One of the best things about BIGSOUND 2026 was wandering into a room and watching Stimpies play.

Such is the nature of BIGSOUND, you can kinda follow your ears around Fortitude Valley, bouncing between shows without any real plan other than to find shit you’re into. There’s this gun barrel-shaped bar called Blutes that, on the Wednesday night, was vibrating with guitars and thumping drums. Within a few seconds of walking in, you realised Stimpies were absolutely going for it.

Instruments were being waved around the stage, voices were going hoarse, and the crowd and the band were each pushing the energy of the room to euphoric levels — it’s that shared feeling you can only really get from live music when it hits just right. Of course, they instantly became the talk of the town (or maybe I just couldn’t shut up about them).

Turns out Ned (guitar & vox), Bec (bass & vox), Ethan (guitar & vox) and Van (drums) were all nice people as well, and they agreed to meet me for a chat at a cafe the following day. That’s below, but before you read that, you need to pre-save their upcoming album Doing Good (pre-save here) immediately, then go listen to the four singles that have dropped so far:

How hungover are the band right now?

The band’s pretty cooked… it’s been a huge week, I think we’ve played 6 shows in 7 days and done about a thousand interviews in between. I’m still riding on a high and haven’t really gone to bed overnight. Hit the pub for a 10:00am 4X and some eggs and bacon and I’m sorted. Ethan’s the same he’s up and about but bec and van are cooked. fair chance they’ll be sleeping til about 4:00pm.

What’s the go-to hangover fix?

For me I’m pretty easy. Tends to be some healthy food, a coffee and a cigarette. Ethan’s opted for a pack of salami and a Diet Coke. The key with the other two is to just leave em be… don’t “poke the bear”.

How has the BIGSOUND experience been?

Honestly it’s been amazing. We’ve loved it. The opportunity to get up and show the room what we’ve got is incredible. We back ourselves in on stage so it’s cool to see the faces of people in the audience getting into it. Coming in we kind of expected rooms full of stuff people in suits with lanyards and pie charts but it turns out big sound gets down. Both of our showcases were roaring. Apparently we were one of the only bands to get mosh the whole week so I guess that’s a good sign.

How do you feel about being on display like that compared to a regular show?

Pretty good. We feel pretty primed at the moment. We’ve been busting our arses all year and we’re a pretty tight knit unit. We love getting on stage and introducing people to what we do and what better opportunity than right here?

Who have you seen that you love?

Liquid Zoo. Easy. They’re great mates of ours so we’re biased but they’re just so good. Incredible musicians and even better performers. They feel like our brothers a bit so seeing them pull it off on the big sound stage makes us proud.
Public Figures, Melbourne homies.
Milly strange, huge shoutout! The whole band is unreal.
Local the neighbour. A personal favourite.

Tell me about ‘Doing Good’. Seems pretty self-explanatory, but is there any hidden meaning underneath there?

Doing good just felt right. We spent weeks tossing up names and spitballing ideas and it wasn’t until I (Ned) just randomly said “how about Doing Good” that we all went yeah that feels like the one. It just felt like an accurate representation of where we were at the time and even more so now with the release only four weeks away. It just felt like we were all in our prime both physically and mentally and that we all had our shit together and a strong sense of contentment in the people and spaces around us. We were and are Doing Good.

Seems like you shot a bunch of clips out in the country. Tell us about it…

Yeah we pretty much try to shoot everything in our backyard, back home on the Ninch (Mornington Peninsula) we’ve got beautiful Bunurong country right at our doorstep. Rolling hills, and some of the best beaches in the world. We love it back home it’s just beautiful. There’s also a really strong connection between the community in that all of our indoor shots are set at local pubs, bars, and music studios in Frankston. The scene’s pretty tight knit and that extends beyond just the bands and into the venues and crowds all over.

You and Ethan share the main vocal duties, and you can really hear you lock in. How would you explain that feeling to someone who’s not a singer?

There’s nothing like it… Ethan and I are basically brothers at this point we’ve grown up singing together since we were sixteen. It’s rare to find that kind of musical connection with anyone and when we lock in together on stage we really feel it. We also tend to try and one up each other or impress eachother in rehearsals and pull out some pretty techy harmonies all in the sake of getting a reaction out of each other. It’s fun.

You guys sing, ‘When can I call this my occupation?’ in ‘Long Long Time’. How hard is it to get to that level as a band? Is that something you guys talk about?

I wrote that song in a pretty heavy slump, having just come back from a year of hiatus knowing that making and performing music was the one thing in life I was completely sure of. However the self doubt and imposter syndrome is inevitable and the feeling of “Is this ever gonna work?” Or “Do I actually have what it takes?” Is real. And still haunts me and I’m sure it does almost every other creative out there. However it’s quite cool now singing that song and looking out at what we’re doing maybe a year and a half since it was written and just feeling like I’m in a completely different place to the headspace I was in when I wrote that. And a deep pride in everything we’ve done in that time.

You’ve got a manager, but you’re doing pretty much everything else yourselves. How does that work? Who’s good at what?

Weve got a killer manager Penny. They’re pretty much the 5th member. Nothing we do would function without them, and in saying that it is a very 5th member style relationship. Stimpies have always been about doing as much as we can in-house. We design all our own graphics, posters, t shirts, and often print them all ourselves too. We’re always the co-directors of our own music videos, and all of our recordings are completed with Ethan and I watching over everything. That’s the way. DIY til we die.

What’s coming up over the next six months for Stimpies?

Doing Good is out October 9th. We’ll back it up with an Aussie tour Jan/Feb and we’re hoping to get some festival slots too. We’re keen to have a crack in Europe and the US so we’ll see how that goes, but you can be confident in more music coming very soon. There’s no shortage of creativity here and Stimpies is geared up more than ever before.