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.