GOPHER — Tunnel Buddies. Comedy metal done right is significantly harder than it looks( or sounds, lol). as reviewed by Mark. J.

 GOPHER — Tunnel Buddies

GOPHER — Tunnel Buddies. Comedy metal done right is significantly harder than it looks( or sounds, lol). as reviewed by Mark. J.

(Prime Cuts, 1 May 2026)

Here is the thing about Tunnel Buddies that a lot of reviews might not bother telling you: comedy metal done right is significantly harder than it looks( or sounds, lol). For every Blood Duster, there are twenty bands who confused volume with wit and ended up with an embarrassing novelty record nobody's revisiting in five years. Ernie Bingo and Ned Smelly — allegedly arriving in the colonies on Australia's First Fleet from Fanny Barks, UK, in 1790, an origin story delivered with complete and total commitment to the bit — have made something tighter, stranger, and more durable than their "party metal / electro chaos" classification immediately suggests.

The Perth duo released this on May 1 via Prime Cuts on CD and digital, and the tracklist does preliminary work before a note plays: "Op Shop Reject," "Keno King," "Hot Mess Express," "Five Bucks A Day," "Does The Queen Queef," "Seoul Hole," "Shopping Trollied." This is social observation filtered through a very specifically Australian working-class lens — the op shop haul, the keno machine at the TAB, the five-bucks-a-day mentality of grinding out an existence — and it's sharper than the band's self-deprecating retiree mythology implies. Blood Duster's shadow falls across all Australian party-grind and Gopher aren't trying to escape it; they're operating within that lineage with full acknowledgement of who built the room they're now playing in.

First single "Kupu Kupu Malam" — a word that carries a certain layered weight depending on where you use it — opens like a nightclub anthem before the guitars arrive and remove any illusion of safety. That structural contrast, the almost dancefloor-ready synth intro collapsing into grinding slam that drops the floor entirely, is the album's recurring device, and Gopher pull it off repeatedly because they're genuinely capable at both halves. The electronic elements here aren't apologetic adornment or cheap window dressing — they're load-bearing. The kind of synth architecture that Electric Callboy use to manufacture stadium-scale appeal and Alestorm use to build nautical absurdism, deployed here in service of something grittier and more parochial.

"Hot Mess Express" is the record's centrepiece — a Lilker-esque bass presence that grounds everything, the tightest track on the album, the kind of low end you feel behind your sternum(and as classic as any Blood Duster anthem). "Five Bucks A Day" takes the left turn nobody was expecting, threading genuine black metal atmosphere — actual bleakness, not parody bleakness — into a tracklist that also features a song speculating on whether deceased monarchs pass wind. That range is a liability or an asset entirely depending on what you bring to the room. If you need your comedy metal to stay comedic and your black metal to stay grim, Tunnel Buddies will frustrate you. If you grew up on records that treated genre categories as suggestions rather than sentences, this is one of the more interesting Australian debut records of the year.

The "Party In The Sky" single and video explains the band's appeal in four minutes — catchy synth hook, groove riff with real muscle behind it, a chorus you'll be singing back at the bar without being able to explain how it got there. Ned Smelly's account of the song's genesis — drinking flights into blackout because the in-flight entertainment is garbage — reads as deadpan autobiography with enough specific detail that you believe it entirely. These aren't jokes without targets; they're observations with a particular working-class Australian texture that gives the comedy actual ground to stand on.

Lawnmower Deth comparisons will come, and they're not entirely wrong, but Gopher have a sonic palette Lawnmower never quite located — that death/slam foundation gives Tunnel Buddies real weight. The more apt comparison might be Carnival in Coal, the French avant-nutcases who worked out that genuine musical chops and absolute ridiculousness are not mutually exclusive propositions. Whether Gopher sustain this on a second record is the real test. For now, they've made the debut their deranged mythology deserves.

Funny as fuck, but an utterly awesome party metal classic!!!

gopherit.bandcamp.com

https://www.facebook.com/gopheramassage/