A glitch is a sudden malfunction in an electronic system. As a recurring phenomenon in our virtual landscapes, we are all familiar with glitches in their various forms and collectively understand that, if the malfunction doesn't resolve on its own, the reliable turn-off-and-on-again method will almost always restore the system to its original state. At times, however, witnessing a glitch can engender an unsettling or even sickly feeling, which has been theorised poignantly by Julia Kristeva and her concept of the abject.

Kristeva would suggest that witnessing a technological breakdown forces one to consider (whether consciously or unconsciously) the innate potential for our own mortal bodies to glitch, malfunction, and become abjected, or “cast off." Deeply unsettling, the glitch reminds us that our biological, political, economic and social systems are not secure but acutely vulnerable—as felt in the global IT outage of July 2024. Going further, the glitch can thwart colonial/capitalist ideals of progress by freezing linear time. Climate catastrophes such as bushfires, floods and droughts can be considered the ultimate glitches as they negate capitalist desires for unencumbered economic progress and force humans to consider the cyclical nature of growth. While glitches are often brief and easily fixed, these technological fissures can be unsettling, disruptive and, if deployed with artistic intent, subversive.

Shady Nasty are a band from Sydney who utilise glitches in the visual and auditory worlds they create. When performing live, lead singer Kevin Stathis begins songs by looping, reversing or freezing ominous, reverb-heavy guitar passages, creating a kind of audio glitch from which the rest of the trio build upon. This includes Haydn Green on five-string bass, whose melodic, pitch-shifted lines lead many of the compositions; and Luca Watson on drums, who plays in a kind of glitchy, free-jazz style. Stathis’ melodies pay homage to Sydney’s multicultural suburban communities, including his own Chinese heritage, with the guitar and vocals echoing traditional Asian and Arabic scales.

Whereas punk performances traditionally begin with an aggressive, nihilistic wall of white noise, Stathis’ feedback conjures something more subtle, introspective. The brooding soundscapes he creates invoke a river with multiple currents pulling back and forth against each other. The soundscape is the auditory manifestation of a glitch, where melodies are snagged and locked in a loop. This looping mirrors the band’s thematic preoccupation with cultural stagnation and their scepticism towards technological, social and capitalist growth. We can identify this scepticism through the symbolism embedded in their videoclips—works of hybrid, digital art directed, filmed and edited in-house by Watson with help from Green, Stathis and a handful of other collaborators. Shady Nasty’s videoclips are far from ancillary afterthoughts; in fact, they are central to the conceptual fabric of the band and seem to exist as a priori to the music itself. There are rarely definitive stories in these videoclips but usually a series of symbolically dense vignettes that disrupt the idea of linear narrative progression.

Modded cars are a central component of Shady Nasty’s suburban-Sydney aesthetic, though in the band’s videoclips, these vehicles are almost always stationary. Cars are on fire on the side of highways; static in parking lots, scrapyards and dealerships; in limbo in McDonald’s drive-thrus and parked in the driveways of suburban homes (as pictured on the cover of their upcoming album TREK). For a long time modded cars have offered working-class, immigrant communities a way to add speed and impetus into their lives. These vehicles become vessels to surpass economic conditions where social mobility is in many ways restricted. Shady Nasty’s recurring use of static, high-performance vehicles, can be read as a critique of the mythologised Australian dream of class mobility, and as scepticism towards social progress more generally.

The paradox created by TREK (defined as a long, arduous journey or migration made on foot), and the stationary car on the front cover reinforce the band’s preoccupation with the limitations of both social and self-progression. The title could also be read as an acknowledgement of the arduous journeys made by many immigrant and refugee communities in Sydney and beyond—a journey that for many is still ongoing due to growing xenophobia and pressures to “assimilate” into white Australian culture.

One of the most interesting images of a luxury vehicle can be found in the videoclip for ‘IBIZA’, where Stathis sits in a Range Rover with a bodybuilder. The bodybuilder’s hand is gripped tightly on the wheel, although the vehicle remains static. The two men stare forward in silence and stillness as the camera pans in and out of the window and sunroof like a drone. The entire scene has glitched: the hazard lights are blinking, and both the car and its passengers begin to distort and blur.  

