Blasting out of Tasmania, Australia’s small but increasingly visible underground rock circuit, Spooky Eyes arrive with a sound that feels less like corny retro revivalism and more like excavation, pulling something raw, heavy, and half-buried out of the late ’60s and dragging it into the present.
At its core, the band is a stripped-down power trio: Jude Hastings on guitar and vocals, Piper Rayner on bass, and Jason Bassett on drums. What began as Hastings’ solo project has expanded into something more forceful and physical, anchored by a rhythm section that leans hard into momentum rather than precision. The result is a band that prioritizes feel—volume, repetition, and the slow burn of a muscular riff stretched just past its breaking point.
Their self-titled debut plays like a document of that approach. The record doesn’t chase polish. Instead, it holds onto the grit: fuzzed-out guitar tones that bleed at the edges, basslines that throb, and drums that feel locked into a kind of forward push rather than a fixed groove. There are clear reference points—garage rock, heavy blues, early psychedelia—but Spooky Eyes treat them less as genres and more as textures to recombine into their own wild tunes.
There’s a particular allegiance here to the late-’60s underground, not just sonically but structurally. Songs tend to circle rather than resolve, leaning into repetition and small variations. It’s a sensibility that comes through most clearly on their take on “Psychotic Reaction,” the 1966 garage staple originally recorded by The Count Five. Rather than treating it as a straightforward cover, Spooky Eyes use it as a launching point, stretching its nervous energy into something heavier, more saturated, and less contained.
What makes the record work is its refusal to overstate itself. There’s no attempt to modernize the formula or dress it up in contemporary production trends. Instead, Spooky Eyes lean into the brutal physicality of the music: amps pushed to their limits and a general sense that the recordings are trying to capture something that’s always on the verge of slipping out of control.
If anything, we hope this album is only the first transmission. Spooky Eyes aren’t reinventing psychedelic rock so much as reactivating it, treating its history as a live wire rather than a closed chapter. Or, as a satisfied fan said on Bandcamp: “Rock ‘n roll wasn’t dead, it just needed CPR.”
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