The Finalists celebrate the release of their debut album ‘First’ with very special guest John Sharkey III.

The Finalists celebrate the release of their debut album ’First’, on Half A Cow Records with special guest John Sharkey III launching his new single ‘I Found Everyone This Way’.

THE FINALISTS

With a sound that draws on the band’s collective music history playing in a number of bands in Sydney, Australia and Auckland, New Zealand, they’ve concocted a blend of jangly guitar-based indie rock, with elements of psych-rock, shoegaze and post-punk threading through the music. You can hear the ghosts of Factory and Flying Nun Records, the evocative strains of The Go-Betweens and The Smiths and other Antipodean contemporaries such as Underground Lovers, Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever and RVG. On their debut album, the twin totems of melody and melancholy course through the sparkling and shimmering guitar lines. Elsewhere the group take flight in Sonic Youth-inspired six-string explorations.

The Finalists' debut single, 'Ignore All The Hate (On Your Telephone)', a featured single of the week on 2SER 107.3FM, was an understated slice of melodic melancholia, draped in acoustic and electric guitars that sparkled and gently jangled. In contrast, 'Learn To Live Without You', a concise and infectious, garage and jangle-pop guitar nugget, harks back to the golden age of the two and half minute pop song.

"A supergroup out of Sydney, a culmination of amazing talent from a whole bunch of different bands." – Mick Radojkovic (The Tuckshop 2SER)

JOHN SHARKEY III

Philly-born, Canberra-dwelling John Sharkey III will release his debut solo album ‘Shoot Out The Cameras’ on March 5th. The arresting first single,’“I Found Everyone This Way’ is out now. Perhaps best known as the creative force behind confrontational noise-punk band Clockcleaner, which erupted from the fertile soil of Philly’s DIY scene in the 00s, Sharkey’s solid underground creds include hardcore/punk bands such as 9 Shocks Terror and more recently, literate indie-rock explorations as Puerto Rico Flowers and Dark Blue.

Fate intervened in the shaggy shape of Philly hero Kurt Vile, who invited Sharkey onstage when he toured Canberra last year. In the audience that night was Canberra native Nick Craft, who stood mouth agape as Sharkey sang pristine country harmonies with Vile on a cover of The Highwaymen’s “Silver Stallion”. Once Craft heard Sharkey’s demos, he urged him to make an album. 

Holed up in a small studio on Queanbeyan’s industrial estate, Sharkey and Craft captured Shoot Out The Cameras in two marathon sessions. Beautifully recorded, the starkness of Sharkey’s lyrical imagery and pit-of-the-stomach emotions are honoured with nothing more than guitar and voice, and, on the album’s closer, the glisten of Philly homie Mary Lattimore’s harp.