Is Melbourne Having Its Next Great Rock Moment

There are weeks in a city where everything lines up at once and you can feel something shifting under your feet.

Melbourne is sitting in one of those weeks right now. Metallica finish their last Australian show in Sydney tonight, Oasis only just left after a run of stadiums, AC/DC hit the MCG again tomorrow, and Amyl and The Sniffers somehow managed to shut down Federation Square before they even played a note. This isn’t normal energy. This isn’t hype. Melbourne has walked headfirst into a rock moment the rest of the country didn’t see coming.

You can trace the spark back to a lot of places. Metallica showing up in town last weekend kicked things off with the full M72 machine, then you had James Hetfield wandering down AC/DC Lane checking out a mural of Cliff Burton painted by local artists. Before that you had a world record attempt in the middle of Fed Square where 374 bagpipers filled the plaza to perform Long Way to the Top, and that link back to Melbourne’s own history was impossible to ignore. The original AC/DC truck video shot on Swanston Street in 1976 still sits as a north star for Aussie rock.

Then this week happened.

Amyl and The Sniffers were supposed to play a free all ages show at Fed Square. It got cancelled minutes before they were due onstage after the front barriers gave way. The band then took their entire performance fee and dropped five grand behind the bar at seven venues, which turned the frustration of the night into something that will be remembered for years.

But the truth goes deeper than a cancelled gig and a generous gesture. Melbourne is full of people again. Not in the “pre-COVID bounce-back” way we heard about for three years, but in the old school way where music drives the city and every lane feels like it is plugged into something bigger. AC/DC Lane, which has been a tourist stop for ages, is suddenly alive again. Metallica fans were packed shoulder to shoulder last week. Amyl fans crammed into Fed Square. Oasis shirts were everywhere. And now AC/DC are about to crack the MCG again with the second show of their return.

This city has not felt like this in a long time.

The comparison that has started popping up online is whether the Fed Square surge was Amyl’s “AC/DC on a truck” moment. The answer is simple. No, it wasn’t. Not because they aren’t big enough and not because the moment wasn’t real. It wasn’t the truck moment because that original stunt was a completely different time. AC/DC riding a truck down Swanston Street in 1976 was the Australia of that era. Loud, blokey, a bit dangerous, and completely rough around the edges. That moment defined a generation of Australian identity, for better and for worse

What we saw this week is something else. Something that belongs to 2025.

Something that isn’t trying to recreate a past that does not exist anymore.

Amyl and The Sniffers are unmistakably Australian in a way very few bands are now. There’s no polish. No fake accent. No chasing overseas trends. It is raw and local and immediate. But at the same time, they represent a version of Australia that is not stuck in the old brand of nationalism that soaked into the worst parts of our culture. The Cronulla riots, the southern cross tattoos, the Big Day Out flag ban, the heavy drinking, the kind of aggression that shaped the way the world saw us. None of that sits in Amyl. They managed to carry the energy of Australian rock without dragging the baggage with it.

That matters.

It matters because the pool of Aussie bands who can do that is tiny. And this week in Melbourne the demand for that kind of band has never been higher.

The bigger story underneath all of this is simple. AC/DC are closer to the end than the beginning. Metallica are the global torch carriers now. Oasis offered a nostalgia wave that felt enormous and short lived at the same time. There is no obvious next giant. Rock is barely in the charts. Touring is falling apart worldwide. Everyone from Garbage to All Time Low has been talking about how hard it is to keep it going.

So when a band like Amyl can pull thousands into a square, blow the site apart, apologise, redirect the money back into the venues that raised them and then turn up at the MCG the next night supporting AC/DC, it says something that goes way beyond one show.

The question is not whether this was their truck moment. The question is whether this was the week they proved they are the ones who will carry Australian rock into whatever comes next. And the city seems to already know the answer.

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