Smirnoff are celebrating the full scale return of Australia’s summer festival season with the launch of two new Smirnoff Seltzer Cocktails. The Spicy Margarita and Watermelon Margarita seltzer cocktails are bubbly, colourful, and contain only 107 calories per 250mL can.

It’s almost time for a pre-festival dance and sing-along with your music-loving pals. To help get things moving, we’ve scanned the huge number of artists who’re set to perform on festival stages this summer and drawn a line under those who pair well with the new Smirnoff Seltzer Cocktails.

Smirnoff Watermelon Margarita Seltzer

Smirnoff’s Watermelon Margarita Seltzer is low in sugar but rich in flavour. Sweet, ripe watermelon combines with Smirnoff vodka, sparkling water and zesty lime with margarita flavours. It’s flavourful and fresh, much like the artists below, all of whom will be travelling across Australia during the 2022/23 summer festival season.

Lil Nas X

Lil Nas X is as much a performance artist as a pop and rap performer. His awards show performances have never been anything shy of sensual delights. And musically, from the frivolous, genre-exploding ‘Old Town Road’ onwards, Lil Nas X has made creative decisions that might seem risky on paper, but demonstrate unique unifying power in practice.

Peach PRC

Peach PRC wears nothing but pink. Her hair is pink. Her music videos are pink. If she’s got a cat, it’s probably pink too. But there are a few more colours and shades evident in the artist’s nascent oeuvre of nostalgic commercial pop songs.

Peach’s major label debut, ‘Josh’, won over enough listeners to achieve ARIA Gold accreditation. Follow up releases, such as the tongue-slightly-in-cheek ‘00s teen pop tune, ‘God Is a Freak’, have built on this success. The more the public knows about Peach PRC, the more they like.

Beddy Rays

Queensland guitar-slinging outfit Beddy Rays released their debut self-titled album in July 2022. The album includes the band’s recent radio hit ‘Wait A While’, as well as follow-up fist-pumpers ‘Week On Repeat’, ‘On My Own’, ‘Sort It Out’ and ‘Milk’.

Beddy Rays can be efficiently described as a punk band, but there’s not much in the Redland Bay quarter’s catalogue that attempts to rattle listeners. Rather, the band have described the album as a representation of their close friendships and fondness for a low-stakes beach-side jam session, and they do an excellent job bottling this energy for the listener.

Ocean Alley

Ocean Alley’s 2021 single ‘Touch Back Down’ is prototypical summer music. It’s cruisy and sun-drenched, featuring reverberating guitars, a rippling groove and a warm honey chorus from vocalist Baden Donegal.

The band’s follow-up single, ‘Deepest Darkness’, is more dynamically intense than what we’re used to from Donegal, guitarist Mitch Galbraith and co. “’Deepest Darkness’ has a heavy mysteriousness to it,” Galbraith said in a statement, indicating the track’s suitability for when the summer sun sets and the spontaneity of the night-time kicks in.

Smirnoff Spicy Margarita Seltzer

Smirnoff’s Spicy Margarita Seltzer lives up to the promise of its name. Along with sparkling water, zesty lime juice and margarita flavours, the Spicy Marg is boosted by a dash of chilli and a Tommy’s margarita-style injection of sweetness.

The complexity of flavours keeps you guessing, much like the artists below, all of whom will be travelling across Australia during the 2022/23 summer festival season.

Anna Lunoe

Anna Lunoe has been an internationally recognised dance music DJ and producer since long before the release of her 2022 EP, Saturday Love. Lunoe has appeared at festivals such as Coachella, Lollapalooza and TomorrowWorld and collaborated with Flume, Touch Sensitive and Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs.

Six months prior to Saturday Love, Lunoe released ‘Back Seat’, which features vocals from the hip hop genre slider Genesis Owusu. Co-produced by Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs and featuring Sydney’s disco-house king Michael Di Francesco (aka Touch Sensitive) on bass, ‘Back Seat’ is hard, funky house music that sweats passion and is never predictable.

Chvrches

Chvrches have never played it straight. A bit of genre-straddling confusion is written into the Scottish trio’s DNA. Their albums are awash with ‘80s synthesisers and pop hooks, but there’s too much emotive depth for the average workday playlist. Chvrches’ music is electronic and deeply passionate, but to peg it as emo or goth-pop feels cruelly reductive.

On ‘How Not to Drown’, from Chvrches’ latest album Screen Violence, the trio found a perfect sparring partner in The Cure’s Robert Smith, whose presence not only scratched the itch after many years without a new Cure record, but also played a ceremonial function. Chvrches belong in a lineage with bands like Smith’s; bands that make music for everyone, but that’s too idiosyncratic to pin a name-tag on.

Amyl and the Sniffers

On their second album, 2021’s Comfort to Me, Amyl and the Sniffers could have repeated the formula that worked so well for them on their 2019 self-titled debut. They’d already bagged an international following, and band leader Amy Taylor was fast building a reputation as one of the most engaging front people in contemporary rock music.

But with Comfort to Me, Amyl and the Sniffers returned waving a statement of forward-looking intent. Theirs would not be a career couched in the repetition of a tried and true formula. Rather, with songs like ‘Hertz’ and ‘Guided By Angels’, Amyl and the Sniffers expanded on the thrashy pub-punk of their debut with imaginative interpolations of hip hop structures and lyrics that burrowed into Taylor’s psyche.

The Presets

When it comes to the Australian festival circuit, there’s no more reliable fixture than The Presets, right? Correct. As Australian festivals grew in size and variety from the mid-‘00s into the 2010s, The Presets were on stage at just about every one of them.

So, what makes The Presets a spicy, unconventional option, you ask? Well, just about everything they’ve ever recorded. From the punk rock rave of ‘My People’ and ‘Are You the One?’ to the more sophisticated dancefloor invitation of recent tracks like ‘Martini’ and last year’s ‘You Belong’, The Presets have made a career centred on affection for underground culture and a commitment to getting the house moving.

Learn More About Smirnoff Seltzer’s New Cocktail Range

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