moyamoya to chuck a two-night wobbly for hol newland debut album launch

Split between Cowaramup and Fremantle, moyamoya—Liam MacFarlane, Jaydn Kempe and Barney Courtauld—have found their centre of gravity in Boorloo’s punk scene. Their long-gestating debut album hol newland arrives with a two-night launch across The Bird on Thursday, September 17, and Buffalo Club on Friday, September, 18, gathering bands they have befriended in the venues that gave those relationships somewhere to grow. With the new release arriving via Bandcamp tomorrow, Friday, September 11, CAT LANDRO spoke with Liam and Jaydn to find out about the making of hol newland, the surprising influences behind their sound and finding a reason to dance in the face of the world’s absurdity.

moyamoya describe their music as “chucking a big wobbly”—an appropriately Australian phrase for its elastic art-punk, jazz-trained unpredictability and political satire. Guitars twitch and jolt, while the rhythm section keeps finding stranger angles, the off-kilter dynamism recalling Talking Heads or Gang of Four but also a particularly Australian brand of losing your shit.

“The wobbles are what make it interesting,” Liam says. “It’s not about drawing a straight line.”

That preference has been there since Liam and Jaydn began playing together more than a decade ago. Brought together by prog and post-rock, they initially imagined making something grand and heavily orchestrated in the vein of Godspeed You! Black Emperor.

Godspeed offshoot A Silver Mt. Zion offered a bridge to moyamoya. Its collective, politically charged culture showed how experimental music could operate through a punk ethos without necessarily sounding like conventional punk. The wiry garage immediacy of Parquet Courts provided a leaner inspiration; a three-piece was more achievable than an orchestra.

moyamoya’s name also loops back to that formative obsession. “Moya” is both a Godspeed track and the surname of founding member Mike Moya. After years of discarding band names, Liam and Jaydn discovered that moyamoya describes smoke or haze in Japanese—apt for songs circling politics, smokescreens and uncertainty.

Liam liked its sound, too. “It’s onomatopoeic,” he says. “I imagine an oscillator or modulator going, ‘moyamoyamoya.’”

When moyamoya’s original drummer moved interstate, Liam suggested his cousin Barney, a WAAPA-trained jazz musician who introduced another perspective into Liam and Jaydn’s largely self-taught playing.

“He’s a better musician than both of us,” Jaydn laughs. “He knows what he’s talking about, and we’re just like, ‘Can you play this stupid-arse drum lick?’”

The band now develops music through online sharing, individual practice and concentrated time together. Liam lives in Cowaramup, while Jaydn and Barney remain around Fremantle. Becoming “match-fit” for a major show can be difficult, but distance also gives ideas room to develop. By the time they reconvene, “everyone has been yearning for it.”

moyamoya play down south where they can, with Fugazi Gallery and the Servo Taphouse making space for more adventurous acts. But art-punk is a harder sell in a region more accustomed to folk music accompanying dinner. Perth draws the band north not only for gigs but also for the community underpinning them.

That network was visible at two Permanent Residency shows: moyamoya supporting ARSE alongside Spacerhead, and earlier appearing at the Permanent Residency All Dayer, where musicians watched one another, shared audiences and treated the event as something larger than their allocated set.

Their relationship with Greg Patterson began with an invitation to play at Seasonal Brewing Co, growing into touring supports and practical help releasing hol newland through Permanent Residency’s micro-label.

The album has accumulated across four or five years. moyamoya’s prog instincts made even their early double singles difficult to contain: each song seemed to want to flow into another, and then another again. Some tracks were held for a larger project, while material that did not fit was released separately.

As those songs accumulated, the album revealed its subject. “It started to shape itself into this critique of Australian identity, the colony and all of the shit that goes along with that,” Liam says.

After returning to Cowaramup, local flora, fauna and landscapes increasingly entered the work. Alongside the satire came things the band genuinely loved and found beautiful.

moyamoya describe the beginning of hol newland as more accessible and jovial, carrying serious subjects through guitars that sound strangely Australian. “There’s a blistering sun on you,” Jaydn says. From there, the record reportedly becomes increasingly dissonant, culminating in doom-laden closing track “Habitat.”

“It feels like a descent into hell,” Jaydn says. “It becomes maddening as the record gets further along.”

“Habitat” examines how environmental destruction can remain somebody else’s concern until its consequences become personal. Warnings about an animal losing its home can be dismissed as the fixation of a “lefty greenie”—until the threatened habitat is also our own.

“Then one day, it turns into your own habitat,” Liam says. “Then it’s like, ‘Oh, I’d better give a fuck.’”

moyamoya’s animated performances pull against this escalating darkness. Their humour and movement are not signs that everything is fine, but ways of resisting political paralysis.

“The world is fucking absurd,” Jaydn says. “I’ve had many existential crises, and I don’t believe the answer is to give up. This band is an ode to that, in a way. We need to be out there saying something, but we need to be able to dance about it.”

For Liam, playing also acts as a pressure valve. “I catch myself onstage thinking, ‘I’m having a lot of fun,’ and then I’m singing a verse and thinking, ‘This is a fucked-up verse. The content here is pretty dark.’ There’s real value in satire, both in terms of keeping yourself sane and, from an activist perspective, engaging the audience.”

The album’s visual identity similarly distorts familiar Australian material. Its source was a baffling 1990s cookbook containing landscapes, cattle, tractors and a man panning for gold. It also supplied the crab-claw couple used for moyamoya’s recent split single with Spacerhead—one of its few images that actually relates to food.

For hol newland, visual artist Lauren Cowdrey transformed the band’s scanned clippings and ideas into the finished artwork. Familiar national imagery is cut apart and reassembled into something funny, unstable and faintly disturbing.

moyamoya will celebrate at The Bird with Post Nut Clarity, Running Out of Nuns and Margaret River’s The Goddamn Darlings. Liam first caught Running Out of Nuns at a Cowaramup wine bar, impressed by both their punk playfulness and the musicianship beneath the habits.

Their inclusion also matches an accidental trend in his listening. “I’ve almost exclusively just been listening to music with people dressed as nuns recently,” he laughs, pointing to Rosalía, Cate Le Bon and Grub. “It’s popping up everywhere.”

The following night brings moyamoya to Fremantle Buffalo Club with Spacerhead, Pleasants and Skortz. Across both launches, the band promise costumes, projections and “pulling out all the art-punk stops”.

After an album made slowly and across distance, a double celebration feels fitting. moyamoya are gathering the people who helped them reach this point, then chucking one very large wobbly.

moyamoya will launch their debut album hol newland at The Bird on Thursday, September 17, and Buffalo Club on Friday, September, 18 2026. Tickets are on sale now and available from humanitix.com