When the Sydney label Future Classic coalesced around friends Nathan McLay, Jay Ryves and Chad Gillard in 2004, the Australian music landscape looked vastly different. Guy Sebastian, Powderfinger and Delta Goodrem were pop stars, retro rockers Jet, The Vines and The Living End were the prevailing tastemakers.
Though Australia’s burgeoning electro movement was germinating behind Steve Pavlovic’s Modular label in 2004, there was little idolatry for the next generation beyond the same old tropes: dumb rock. Who needs “future” when “classic” was so in vogue?
Celebrating their 10 year anniversary, Future Classic is no longer an accurate name. With sidebars in artist management, festival curation, publishing, promotion and booking, the label now operates as a veritable factory of generational signifiers, and from the top down. Flagship acts Flume and Chet Faker are multiple Aria winners, Seekae, Flight Facilities, Jagwar Ma and Touch Sensitive among its proven vets.
Those successes amplify a culture that now shepherds newcomers like Thrupence, George Maple and Hayden James directly into the embrace of a dedicated audience. The label’s luxury right now is a seeming golden touch, as much as any glut of great music making. In 2014, a knighting from Future Classic is an instant pass to visibility.
It’s no surprise then that, as a bunch of songs that looks back on their “year that was”, Teen Idols is remarkably fresh — a stocking stuffer you suspect could be re-gifted in 2015.
Touch Sensitive, who’s enjoyed a second life on the roster since his escape from mid-2000 electro act Van She, opens the account with the bouncy title-track. One of four brand new songs on the compilation, it’s an immaculate draft of the label’s key points: elegant in its fun, a summer jam with life lurking beneath its crisp surface.
The overall set is a nimble skip between festival favourites and headphone music. Chet Faker’s slow-burning Gold sounds a little staid coming off the back of the screwy wonk of Basenji’s Heirloom, while Seekae’s cloistered Test & Recognise is a good bedfellow for Thurpence’s gorgeous half-dream Silk.
There’s outliers beyond the club, too. Woolfy’s City Lights makes a pretty acoustic-led singalong and Norwegian producer Cashmere Cat’s With Me still strikes an extraordinary balance between classic hip-hop structure and dramatic computer squelch.
If there’s a drawback to taking stock of the Future Classic sound, it’s the framing of the palette of tools the stable is so drawn to. With all its Ableton quirks and pitched vocals, will time nail it to the age?
Any answer might lie in the other new selections. KOA’s All Of My Love is a woozy disco update; the hissy, slow lope of 123Mrk’s Gotta Choose builds behind Martin Mey mournfully repeating, “gotta choose something, still I’m gonna lose something else”.
But the breakout track will be Sydney artist Hayden James’ insanely addictive Something About You, a percolating house jam that sounds like it’s existed on dancefloors for decades.
The label’s history, then, suggests instant classics ahead.
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