Tape/Off – Flat Earthers

“Half love letter, half furious screed, the track does for the band’s home of Meeanjin/Brisbane what Last Quokka’s Red Dirt did for Kimberley,” we wrote of Tape/Off‘s recent single ‘Paris, Texas, Queensland’ back in the summer. Caught in a tug of war between fond nostalgia and simmering anger, the song paired “sunnies, ciggies, singlets and footy shorts worn by Alfie Langer,” with “images of gentrification and colonisation,” offering, as we continued, “more proof the current crop of Aussie punk rock is ahead of other countries in its willingness to confront the imperialistic violence which underpins contemporary society.”

With full-length album Fort Sensible coming early in 2025 via Coolin’ By Sound, Tape/Off have returned with a brand new track ‘Flat Earthers’. It’s a song which uses its titular demographic to explore simplistic attitudes more generally, decrying the contemporary trend to favour superficial thoughts over ambiguity and nuance. “It’s probably one of the very few songs in my life where I’ve written the words before the music, because it was something that I obviously wanted to get off my chest that way,” explains songwriter and guitarist Ben Green. “What initially fired me up was stuff you hear all the time, but I managed to have a couple of conversations in a row which pissed me off, and it was probably people talking about individuals and saying, ‘Oh, that person’s done really well, aren’t they great’ or ‘That person’s really stuffed up, aren’t they an idiot’:

To me it exemplified this ignorance that’s really pervasive these days. We’re so often conditioned to see everything as ‘individuals making choices’ and you don’t look any deeper than that – they make ‘good choices’ or ‘bad choices’ – but you don’t look behind it all and consider, ‘What’s their situation? What are they coming out of? What forces are pressing on them?’ It occurred to me that these people are like flat earthers – they think that everything’s flat, when everything is definitely not flat. It’s a lot more complicated than that.

The message is delivered with a combination of defiant punk and rousing 90s alt rock, complete with a singalong chorus that somehow combines simmering frustration and carefree joy. It’s a whole lot of fun and whets appetites for the record very nicely.

‘Flat Earthers’ is out now via Coolin’ By Sound and you can get it from the Tape/Off Bandcamp page.