STACK #254 December 2025

FEATURE MUSIC

THIS MONTH?

KATIE MELUA Piece by Piece UNIVERSAL

SCORPIONS Coming Home Live UNIVERSAL German rock band

TWO DOOR CINEMA CLUB Tourist History INERTIA Guitarist Sam Halliday

Katie Melua never really broke big in Australia, but she’s a superstar in the UK, where she’s had eight Top 10 albums, including two

Scorpions celebrated their 60th anniversary this year, playing an anniversary show in front of 45,000

thought his local cinema, the Tudor Cinema, was actually the Two-Door Cinema, hence the name

W ith the release of his 1975 album Tonight’s The Night , Neil Young confirmed his reputation as the most uncom promising songwriter/performer of his generation. If he’d stuck to the Harvest approach he could have had more hits. But as he famously proclaimed, the middle of the road was a bore. The songs on this disturbing album were inspired by the drug-related deaths of his Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten and roadie Bruce Berry. In what turned out to be a wake, Young is backed by the Crazy Horse rhythm section, guitarist/pianist Nils Lofgren and steel guitarist Ben Keith on 12 grief-stricken songs book ended by two versions of the title song. Tired Eyes , Borrowed Tune , and Lookout Joe – a warning to GIs returning from Vietnam – and a live 1970 track Come on Baby Let’s Go Downtown (with a lead vocal from Danny Whitten paying tribute to another drug casualty) is rock music at its most potent. There is one song that could have been a Harvest contender: Roll Another Number (For the Road) , with its country feel, an assertive steel guitar and wry Woodstock reference – “I’m not going back to Woodstock for a while, I don’t believe I’ll be going back that way.” In 1992, Neil would release Harvest Moon , a sequel to his biggest-selling album. NEIL YOUNG Tonight’s the Night INERTIA BIL Y’S PICK

chart-toppers. Released in 2005, Piece by Piece was Melua’s second album and featured her first UK Top 5 single, Nine Million Bicycles , as well as a cover of The Cure’s Just Like Heaven . The 20th anniversary edition also features Melua’s cover of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds . MELODY’S ECHO CHAMBER Unclouded DOMINO Melody’s Echo

fans in Hanover, the city where it all started. The result is this live album, which sees the band ripping through their most-loved songs, including Still Loving You, Big City Nights, Send Me an Angel, Rock You Like a Hurricane and, of course, Wind of Change . SKEGSS Top Heavy UNIVERSAL Aussie surf/garage set that captures the band’s spontaneous vibe. “We made this in the spur of the moment kind of thing,” singer Benny Reed explains. “A few of the songs kind of came out on the spot and we tried to capture it before brewing on them for too long.” SPANISH LOVE SONGS A Brief Intermission in the Flattening of Time ROCKET rockers Skegss follow last year’s Top 5 album, Pacif ic Highway Music , with the Top Heavy EP, a six-track

of the band he shares with singer Alex Trimble and bass player Kevin Baird. The Irish rockers issue the 15th anniversary edition of their debut album, which won the Choice Music Prize for ‘Irish Album of the Year’ and reached number 44 on the Australian charts. VARIOUS ARTISTS So Fresh: The Best of 2025 UNIVERSAL

It’s so cool that we still have a compilation album to wrap up the year. The So Fresh brand has been gathering the hits since 2000. This year’s

Chamber is French musician Melody Prochet. There’s an Aussie connection to

the project – she made the first Melody’s Echo Chamber album with Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker. Unclouded , her fourth album, is another intoxicating collection of dream pop.

edition opens with the year’s longest-running chart-topper – Alex Warren’s Ordinary – and ends with The Weeknd and Playboi Carti’s Timeless . In between are tracks from some of 2025’s shining stars, including Justin Bieber, Sabrina Carpenter, Gracie Abrams, Olivia Dean, and Chappell Roan. THE WATERBOYS Rips from the Cutting Room Floor INERTIA

MÖTLEY CRÜE Theatre of Pain UNIVERSAL

Theatre of Pain was Mötley Crüe’s first Top 10 album in Australia and America. The 1985 record was aptly titled as singer Vince Neil was facing prison time after a car

It’s 40 years since The Waterboys’ landmark single The Whole of the Moon . It was their only Top 40 hit in Australia, but the

Spanish Love Songs is a punk-pop band from Los Angeles. This new EP features collaborations with

crash that killed Hanoi Rocks drummer Nicholas Dingley, and bass player Nikki Sixx was battling addiction. Amidst it all, the band came up with a glam rock hit, which was dedicated to Dingley. The Crüe cover of Smokin’ in the Boys Room was their first Top 40 single in the US, while the power ballad Home Sweet Home was another chart hit. PORTUGAL. THE MAN Shish ROCKET Portugal. The Man is actually a rock band from Alaska, led by the husband-and-wife team of John Baldwin Gourley and Zoe Manville. Shish is their tenth studio album, with the title a reference to Shishmaref, a town in Alaska, which is often called “the friendliest village in Alaska”.

band – led by the great Scot, Mike Scott – have released 16 studio albums. This new release is a companion piece to their most recent record, containing 16 “extras” from Life, Death and Dennis Hopper , which was released in April this year. The Waterboys are touring Australia in May 2026.

Illuminati Hotties, Kevin Devine, Dan Campbell, and Tigers Jaw. And a bunch of tracks from the sessions for their previous album, No Joy , have been added as a bonus. TEED Always with Me ROCKET

Coming in JANUARY MADISON BEER Locket (Jan 16) LUCINDA WILLIAMS World’s Gone Wrong (Jan 23) LILY ALLEN West End Girl (Jan 30)

LA electronic musician Orlando Higginbottom started out releasing music under the name of Totally Enormous

Extinct Dinosaurs. Now abbreviated to TEED, he says his new record – which he wrote on a single synth – is a “yearning for connection at the end of the world... How do we find happiness in the chaos of our world?”

Radio legend Billy Pinnell presents Billy Pinnell’s Musical Moments on YouTube.

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