Vacations Brought Their MATES To The States

When Vacations first concocted their own festival MATES, it was a homecoming. In 2022, they hadn’t played their hometown of Newcastle, Australia for a minute, and they wanted to get back to their roots of booking events and throwing parties. So instead of a normal show, they gathered a bunch of Australian artists together for a blowout mini-fest. It was a success, and they immediately hit a ceiling. There wasn’t really any way they could scale MATES up to a larger event in Newcastle. So they started thinking bigger — and further.

For this year’s iteration of MATES, Vacations frontman Campbell Burns reimagined what the festival could be after relocating to Los Angeles. He envisioned an array of international acts, scenes and countries in conversation with one another. Coinciding with the 40th anniversary of the band’s US label Nettwerk Music Group, the fest would include some of their labelmates. But mostly, it was about Vacations creating a space where they could put on old compatriots and strangers they’d admired from afar alike. 

In the end the band curated a lineup that existed across the spectrum of indie music, with fellow Australian acts WAAX and Jaguar Jonze; American artists Claud, Ian Sweet, Kacy Hill; and Yot Club, and Puma Blue repping the London scene. They also brought in Stereogum as a media partner for this year’s iteration of the fest.

On Saturday, Vacations’ experiment finally went down at the Bellwether, a multi-room venue that opened in LA last year. MATES was set up as a proper festival, with the venue’s largest room as the “mainstage” equivalent, and a smaller upstairs room as a side stage. Throughout the night, concertgoers could also take a breather at a pizza restaurant in one of the bars, or on a patio where Alex Lahey, Banoffee, Georgia Maq, and Japanese Wallpaper — all Australian artists — DJ’ed. (One bemusing throughline with the DJs — pretty much everyone included a remix of one Brat remix or another.) 

Fittingly, the night kicked off with WAAX, an Australian band with a long history in Brisbane; Burns had been a fan, and ended up temporarily playing in a rebooted iteration of the group last year. Led by their dynamic frontwoman Maz DeVita, WAAX were by far the more aggressive end of MATES’ lineup — a caustic punk uproar that almost belied the array of dreamy indie to follow. 

MATES’ schedule had minimal overlap, meaning fans could see most of every artist’s set. Right after the blistering WAAX, there was the calmer, reflective Claud. Amidst songs mulling over relationships — including a great new one called “Deadbolt” — Claud had a dry sense of humor and joked about Shrek after playing “I’m A Believer,” the Neil Diamond-penned Monkees classic Smash Mouth covered for the movie. “I got you to sing along to ‘I’m A Believer,’” they deadpanned in between songs. “I bet you weren’t expecting that today.” An audience member howled “I love Shrek!” Claud: “Shrek is awesome. Shout out Shrek.”

For a while, these vibe shifts continued apace: Next was another Australian act, Jaguar Jonze, whose stage presence was already too powerful for the tinier stage upstairs. After Jonze’s finale — a throbbing, dance-tinged cover of “Heart-Shaped Box” — the downstairs venue grew packed for Yot Club’s wistful bedroom-pop. Back in 2019, Yot Club mastermind Ryan Kaiser went viral on TikTok with “YKWIM?” His set mostly focused on this year’s Rufus, but it still indicated something about MATES: Once you started observing the crowd, it became evident this was a different, ascendant generation of indie. Online, Gen Z, all that stuff — the festival was dominated by kids fervently singing along or filming songs by various acts that had wildfire success on TikTok.

After that, though, were some slightly more veteran artists. Kacy Hill brought a stunning set to the upstairs stage, her sinuous singer-songwriter approach having grown even more refined on this year’s Bug. Puma Blue might’ve been the surprise of the night: Though Jacob Allen’s recordings are often hushed, there was no mistaking that his band is made up of musicians who came up in London’s jazz scene. Puma Blue’s live sound can turn roiling and experimental even while remaining gentle and vaporous. It was one of the more mesmerizing sets of the night. 

Finally, it was time for the headliners. Ian Sweet’s stalwart indie rock was effectively the opener for the main event of Vacations’ set. Jilian Medford led the band through a rendition of their recent cover of Broken Social Scene’s classic “Anthems For A Seventeen Year Old Girl,” before addressing the crowd with what seemed to be one of the evening’s rare moments of acknowledging the precarious world outside. “This song is about making out, do you relate?” Medford quipped before “Your Spit.” “I don’t think there’ll be a lot of making out or sexual energy for the next four years. We don’t get horny when Trump is president. But! He’s not president yet.” 

Once Vacations took the stage for the night’s final set, it was clear just how much of a draw the band were themselves: This was still their show, and the gathered fans rapturously ate up the fact that Vacations decided to play a set full of deep cuts, b-sides, and songs they hadn’t played in years (or ever in the States). Amidst one infectious jangle-rock track after another and various singalongs, the band took a few moments along the way to earnestly thank the crowd for embracing the whole idea of this event. “We basically wanted to put on a festival with bands we wanted to see without having to pay for tickets,” they joked. 

But in the end, it was more than that. It was one thing to pull off a big hometown show with the original MATES. When I spoke to Burns earlier this fall, he hinted at ambitions to keep scaling MATES up into a biggest festival, and dreamed of it being located in a different place each year, of it being a different conversation between scenes each time it happened. In its small way, MATES’ 2024 LA version worked as a proof of concept. This particular conversation was intimate and specific, but it left you thinking of how much more expansive it could become after the success of its first trip abroad.

Check out more photos from the event by Daniel Topete below.