The Gnomes

A beachside suburb, a DIY studio and four day jobs

The Gnomes come from Frankston, at the southern end of Port Phillip Bay, about an hour by train from central Melbourne and better known as a commuter terminus than as a source of guitar bands. The four of them met at high school there. Jay Millar sings and plays lead guitar, Ned Capp plays the other guitar, Olly Katsianis plays bass and Ethan Robins drums. When ABC News profiled the band on 2 September 2026, Millar and Capp were 20 and Katsianis was 22, and all four were still holding down regular work: pizza delivery, a sunglasses shop, a thrift store, and in Robins's case a boilermaking apprenticeship he began at 15.

The hub is Singing Bird Studios, a DIY room in Frankston that serves as rehearsal space and recording studio at once. Its owner, Stuart Anderson, told the ABC that the local talent pool put him in mind of "a new Seattle or something" — a large claim to make for a bayside suburb, but the studio is the practical reason the records sound the way they do, because it gave the band somewhere to work without a budget.

Millar began the project alone in late 2022, posting bedroom recordings to Bandcamp. That early material sat closer to lo-fi and slowcore than to anything a listener would now recognise as The Gnomes; the sixties pop writing was already there but thinly recorded. It hardened into a four-piece when Robins came in to cover gigs and stayed.

Introducing… The Gnomes, cut in four days

The debut album, Introducing… The Gnomes, arrived in November 2025: twelve tracks recorded at Singing Bird, with songs Millar had written on his own re-cut by the full band so the record would carry the live sound. His account of the process is short on romance — "we live-tracked the whole album together in the same room in about two days. Then we spent another two days doing overdubs." Physical copies went out through Sound Merch Australia rather than through a label.

The reference points are not hidden. The Beatles, The Kinks and The Easybeats run through the writing, with beat-group harmony and twelve-string jangle played at garage volume. Classic Rock, covering the band on 19 August 2026, filed them under garage rock, Merseybeat, twelve-string jangle and fuzz pedals, and noted that the Viagra Boys had taken to them.

The album launch was at the Brunswick Ballroom in Melbourne on 14 November 2025, with Loose Lips, The Pearlies and Riviera opening, and a week of New Zealand dates booked for early December behind it.

A four-track EP, More, followed on 15 May 2026, self-released and produced by Millar himself. Far Out Magazine's review, published the day before, conceded the record offered "nothing new" and argued it was "exciting exactly because of that", picking out Magic Man as the strongest thing on it. Katsianis has described that song as the one that "captures the bluesy twelve-bar stuff we love to play but mixed with a harder, rockier sound".

Dive bars, the Hordern, and the first trips abroad

The run that built the audience was announced on 23 December 2025, after a stretch of sold-out Melbourne shows including the Brunswick Ballroom launch. Billed as the Dive! Dive! Dive! Rock'n'Roll Dive Bar Tour, it put six shows across Melbourne and Bendigo through January and February 2026 at twenty dollars a head, door sales only, with no presale to speak of. A short New South Wales leg in mid-January added free entry shows at the Lansdowne in Sydney and Dicey's in Wollongong, arranged around a support slot for Viagra Boys at the Hordern Pavilion. Then came the Waterfront Festival in Frankston on 7 February, Flippin' The Bird on 28 February, Golden Plains on 8 March, and two dates alongside Hockey Dad.

The larger break was Spiderbait's 30th anniversary tour, which carried them through venues several sizes up from the dive bars. Spiderbait's drummer, Kram, said of them that they were "good enough to do whatever they want all around the world." Elsewhere they have shared bills with Eddy Current Suppression Ring and played the Wave Rock, Yours & Owls and Valley Fiesta festivals.

Overseas, their UK debut came at The Great Escape in Brighton, with shows in London, Glasgow and Manchester following. They are managed by Simone Ubaldi, and by the time Beat Magazine spoke to them in May 2026 the question was less whether they could fill a diary than whether they ever stopped. Capp's answer there was blunt: "What's the point of not playing all the time?"

Batteries, and the noisier turn

With A Gnome, released on 4 November 2026, is the first record they have handed to an outside producer: Dec Mehrtens, guitarist in Amyl and the Sniffers. It was trailed by the single Batteries with Anything You Need as its B-side, and it marks a deliberate move away from the clean beat-group jangle of the debut. The fuzz on Batteries comes off a cheap pedal held together with duct tape.

Millar's framing of the single is that it works both ways at once: "This song is kind of a trap. It's The Gnomes' softest and quietest song and also our loudest." The conditions were about what the band's economics would predict. "One night during the recording of this EP, Ned and I slept at our managers' studio," Millar said. "We woke up on the floor to Dec kicking us out because the Sniffers were rehearsing that day."

Pinning the band to a genre is a losing exercise, and Millar has said as much: "The sound is always changing, and it'll never be a specific thing." On the evidence of twelve months — a Merseybeat-leaning debut, a twelve-bar EP in May, a fuzz record in November — that is a statement of fact rather than evasion.

Where they stand, November 2026

Four Australian dates are on sale, spanning 27 November to 19 December 2026 across three cities. They open at the Queenscliff Music Festival in Princess Park, Queenscliff, on 27 November, doors at four in the afternoon, then play The Junk Bar in Brisbane on 16 December and the Lansdowne Hotel in Sydney on 17 December. The run closes at the Croxton Bandroom in Melbourne on 19 December, billed as The Gnomes (and Friends) and set up as a two-stage event rather than a straight support bill. Tickets are going through Moshtix and Oztix. Before that, a UK and European run in November carries the new EP, the Shacklewell Arms in London among the stops.

The gap in those numbers is worth noting plainly. The Lansdowne holds about 300; the Hordern Pavilion holds thousands. The band's own headline draw is still club-sized while the slots handed to them by Spiderbait and Viagra Boys are not, and the Croxton show on 19 December is the first real test of whether the hometown audience has caught up with the invitations. They have had overseas label interest, but nothing has been announced, and both 2026 EPs went out without one.