Floodlights | Balnarring Social Club | 15th February
I drove down to join two friends already camping in Balnarring. Floodlights were playing three nights at the local pub as part of a regional run to open 2026, and we sat in the early afternoon sun drinking 4X Gold.
Floodlights heavily lean on outback coastal imagery in their songs, with sparse, aesthetic stabs of sentences about dry grass, wide open roads, and country towns. We did the 30-minute walk into town in 20 and arrived through the line of pines to the pub.
It was bustling with South Coast locals and a handful of Melburnians who’d made the trip down, many, like us, camping along the foreshore. We stood under heavily misting sprinklers suspended over the lilydale toppings of the beer garden as kids ran around behind us under the pines.
Floodlights took to the makeshift stage and opened with Wide Open Land, a little slower and hotter than usual. The merciful sprinklers beat down and everyone’s hair was glistening wet by the second song, while others clustered around the umbrellas at the periphery of the stage.
The five-piece played Tricky, their most recent release from late 2025. They blended harmonica and piano in the midsection, and the song gradually increased in its forcefulness. They used both an arpeggiated synth and a harmonica together in the final chorus, a rather weird combination that they had a knack for making work.
Floodlights have evolved quite a lot since their first EP, Backyard, was released in 2019. They showed a lot more willingness to experiment in form, with their most recent work much more cut up. They shifted the rhythm and dynamic of their songs unexpectedly, and combined elements from disparate genres under the same aesthetic umbrella they’ve always had, of the small town and the back country.
Songs like Buoyant and The Light Won’t Shine Forever mixed odd synth sounds and clean vocal harmonies behind the ubiquitous dirty guitar, and they showed a clear influence from bands like Black Country, New Road.
They felt like a band really hitting their stride. Their last album was their best yet, and on stage they were much cooler and more commanding than when I last saw them around a year ago at a sold-out Northcote Theatre.
During Horses Will Run, lead singer Louis parted the crowd and sang in the middle of the beer garden. The sun had mercifully dipped behind the row of pines and the wet crowd became more lively.
“We’re not going to do the whole rigmarole of an encore, we’re just going to stay up here,” said Louis. “It’s important to bring music into small towns, regional places.”
The band closed with Backyard, and the crowd poured out of the pub over the back fence. We hung around for another couple of hours, lounging around the picnic tables near the road. The table next to us were from Northcote, and they hadn’t been able to get a ticket to the Friday or Saturday show.
An immensely likeable and charming band, whose music felt uniquely 2020s. They were vague and thematic in their allusions to summer and country driving, and allowed the listener to project into their music whatever they wanted it to symbolise.
To me, Floodlights’ music felt like a hot Sunday afternoon at a country pub, an interlude to a weekend of camping. Next time I see them in Melbourne they’ll undoubtedly mean something different.