AIRLINE
- ballpointpressbne
- Mar 6
- 5 min read
Words: Joseph Maranta
Photographers (Instagram @): @doctorxzaius & @knottsofunnyproductions
Being an avid Australian music follower, specifically one who adores emotional, heavy rock, I often find myself having bouts of decision paralysis when choosing an artist to listen to for hours on end. In Brisbane there’s the likes of Blue Diner and Phantasm Street; around the country, you have The Genevieves and Dogworld, and don’t even get me started on what the rest of the world has to offer.
Yet despite the overwhelming amount of talent within the genre, there’s only one band who sits atop my Last.fm profile as my most listened to artist of 2025, the Eora / Gadigal quartet, Airline.
In my reflections of why I’ve become so drawn to them, I’ve tried to isolate the contributing factors. Of course writing this article has made me more inclined to listen through their discography, but ultimately I believe it’s the authenticity of their music that I find so compelling. In saying this I don’t mean to denigrate the authenticity of the aforementioned bands, but instead I intend that statement to be an ardent commendation of the music Airline creates.
There’s an abstract quality to their music, something intangible that you can’t help but be enamoured by.
Fronted by Andrew Bailey-Hughes (lead vocals and rhythm) and supported by Lewis Gardiner (drums), Callum Waugh (vocals and bass) and Hunter Hayes (vocals and lead), Airline’s gritty and deeply impassioned soundscapes are on the cutting edge of Australia’s alternative music scene.
JOE: Hey guys thanks for coming on! So did you all know each other prior to Airline?
ANDREW: We were sort of mates before joining the band. Hunter and I would always jam together in hopes of making a band one day, and we knew Lewis through mutual friends. Cal was actually in the audience for our first show.
LEWIS: Cal was on the bill that night, he was playing with another band. We were running around as a trio for a while and then Callum joined at the start of 2024.
JOE: And were all of you pretty into that heavier distorted rock sound?
ANDREW: Yeah big time.
CAL: I’m gonna out them. They used to do Arctic Monkey covers at their early shows.
LEWIS: It was definitely more indie-rock at the start, but I’ve always been a big fan of heavy music. I play the drums though, so the drums change and the music steps into different genres as a result.
JOE: You’ve recently released your first project CASSINI, was this EP always a part of the band from its inception?
ANDREW: I feel like these songs have changed so much from when we first made them. A couple of the recordings are like two years old, and some were only a few months old. We had an idea of the sound we were making but the project naturally took form as we added more tracks. There was never an overarching theme we aimed for, we just wrote them and it is what it is now.
That being said though, there was a lot of conceptualisation involved with some of the songs that we didn’t think were initially ready. It really marks a period of time in our band’s history, and the music that we were making then.
JOE: For those not familiar with Sydney’s music scene, would you say that your sound is a niche within Sydney?
CAL: I feel like that distorted heavy sound is pretty around right now, I think that’s the trendy sound at the moment. There’s a lot of indie bands here, but it seems like every gig I go to the opening bands have a similar sound to us.
ANDREW: In our early days that sound wasn’t as prevalent as it is now.
JOE: And how is the health of Sydney’s music scene currently?
LEWIS: Strong, really strong. It’s strong in Wollongong too, we have a separate scene to Sydney’s but it’s very healthy here as well. There’s a lot of similar sounding - heavy and distorted guitars with loud vocals, all of these bands are playing together at the moment.
CAL: I agree, the people involved with the music scene here are such legends too. Like I met these guys through playing a show together and we hang out every weekend now. That goes for my other friends too, I’ve met a lot of them through music.
ANDREW: I think Sydney is in a healthier state than we were in 3-4 years ago.
JOE: Your heaviest song off the EP would be ‘Coma’, how did that song come together?
ANDREW: Coma was written between the three of us just before Cal joined. We’d recorded most of it already, but Cal added some screams to it and it really changed the energy of the track.
LEWIS: More so than any of our other tracks, Coma has a story behind it.
ANDREW: It isn’t like a fable by any means, but I wrote it while I was in a detached mindset about the world, more specifically my place within it. It’s very much about being dissociative and lethargic - watching the world fly by while you're sitting in it idly. That’s the coma metaphor behind the track.
JOE: What was the thought process behind including the title track with Common Language?
ANDREW: We’ve been playing that track for ages, we used to refer to it as ‘Intro’ because we would always start our set with it.
CAL: We were going for the space theme with Cassini. I have a bunch of space facts in my head, I can rattle some off if you want.
JOE: Go on then.
CAL: It’s pretty sick how you can fit all of the planets in the solar system between the distance from the Earth to the Moon. That one’s for free.
JOE: You kicked off February with your first out of state show in Melbourne, was it nice going out of your comfort zone?
LEWIS: It was pretty grim.
ANDREW: Second night was grim, we played last chance Rock’n’Roll bar and it was very unforgiving.
LEWIS: There was no one there to forgive or unforgive. But, we played with GUSH at The Old Bar and that was great. The venue has an awesome familiar vibe for a lot of Sydney and Wollongong bands.
CAL: Everyone was super lovely and looked after us, we really enjoyed our set there. We got to hang out with a lot of cool people.
JOE: Do you think you’ll head North or further West for your future tours?
ANDREW: I can’t speak for the other boys but I’ve really loved the sounds coming out of Adelaide, like Twine and Sunsick Daisy - who we’re playing with in March. But at the same time bands like Blue Diner out of Brisbane are also super fucking awesome. Wherever we can afford, we’ll go there first.
JOE: If you could choose three supports to play alongside you in a dream Australian gig, who would you take?
LEWIS: Ok Hotel would be one. Charles Carnabuci is another.
ANDREW: Well if we’re going with who we respect in the scene, I’d have to go with Jan. One of the best live performers I’ve seen before, not just locally but in general.
JOE: Releasing the EP so early in the year, you still have 10 months left of 2025. So what are you hoping to tick off before 2026?
CAL: We’re sitting on a few tracks now so we’ll be going back to the studio. But we want to keep having fun and playing shows.
ANDREW: There’s a weight off our shoulders having released the EP, which allows us to focus on playing shows again.
LEWIS: If we put our names in I’d love to have a go at playing SXSW or Bigsound, but we love playing shows that come to us too.
AIRLINE UPCOMING SHOWS
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