The wait is over for cult faves HTRK, as the Melbourne electronic post-punk duo make their Sydney Opera House debut in the Drama Theatre as part of Vivid LIVE.

Cult duo make their Opera House debut

Making their long-awaited, Sydney Opera House debut at Vivid LIVE, HTRK – aka Melbourne duo Jonnine Standish and Nigel Yang – have long been one of Australia’s most essential bands, praised for their brooding, sensual soundscapes by the likes of The New Yorker, The Fader, Pitchfork, The Guardian and The Wire.

Few groups in history, recent or otherwise, elevate mood to such singular, smouldering supremacy as the Australian duo of Jonnine Standish and Nigel Yang aka HTRK [‘Hate Rock']. Across nearly two decades of work, wounds (co-founder Sean Stewart tragically took his own life in 2010), and world tours, their sound has shape-shifted between densities and intensities, noise and nakedness, but never wavered in its delicate poetic gravity. Theirs is a chemistry of smoke, echo, and the undertows of desire, the dislocation of cities and memory, the melancholy of distance and deepening night. It’s music of solitude and sensuality, for small hours and lost weekends, spoken in an intimate shadowplay language of skeletal electronics, velvet voice, and noir guitar. 

HTRK’s albums have been released by an array of international labels including Fire (Nostalgia), Blast First Petite (Marry Me Tonight), Boomkat Editions (Over The Rainbow), and Ghostly International (Psychic 9-5 Club, Venus In Leo). For the occasion of their most recent full-length, the celebrated slowburn suite Rhinestones, they founded their own artist imprint, N&J Blueberries. In the live setting they transform spectral torch songs into quiet storms of tension, texture, and transcendence.

Presented by Sydney Opera House