Dick Diver embodies a time that is both long gone and ever-present. They may have never been a household name but the Melbourne quartet, or what they represent, are a part of the national cultural fabric. Their lackadaisical affect belies the seriousness of both their musicality and lyrics, which are unpretentiously and undeniably Australian.
The band combine the slacker vibes of Pavement with the bookish lyricism (they take their name from a character in an F Scott Fitzgerald novel) and jangly “striped sunlight sound” of the Go-Betweens. Releasing three albums and an EP between 2009 and 2015 through the celebrated Melbourne indie label Chapter Music, Dick Diver’s encapsulation of millennial malaise under capitalism made them the unwitting leaders of a genre jokingly nicknamed “dolewave”. The band, and much of the underground music press, bristled but the moniker nonetheless expressed something true: this was the music of the everyman, suburban poetics for the struggles and quiet joys of daily living.
For me, Dick Diver was the sound of moving to Melbourne and starting my independent adult life. Living in sharehouses in Richmond and Carlton North, my housemates and I would cycle down to the Tote after working our entry-level jobs to see Rupert Edwards, Alistair McKay, Al Montfort and Steph Hughes play these songs that were somehow about us. Dick Diver soundtracked the changing tides of my life, spinning on a record player or blasting from a stage as I learned how to work, how to love, how to live.
It’s been a while between drinks: Dick Diver’s last shows were in 2018 and, despite the memorable lyric “Europe’s fucked, probably”, half the band now lives there. In the intervening years they have busied themselves with other musical projects, including Sleeper and Snake, Terry and UV Race, and undergone new personal adventures, such as raising children.
This surprise reunion was initially a one-off but demand ballooned it into a four-show affair, including two all-ages matinees. Despite it being 10 years since their last album, the cheekily named Melbourne, Florida, this is not the typical album-in-full nostalgia show. The sentimentality is there, of course – “It’s been such a treat to learn these old songs. It’s been a while since we’ve been together,” McKay tells the sold-out crowd on Friday night – but you’d be forgiven for forgetting any time had passed at all.
It does take a little time to warm back up: the band feels a little subdued at their first show on Friday night, with their signature banter missing, and loud crowd chatter throughout the sprawling Amber – one of their best – dulling the meditative impact of the song’s languorous pace and surrealist imagery (“When I was young, I saw a horse in a stream / One day it looked at me and said, ‘Get a grip, dreamy, it’s the 21st century!’”)
But the music sounds great and the band remains as tight as ever, with guest musicians on saxophone and trumpet elevating songs such as Lime Green Shirt and Private Number. Band members swap instruments and vocal duties, and it’s not hard to see how this ramshackle crew got together and made this magic.
By Saturday, with two shows under the belt, the energy is immediately higher. The show kicks off with Alice, a highlight from the 2013 album Calendar Days that sounds like REM’s Losing My Religion if it were set in the Northern Territory on a scorching summer’s day. The setlist is similar but for the addition of the “ancient” Flying Teatowel Blues, a strange, epic beast of a song that takes its cues from spaghetti westerns and shows the band’s versatility.
The easy repartee reminds us of where we are and who they are. “Who can recite their CRN number?” Montfort says before the band plays New Start Again, the title track from their 2011 debut album. During the anthemic Head Back, the crowd roars “burn the flag” in unison – a lyric that clearly captures a mood in 2025.
These songs are evergreen. Dick Diver’s value today is in more than just remembering the past: here is a band who manage to both embody the larrikinism of Australian culture and provide a howl of truth about what it means to live here, what it means to live at all. A Dick Diver show, rare and special as it is now, is a look both back and forward: things change, things stay the same.
