Alter Boy, the indie electro pop band from Perth, have defied the odds. Risking flash fame as a queer/trans/hard-of-hearing novelty act early in their career, they’ve now found their way into the hearts of the entire world. Labels other than ‘phenomenon’ are now redundant.

This doesn’t mean Alter Boy have walked away from their roots and the drive to make music more accessible for more people, it’s just that they’re continuing the conversation in a differently nuanced way.

At the core of Alter Boy is singer, lyricist, auteur and brooding stage presence, Molly Priest, who defines her mission as an artist as, “…tapping into the collective unconsciousness.”
“I want to get silence played on the radio,” Priest said when speaking about the development of Alter Boy’s soon to be released debut album. “I want to interrupt everybody, take an Andy Kaufman approach to creating music.”

This is the stuff that public relations and record company execs fear the most. Nobody wants to back different, but that’s exactly what Alter Boy ask their audience to do. And their audience has responded to the call.

Not that it’s at all difficult to fall for Alter Boy. On the surface of it they create a highly accessible brand of electro pop, the sort you can dance to, snuggle up in bed with and introduce to your significant others. Alter Boy’s take on 21st Century contemporary noise is as woozy and charming as it is innovative, as dense and muscular as it is accessible, and as take-you-away from the humdrum and anxiety of modern life as it is challenging and thought provoking.

Underlying Alter Boy is the idea of paradox. It’s the reason why frontwoman, Molly Priest, wants to incorporate silence into the band’s music.
“Different frequencies of sound induce different states in people,” Priest said. “There’s a lot of frequencies we can’t hear, but that doesn’t mean the silence doesn’t affect your reality. That’s not about being deliberately difficult or wanting to focus on one thing above any others, it’s just about the band’s drive to push the limits of what music can be.
“I like that we’re seen as accessible, that people think we play pop music, because we do. We also play music that aims to help people step outside their subjective reality and see the world differently.”

Alter Boy embody the concept of the seven heavens around which their upcoming debut album is based. They offer their audience a journey from stability and certainty to renewal through annihilation, with every stop along the way on the trip to enlightenment. It’s up to their audience how long they spend on the journey and how much time they take at each stop.
Alter Boy’s latest single, ‘Life Finds A Way’, embodies this approach, presenting the world with a dancefloor-filling banger that’s also a treatise on the irrepressible flowering of life no matter how heavily bricked in its seeds.

There will be no holding back Alter Boy in 2024 and beyond. They’re like a black hole, everything and nothing all at the same time. You can take from their music the whole of existence, or you can choose to let their pulses of sound/non-sound lap at your being while you create your own worlds. It’s all up to you, but what you have no choice about is whether you’ll be beguiled by this outfit from the shores of the Indian Ocean. You will and, no matter where you experience Alter Boy for the first time, afterwards you will forever feel their inexorable pull.

Alter Boy

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