Interview by Ali Williams
Long before Australian playlists started happily throwing funk, rock, hip hop, soul and heavy groove into the same digital bucket, SKUNKHOUR were already doing the hard, sweaty version of it onstage. No algorithm. No tidy marketing lane. Just real instruments, an MC, big rhythm, bigger nerve, and a refusal to flatten themselves into something easier to explain. Now the band are taking that history back out on the road with the Back to Basics Tour, a title pulled from one of their earliest songs and a pretty cheeky understatement for a band with this much behind them. Speaking with HEAVY‘s Ali Williams, Aya Larkin says the tour is about “getting to some places that we haven’t been for a long time.”
For northern New South Wales and southeast Queensland, that sentence has some proper bite. SKUNKHOUR play Cooly Hotel on Thursday October 15, Norton Music Factory in Caloundra on Friday October 16, CrowBar in Brisbane on Saturday October 17, and Arts Factory in Byron Bay on Sunday October 18, before heading through Sydney, Melbourne, Coffs Harbour and Pacific Palms. That Byron Bay date carries extra local flavour. SKUNKHOUR have often played The Great Northern, but the return to Arts Factory reaches further back. “We haven’t played since the nineties,” he says.
Anyone who remembers that part of the world before every second venue turned into a development proposal will understand the appeal. The band’s story starts in Lismore, not some polished industry office with a framed gold record and a coffee machine that looks financially irresponsible. Aya is clear on that. “There’s an origin story from Lismore,” he says. “That’s where the band was formed.” That beginning still explains a lot. SKUNKHOUR never carried the sterile shine of a band assembled to suit a boardroom guess. They sounded built from live floors, long drives, borrowed money, regional hunger, and the sort of musical curiosity that makes a band harder to sell but much harder to kill.
The current line-up keeps four original members in the mix, including Aya Larkin, Dell Larkin, Dean Sullivan and Warwick Scott, with newer players adding fresh muscle. Drummer Carlos Adura gets a particularly glowing mention from Aya, who calls him “an absolute gun.” That is the kind of review every drummer wants, especially from a singer who has survived enough stages to know the difference between flash and actual force.
SKUNKHOUR in 2026 are still here. Plenty of bands survive. Some do it beautifully. Some do it with the spiritual glow of an overdue electricity bill. SKUNKHOUR sound far more interested in movement than preservation. Aya says newer material from a recent four-track EP sits inside the set with confidence, with three of those songs still being played live. That says plenty. Older bands can talk themselves into treating new songs like vegetables on a dinner plate: technically present, quietly avoided, and only there because someone said they should be. SKUNKHOUR are not doing that. Aya says those newer tracks sit among the strongest songs in the set, and that creating them again “re-energized the band.”
The set has not been locked away either. Aya says they keep bringing in “variations here and there without bastardizing too many songs,” which is the correct balance. Give the crowd the song they came for, but let it breathe enough that the band does not look trapped inside its own catalogue.
The audience has shifted too. SKUNKHOUR still have the original faithful, but Aya says younger fans have started turning up in serious numbers, especially in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide. Some arrive through parents. Some arrive through friends. Some probably arrive because the internet finally did something useful between ruining attention spans and teaching everyone to argue badly. Aya calls it “a full generational jump.” He says younger fans know deep album tracks and sing every lyric, which must feel slightly surreal when those songs have already lived several lives before some of those fans had even entered the group chat of existence.
That cross-generational pull fits perfectly with . SKUNKHOUR who never belonged neatly to one moment. Their music carries the 90s in its bones, but it does not sit there politely waiting to be admired. It still moves. It still sweats. It still sounds like musicians pushing at each other in real time, which feels oddly fresh when so much modern music arrives buffed clean of fingerprints. The old stories are still there, of course, because a band like this does not survive three decades without collecting some high-grade nonsense. Aya recalls European tours where SKUNKHOUR realised the queues in Milan and Florence were actually for them. He also remembers less glamorous adventures, including tiny crowds, hostile support slots, and the sort of touring mishaps that make a decent person grateful for modern accommodation locks.
But the tour does not need those stories to justify itself. They add colour, not purpose. The real reason to see SKUNKHOUR now is simpler: they remain a live band with unfinished energy. At Cooly Hotel, they will be joined by Supermassive, featuring members connected to Machine Gun Fellatio, which gives the night a very healthy chance of getting loose in all the right ways. CrowBar, Norton Music Factory and Arts Factory should follow suit, each with its own flavour of sweat, memory and new bodies discovering the songs in real time.
SKUNKHOUR could have turned this run into a polite lap of honour. They have earned the right. Instead, the Back to Basics Tour feels more like a reminder that the basics were never basic in the first place. A band. A crowd. A groove. A bloody good time. That will do just fine. For all the info and tickets head to https://www.skunkhour.com.au/
