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JAKE MURDOCH
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You can hear the lineage if you listen sideways. A bright guitar figure that recalls the jangle tradition, a beat that carries the ghost of radio pop’s golden decades, and over it a voice trying to turn personal confusion into communal chant. Next arrives like a postcard from the old promise of pop music: that three minutes can make private trouble feel publicly survivable. Jake Murdoch stands in an interesting place in the Australian continuum. A kid with festival credentials, government showcases, and the blessing—or at least the company—of Andrew Farriss (INXS), he embodies the perennial story of youth stepping into a tradition already crowded with legends. The question is never just what he feels, but how those feelings join the long conversation of songs about wanting, leaving, and circling back. Next is built on motion. The groove pushes forward even when the lyrics hesitate. That tension—between the urge to run and the urge to remain—has powered pop narratives since the first teenage laments of the 1950s. When Murdoch sings about not disappearing this time, he’s entering a hall of mirrors where every generation has promised the same thing.

There’s innocence here, but also instinct. He knows a chorus must open like a door. He knows repetition is not redundancy but ritual. The lines about pretty faces and right places could be fragments from any young lover’s notebook, yet set to melody they become declarations, little bids for permanence in a fleeting world. What lingers is the sense of a young musician auditioning for history. Not self-consciously, not with pastiche, but with the natural absorption of someone raised inside the stream of pop. Next doesn’t reinvent the form; it participates in it. And sometimes participation—adding one brighter tile to a sprawling mosaic—is the deeper achievement. The song leaves you with a familiar but welcome feeling: that the story of pop renewal, of kids picking up guitars and translating their immediate hearts into shared sound, is still being written. Murdoch’s entry is earnest, tuneful, and alive to possibility. In pop music, that has always been more than enough to matter.