, no gig in weeks, the next a month away, and its author called the scene quite dead at the time of writing. He was early, but not wrong. What followed over the next year was the fall, and because this is a history and not a eulogy, here is the sequence as plainly as it can be stated.

Project Punk had already gone in July 2024, last gig and out, a self-described rock and roll suicide in the Ziggy Stardust tradition, burning out on its own terms rather than fading. Antidismal held Happy Feet Fest at the Bardon Bowls Club in September 2024, a bill leaning indie pop and BIGSOUND, the scene's Be Here Now moment, enormous, polished and slightly beside the point, before Ixara left to tour nationally supporting Aleksiah, and as her career took off the label completed its long drift from its punk roots toward indie pop; through 2025 it stopped holding gigs in the scene it had helped build. Deadtrigger scaled up before it slowed down. The second SkatePUNK, on 14 April 2025, drew around five hundred people across two stages with council funding behind it, and Braxton spoke on a BIGSOUND panel; the founding move had become infrastructure. Then the 2025 edition moved indoors, this magazine observed in print that the name no longer fit, and DeadFEST, which is what SkatePUNK had been rebranded to, was cancelled. Braxton stepped back for personal reasons, and the machine that had carried the bayside went quiet. Gormless Records was the scene's last stand, and it ended quietly and early. The community halls had worked out they could jack rental fees and bonds on a captive scene, the crowds got harder to manage, and the official explanations pointed at both, and Cyclone Alfred flattening the calendar that March didn't help, but the honest core was simpler and older. Arran and Johnnie were starting university, and the all ages clock that comes for every founder had come for them. Their last all ages show, at a Spring Hill hall on the 1st of March 2025 with Heavy Liquid and Bubblegum Haircut on the bill, was a good one, strong turnout, good night, George of Shock Value sending everyone off by buttering the doorknobs. Gormless still exists on paper and now mostly carries Piss Off's pub bookings and releases. The band's own records map the arc. After the shed-rock debut came Slab, the famous one, the original lineup at their peak powers, proper production carrying the comedy, the grunge tinge evident every second song; and then Cut Tongues, recorded at a 'proper' studio and sounding like it, midtempo, a riff per song with the noise baked on, the urgency gone, which is what happens, and has always happened, when the people carrying the unpaid version age into the paid one.

The middle of that fall has a primary source, an unpublished review sitting in this magazine's own archive, of a gig called School's (Almost) Out on the 9th of November 2024, Chimpeltons and Ambrosial across the bill with The Amphetamines and Konfess. It reads like the era. Fifteen bucks on the door, a crowd of pop punk and mall emo kids mostly under eighteen, watching from their friend groups and swaying a little instead of moshing; Heath McTegg working the stage banter; Ambrosial by then a wall of sound in a league of their own, not punk, not indie, not metal; and the Chimpeltons, the act the reviewer had come for, sounding more metal than the shedrock of their Casualty days, playing to a floor half-emptied by people leaving for another gig. The review ends honestly, the deep yearning just wasn't satisfied, and it never ran. One submission to this edition remembers the same night from the floor, and since it was given anonymously it can speak for everyone; the dyed-hair kids on the train and knowing yep, we're going to the same place, someone walking you to the station afterwards saying be safe, a gig as somewhere that felt safe in a year when not much else did. Both of those are true at once, and that is what the fall actually felt like, the machine winding down and the door still worth walking through.

The bands themselves were changing shape under the surface. Piss Off, Shock Value, Heavy Liquid and the short-lived Night Boys had always shared and swapped members, and by the start of 2025 neither Piss Off nor Shock Value had its original lineup; Krystina, Shock Value's bassist, crossed to Piss Off rather than tour Europe, chasing a botany degree instead. Nobody announced the old scene's end. The lineups just quietly stopped being the ones on the old posters.

The venues went with the organisations. The Woolloongabba Substation, the spiritual home of everything since 2021, held its last gig at the end of January 2025, Piss Off on the bill one final time, and then gigs there were banned outright, the liability and the police callouts having finally outrun the goodwill. AHEPA's all-ages nights wound down across the Gormless era, the hall a Greek community venue hired by the hour that kept lifting its fees until the gigs that had built its name could no longer afford to be there; the building reopened under a licensed, over-eighteens operator in late 2025, gentrification doing to the hall what it had already done to the suburb around it. When it went quiet the grief came in two registers at once, half sincere and half the joke you crack so a loss can't land on you, and that was the sound of a scene that knew exactly what another dead venue cost it. Communify's ban pushed one Ithaca Hall show to be booked under the guise of an art exhibition, which is either a low point or the most punk venue booking in this history depending on your mood. The crowds changed too; the criticism that had peaked in 2024, that hedonism had become the standard, that subcultures had been dumbed down to black hair and piercings, that a contingent came to gigs to fight, film or sit outside, did not get less true in 2025. What had made 2024 feel like a tribe was that you could trace anybody's degrees of separation, who they knew, whose photos they stood in; by 2025 you could pick the new crowd by the opposite signs, the pins without the lineage behind them, the filming, the congregating outside, the names at the gigs no longer connecting to anything you knew. The scene had centralised around Redland Bay and hardened into circles of friend groups, and if you weren't from the bay it was getting hard to meet anyone at all.

And the documentation nearly stopped. Breakbone went dark in February 2025 and stayed dark for seven months, a cyclone, school and its editor's own disillusionment with what the gigs had turned into all doing their part. When it came back in September the issues ran partly on archival material, and the writing, by the editor's own later verdict, was polished and bloodless, a magazine posting in its sleep. The Spew slowed with the scene it covered. By the start of 2026 a gig still happened here and there, built around one band's own followers and friends, but the connective tissue, the thing that made strangers into a scene, was gone, and everyone quietly knew it. Gigs as background noise. A kid turning fourteen that summer, holding a guitar in a bedroom in a suburb nobody writes about, had no way of knowing any of this had ever existed.

end of part 4 part 5, what comes after, is live

Read Part 5 › Back to the History ›