Elsewhere in ‘IBIZA’, a ring light hovers over luxury hotel rooms, Balenciaga handbags, high fashion garments and vehicles. Stathis sings from the perspective of a myopic bodybuilder who, ‘in lieu of feeling spiritual’, idealises Ibiza as a heavenly paradise. In a post-modern context that seems to make Nietzsche’s 1882 claim that “god is dead” common knowledge, spiritual rebirth is replaced with a form of physical resurrection and material gain: ‘Get in the gym, get you some fucken gains, lad. Get in the fucken plane, lad. Fix that scoliosis and ‘em sunken eyes. And ‘em shaking knees will piss right off and maybe you’ll come back to life. Gotta get to Ibiza’. In the videoclip for ‘PRETTYB0YZ’, we see TikToks of young, shredded men glitching and distorting and in ‘ATHLEAN-X’ (a reference to a viral workout program), Stathis muses on growing body dysmorphia and the masculine obsession with physical gains: ‘Tried to get cut. Forceful living every other day. Forceful in a silent way. Tryna get big as a Benz truck. Cut like a skuxx’.

Unlike traditional punk, where heaviness can be attributed to fast guitar, sustained aggression and distortion, the heaviness of Shady Nasty’s sound stems from space, reverb and building tension. In Shady Nasty’s compositions, the listener is sonically confronted with a repressed masculine violence that, like the soundscapes themselves, grows and compounds before being released in a momentary surge (or glitch) of aggression. These oscillations between tension and release mirror a gym set—a bodybuilder moving between intense repetitions and momentary rest. When the music slows, the songs mimic the limbs of a gym-junkie—a body heavy with fatigue and laden with roids and lactic acid. Stathis’s low-frequency vocal loops take the form of glitches—short phrases that are repeated and at times whispered over-and-over like a bodybuilder’s self-motivational mantra: ‘No chains on my body. No chains on my body. No signs on my vitals. No signs. No signs’ (‘G-SHOCK’).

Shady Nasty’s creations are also unique for the way in which they illuminate liminal Australian landscapes. This includes highways, industrial estates, fast-food car parks, power plants, train stations, deep suburbia, petrol stations, deserts, salt lakes and cleared bushland. The mansions that feature in multiple clips are also arguably liminal for they are inaccessible to the vast majority of the Australian public. As viewers, we only gain access to these luxury homes through virtual (and regularly glitching/freezing) walk-through tours reminiscent of 360-degree real estate promotional videos. In the videoclip for ‘CAREDBRAH’, a giant flashlight is cast over multiple Bondi mansions perched on the top of a hill. The flashlight momentarily reveals vacant, lifeless homes and, when placed alongside footage of food delivery riders and workers in high-vis huddled together on a freezing night in an industrial site, these images become subtle critiques of the social injustices underpinning Sydney’s acute housing crisis.

While most Australians live in the cities, suburbs and coastal fringes of the continent, many are still preoccupied with a romanticised image of the “bush”—a Eurocentric conception that can be traced back to the pastoral ballads of Henry Lawson and Banjo Patterson. In the videoclip for ‘GET BUFF’, Stathis seems to reflect upon the Eurocentrism of these mythologies as he is filmed in two contrasting settings: a Chinese restaurant and a dense bushland littered with gum trees. Crucially, in Shady Nasty’s videoclips we do not witness the romantic Australian bush as imagined by Lawson and Patterson, but a landscape that has been gutted to make way for warehouses, highways and giant transmission towers. There are also subtle allusions to climate catastrophes (or climate glitches) as we see flashes of blue sky filled with bushfire smoke and suburban Sydney streets inundated with floodwaters.

The landscapes in Shady Nasty’s film clips are also hybridised and layered with virtual filters. The looming transmission towers in ‘77SUNK’ are constantly glitching; in ‘AA’ we follow a character through a videogame-like first-person perspective with RuneScape overlays; in ‘R0LL1N’ H1LLZ’ (ft. Yoni Yen) vast desert spaces transform into psychedelic soundwaves reminiscent of the radio emissions on Joy Division’s iconic Unknown Pleasures album cover; and in ‘G-SHOCK’, strange and kinetic digital entities manifest like Pokémon GO creatures in 7-eleven isles and mundane suburban streets. These images reveal the way in which virtual and natural worlds are overlapping and increasingly entangled. As viewers, we witness “reality” glitching as the virtual world intrudes and upsets the purity of the natural.

In his online essay ‘Glitches: A Kind of History’, Alex Pieschel explains that a glitch “suggests something mysterious and unknowable inflicted by surprise inputs or phenomena outside the realm of code. [They] could be hardware, could be users, could be ghosts.” Shady Nasty’s name is therefore apt as they too are an ominous entity that exists “outside the realm of code." Shady Nasty are a glitch in the Australian music industry. The uniqueness of the band’s audio and visual creations has reconfigured the alternative music scene. Like all great art, their creations trigger a glitch within their audience—it arrests, engenders reflection and, at times, forces a complete reformation in the way one understands the increasingly complex world around them.

Shady Nasty’s debut LP TREK is out February 21, 2025.