Wolfmother

Four young Australians who would really have preferred to have been born 30 years earlier. Wolfmother has taken the patents for lengthy jams and elegant riffs from Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin. In the group’s own words, they play “a mix of the playfulness of Earth Wind and Fire with the intensity of Black Flag”. And they are keen to point out that they don’t want to sound retro. Their eponymous debut in 2005 did great things down under. Six songs entered the Top 100 of the influential youth radio station Triple J. The rest of the planet soon followed. Wolfmother was 2006’s ‘breakout band of the year’ and played all the important festivals, including Rock Werchter, of course. While working on the second album the original trio ran hopelessly aground. Frontman Andrew Stockdale was the sole survivor. With three new recruits, he made ‘Cosmic Egg’ (2009), an album that brilliantly exaggerated everything that was good about their debut. In their words, number three will be a “beastly sounding record”.