Globe Hall Presents Radio Free Alice on Tuesday, March 30th.
Noah Learmonth is the sort of frontman that classic bands are built around. Talk to the wryly amusing Radio Free Alice vocalist, and you’ll find a leader who knows exactly what he wants his band to be: hook-laden yet self-aware; full of nuance, humour and a strange kind of joy; a group for those who often find themselves on the margins of the party, but a unit whose dreams are also ambitiously, unashamedly massive and fully on display with their debut record, What’s In Between.
“I don’t know if I’m an especially joyous person. I wish I was more joyous. But I want to be somebody that makes joyous music. I think it’s a self-deprecating record but, if I can say so myself, I think there’s something very charming about the album,” says Learmonth. “If the album was a person, it’s the sort of person I’d want to be.”
Radio Free Alice began as young teenagers a decade ago, playing covers of Radiohead and Mudhoney and The The to school assemblies full of baffled peers. Now, they’re about to unveil their debut album via Atlantic Records to an increasingly fervent, increasingly global fanbase who’ve taken the Melbourne-based group’s insatiable earworms and idiosyncratic worldview to their hearts. Externally, everything has changed. But Learmonth has always known who Radio Free Alice are from the start.
“I think, from a very early age, we had a sense of the band we wanted to be. In Australia, a lot of the alternative rock that was being celebrated, I was just completely confused by. I just didn’t resonate with it at all,” he recalls. “A lot of them were these Birthday Party-esque, very dark artrock bands, but I always felt like, hold on, where’s the Pulp equivalent? Where’s a band that is very artistic but also just unbelievably fun and you don’t have to be a music nerd to love it? There wasn’t a band like that, and that was the big inspiration for us.”
Central to the band’s outlook are the intelligent outsider figures – Pulp, The Smiths, The Cure, Belle and Sebastian – that you’d probably be able to root out from Radio Free Alice’s own frequency of pop-minded indie-post-punk.
Now, with the drive to make timeless music that could join the lineage of wonderful weirdos who have kept the heart of British indie beating since Morrissey first declared that he was miserable now, comes What’s In Between. It’s a record that understands that rapture and ruin are often unlikely bedfellows; a record built for finding your tribe in mosh pits and on dancefloors. Radio Free Alice’s first album rings with the giddy spirit of a classic indie debut and, for Learmonth, that’s the whole point.
A card-carrying lover of coming-of-age narratives, with What’s In Between Learmonth and his band have written the soundtrack to their own: a debut destined to play on the stereos of a generation of fans as they carve out their singular stories, and an album that cements Radio Free Alice’s place as one of 2026’s most significant breakout bands.
