Radio Free Alice

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 art-rock 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.”

Absolute, steadfast belief in the cause has always sat at the root of Radio Free Alice. Learmonth and guitarist Jules Paradiso started the group at school in Sydney before moving, aged 18, to Melbourne to fully pursue music. With their previous bandmates staying behind, they soon found bassist Michael Phillips and drummer Lochie Dowd at Melbourne University. A move 500 miles across the country might have been a big jump, but finding a place that could nurture and provide a home for their ideas was the only logical option.

“We were playing a lot when we first moved to Melbourne and it really seemed like, from the first show, people resonated and were having a really good time,” Learmonth remembers. “It was like, OK, we’re onto something. Because even though we’ve got three monthly listeners, every time we play live it seems to grow.”

The frontman was no stranger to a little uprooting, either. Having spent the first 10 years of his life living in the UK, it’s perhaps those early years that explain Radio Free Alice’s proudly Anglophile sensibilities. But you get the idea that, childhood experience or not, Learmonth would always have been a man drawn to the world’s more self-deprecating, sardonic characters.

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. But also… “Jules and I joke about how, if we never watched The Office UK, we wouldn't have a personality,” Learmonth laughs. “There’s a line in ‘Lunch Money’, and no-one’s picked up on it yet but it’s literally taken from Peep Show.”

It makes sense, then, that Radio Free Alice have quickly transcended the often hard to break out of Australian music scene, and become a band welcomed onto stages around the world. With every visit to the UK, they’ve hurdled expectations. In 2025, they booked one London headline show that, due to insane demand, ended up expanding to six sold-out shows in the capital in the space of a singular month. Later that year, they returned for a sold-out tour finale at Scala, via a US run which included three sold out NYC shows; this summer, they’ve spent festival season touring around the world’s biggest stages, from Governor’s Ball to TRNSMT, Rock Werchter to Reading and Leeds. Back home in Australia, they supported Geese on their first trip down under, and warmed the stage for The Killers on their last arena run.

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.

“I find it disappointing that sometimes, in indie music, there’s this attitude that small and lo-fi equals credible. If the vocals sound like they were recorded on a Nokia, then it's interesting. Personally, I think that's all just bullshit,” he says. “I think being big is ambitious and exposing and risky. When you do the lo-fi thing, you can hide behind it and say ‘Oh, we weren't trying that hard’. But we really want these songs to to be fucking banging. There’s more on the line. And if you don’t agree, you can't say we didn't try.”

A three continent record made with England’s Ewan Pearson over a couple weeks in an isolated bushland studio north of Sydney during sweltering Australian summer; songs were re-worked and re-visited with producer Peter Katis (Interpol, The National) at his studio in Connecticut in between RFA’s touring schedule; while a week of downtime in north-west London earlier this year spawned the final touches on the album with young UK producer Finn Billingham working out of Flood and Alan Moulder’s studio.

Of working with Katis, What’s In Between rounds up the best of Radio Free Alice so far and injects it with a fresh lease of life. “He did what a producer is meant to do, which is take your song and make it animated so it’s not just two guitars, bass and drums,” says Learmonth. “He's made it slick but he's also made it more human. It feels powerful and big.”

Where early single ‘Rule 31’ pairs ominous, oblique lyrics with the sort of propulsive yet emotive guitars that find the midpoint between The Cure and Bloc Party, ‘Lunch Money’ was written during a soundcheck in Nottingham around a bassline that felt gleefully reminiscent of ‘80s curios Orange Juice. “I like that it’s summery and dancey, but in that English new wave talky way,” Learmonth nods approvingly.

Ask Learmonth of the origins of ‘Crying With You’ and he’ll tell you a story about a bag of mushrooms and a wild week writing for the album in Joshua Tree, at French producer Nicolas Vernhes’ studio that he recently relocated from the bustle of Brooklyn to the expanse of the Californian desert.

At the other end of the spectrum, ‘Kick In the Shins’’ first punchline (“I heard The Cavern Club is now a Morrisons”) came from equal but oppositely amusing beginnings. “When we visited Liverpool, we tried to go to The Cavern Club and we went to find it and it was a Morrisons. And I thought, ‘That's a classically poetic description of the neoliberal world we live in where the past has [been destroyed]’,” the frontman eulogises. “And then, about five minutes later, after I'd written it down on my phone, we realised that no, The Cavern Club is still there down the road. We just accidentally went to a Morrisons. But I still kept the lyrics.”

‘Undressed’ channels a Cocker-esque figure, desperately wanting to see their love interest naked, while ‘Big Ideas’ - featuring a cameo from Rachel Brown of Brooklyn’s Water From Your Eyes - takes a step back with what Learmonth tentatively calls their most “mature” song yet. “It's such a step in a direction that we haven't been before; it's very melodic and understated and unassuming. It’s our favorite song on the album,” he nods. Meanwhile What’s In Between’’s title track opens the record with an introduction to its themes of tension and possibility. “The point of art is [to document] the between spaces; between people and places and feelings and stages in life,” the frontman says. “There’s something romantic about that idea, I think.”

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.