The year is 2026 and it’s simultaneously never been easier or harder to be an artist
You can make music from the comfort of your (mould ridden) home with total creative freedom, only to lose it in the algorithmic void of content and AI slop. You can book a show at an exciting new venue one day, and watch the venue get shut down by developers and conservative groups the next. You can make a living from your day job, but it will also mentally and physically drain you, slowing down the creative output that actually sustains you.
It’s this same feeling of exhaustion at the core of HARDER YAKKA, Teether’s sixth solo album and his first since relocating from Naarm to London. Picking up where we left off with his previous works - 2024’s It Must Be Strange To Not Have Lived and 2025’s YEARN IV with Kuya Neil - HARDER YAKKA plays like a hazy sequence of vignettes of everyday city living, made up of sludgy guitars, lo-fi drums and Teether’s instantly recognisable dead-pan flow. In his own words, “theme songs for the best and worst years of your life”.
Entirely self-produced, HARDER YAKKA still brings some surprises amongst its familiar sounds. “PERFECT SYMMETRY” featuring fellow CONTENT.NET.AU artist Sevy brings us to the club, evoking the jittery come-up of falling in love over a pounding kick drum, while the plucked synths of “SOMETHING’S GOING WRONG” and “GHOSTS SURROUND THE CASTLE” have an almost medieval quality to them, which feels apt for the album's weary, existentialist themes. These ideas and competing sonics are anchored by Teether’s aloof vocals, delivering lines like “Beautiful girls / I might kill myself” on the hedonistically detached lead single “SPIRAL STEP”.
Though HARDER YAKKA acknowledges the hard labour of survival, it never wallows in it. The city is not actually out to get you, but it is completely indifferent to your suffering. So you may as well keep waking up, going out, and chipping away at that thing you love. What else is there to do?
Words by Louisa Christie