Budjerah

Fingal Head, the church and 18,000 people at Carrara

Budjerah Julum Slabb was born on 17 March 2002 at Fingal Head, a headland community on the far north coast of New South Wales, and is a Coodjinburra man of the Bundjalung nation. Both his parents are musicians and licensed pastors, so the first rooms he sang in were churches and the first repertoire he learned was gospel. The scale shifted early. As a teenager he was already singing before crowds of more than 18,000 at Carrara Stadium ahead of Gold Coast Suns home games — an odd apprenticeship for a singer whose records would later be built on restraint rather than force.

Asked what he grew up on, he names Archie Roach and Yothu Yindi in the same breath as Michael Jackson and Usher, and both halves of that answer are audible. The Australian lineage shows in how he talks about singing for community and in language; the American one shows in the phrasing, the falsetto and the way he sits behind a beat. The church shows in everything else — the harmony stacks, the fingersnaps, the habit of treating a chorus as something to be testified rather than belted.

A chair that never turned, then four years of EPs

In 2019, aged 16, he auditioned for the eighth Australian season of The Voice with "Climb Every Mountain" and no coach turned. It made no difference to the trajectory. His debut single "Missing You" arrived in October 2020 and went to the top of triple j's airplay chart; by March 2021 Apple Music had named him an Up Next artist, and his self-titled EP followed on 26 March 2021. That year he won the ARIA Award for Breakthrough Artist – Release.

What came next was a run of singles rather than a body of work: "Higher" in 2021, "Stranger Love" with PNAU, "Ready for the Sky" in 2022, and the second EP, Conversations, on 8 April 2022. "Therapy", released in February 2023, went platinum and remains the song he has played live most often. He sang at the AFL Grand Final in September 2022 and opened for Ed Sheeran on his Australian dates, and in 2023 he took Artist of the Year at the National Indigenous Music Awards. By any ordinary measure he had arrived. There was still no album.

Gentleman, and the four years it took

There nearly was one, much earlier. Budjerah recorded a full album with Matt Corby at Rainbow Valley roughly four years before Gentleman came out, and only one song from those sessions — "Video Game" — was ever released. His explanation is unglamorous and plausible: he was playing two or three shows a week and had no room to develop anything. "I didn't feel creatively satisfied, just having these little short bursts of creativity with the EPs," he has said, and separately conceded that "even by music industry norms, four years is a long time to get that many songs together."

The version that survived was built with Om'Mas Keith, the Grammy-winning producer whose credits include Frank Ocean, Jay-Z and John Legend, and whose main contribution appears to have been talking Budjerah out of perfectionism. "There's no pitch correction on a lot of those tracks," he told Rolling Stone Australia. "It was just straight me." The songwriting room was stacked with people who wrote the records he grew up on: Poo Bear, Philip Lawrence, Rob Lewis, and Diane Warren, who co-wrote "Even at My Worst".

The singles rolled out slowly — "Want You Back" on 19 September 2025, the title track on 20 March 2026, "Could I Be" on 22 May and "Even at My Worst" on 3 July. Elton John played "Want You Back" on his Apple Music radio show. Gentleman itself landed on 24 July 2026 through Warner Music Australia: eleven tracks, 37 minutes and 33 seconds, and a debut at number 14 on the ARIA albums chart.

Where he stands in October 2026

The reviews have been consistently warm and, usefully, specific about why. Writing for Beat Magazine, Bryget Chrisfield heard Prince in the title track's bass and cowbell, a seventies soul lineage in the falsetto on "Could I Be", and gospel in the fingersnaps and harmonies of "Sinner". Sounds of Oz, on 9 August 2026, described the record as the work of "an artist who knows who he is" and noted how far it sits from the shy indie-pop teenager of 2020. The ABC's Mawunyo Gbogbo called the eleven tracks "a timeless R&B/pop sound"; Bernard Zuel settled on "a classy debut". The common thread is that the album is more polished and more commercial than the EPs, and that the voice survived the polish.

Life outside the record moved at a similar pace. He proposed to Sophie Moore at the Sydney Opera House on 22 April 2026 and married her on 4 June at Pioneer Country in Tweed Heads South, six weeks before the album came out. He is 24, and openly unsatisfied with being only a singer: "I want to be a triple threat, so singing, dancing, acting." On the question of what he sings, he is less ambiguous. "I don't sing nothing that I don't mean. I always relate it to my personal experience and my stories."

Small rooms, a beer garden, and a set that keeps the covers

The Gentleman run is deliberately modest in scale. It opens at The Espy in Melbourne on Saturday 31 October — the only 18+ date — then The Sound Doctor in Anglesea on 1 November, Metro Social in Sydney on 7 November, Miami Marketta on the Gold Coast on 20 November, and the Triffid beer garden in Brisbane on 21 November. Pre-sales opened before the general on-sale at 10am AEST on Thursday 23 July. In the album release week he also played free stripped-back sets and signings at three record stores between 26 and 29 July.

He has been plain about why the shows matter more to him than the campaign around them: "Being on stage is my favourite part of my job, and I can't wait to see my fans again," he said when the tour was announced, adding that he wrote the album with performance in mind.