Australian indie is the mostly-post-1980 body of guitar and psych music made by Australian bands sitting at a deliberate distance from the majors. Two scenes anchor it: Perth on the west coast, where Kevin Parker's Tame Impala built the world's leading modern psychedelic-pop workshop, and Melbourne in the south-east, where Courtney Barnett's talk-singing songwriter craft and King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard's polyrhythmic maximalism run in parallel with Amyl and the Sniffers' back-to-pub-rock punk. Line-ups run four or five players, production sits between lo-fi and hi-res, and the lyrics tend to sit flat over the melody — everyday observation rather than emotional performance.

The origin point is The Church (Sydney, 1980), whose 1988 single 'Under the Milky Way' established the twelve-string jangle and reverb vocal that codified the scene. You Am I, The Go-Betweens, and Powderfinger extended that template in the 1990s. In Perth after 2007, Kevin Parker's Tame Impala emerged and 2010's Innerspeaker shifted the global centre of psychedelic pop to Western Australia. Melbourne's answer came in 2013 with Courtney Barnett's How to Carve a Carrot into a Rose, and by 2017 King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard had released five albums in a single calendar year — a rock-history first.

On Tame Impala's 'The Less I Know the Better' the bass is louder than the vocal, a deliberate choice that pulls the listener's head backward. Kevin Parker records almost every instrument himself at home, staggering the drum and bass phase to give the record its rubberised feel. Courtney Barnett's 'Depreston' is a flat, unpunctuated narration of viewing a suburban house for sale — the vocal never rises, and the emotional weight lands precisely because it doesn't. King Gizzard's odd time signatures should be heard, not counted; the correct listening posture is to accept the weirdness rather than try to parse it.

Tame Impala 'The Less I Know the Better' (2015) for the production language. Courtney Barnett 'Depreston' (2015) for the songwriting language. King Gizzard 'Rattlesnake' (2017) for the maximalist end. Amyl and the Sniffers 'Guided by Angels' (2021) for the current pub-rock revival. Late-night headphones or a dusk drive are the right frames.

Tame Impala's first three albums — Innerspeaker (2010), Lonerism (2012), and Currents (2015) — were all effectively Kevin Parker solo projects recorded at home; the five-piece live band exists only for touring. King Gizzard's 2017 five-album run included Flying Microtonal Banana, recorded in 24-tone microtonal tuning on a custom guitar built for Turkish saz players. Courtney Barnett co-runs the Milk! Records label with fellow songwriter Jen Cloher, and the label has become the Australian indie scene's most visible women-led operation.