bReview: Phantastic Ferniture

w/ support from Louisa Nicklin

Thursday 11 December 2025 at Double Whammy

Written by Cecilia Muecke

Photography by Milad Asadi

Phantastic Ferniture’s self-titled and sole full-length album turned seven years old this past July, but you can’t tell by the rollicking crowd that receives them, dutifully dancing along to songs old and new. The Australian band open their first international tour in Tāmaki Makaurau tonight and will play two more dates in Te Whanganui-a-Tara/Wellington and Ōhinehou/Lyttelton this weekend. “We’re international rockstars now,” frontwoman (and familiar face) Julia Jacklin quips mid-show.

But before any ferns grace the stage, Louisa Nicklin sets it with utmost precision. There’s a gravity to the Tāmaki-based artist that’s apparent the second she walks out alongside her band – it’s laced in her weighty lyrics and the resonance of her voice, the punchiness of her guitar and closed-eye concentration on her face.

Kicking off her set with “Moving Slow” from her debut self-titled album, Nicklin’s compositional background in both classical and pop genres is apparent in her intricate and dynamic arrangement. Many songs, including “The Highs”, stretch and compress over tempo changes and dramatic crescendos, and Nicklin gives them her all. She finds an ethereal, almost ghostly sound on “Want Your Mother”, which is overlaid with a sound distortion that recalls wind whipping through trees. “You don’t like change/Afraid of what it means/Wish you were a child/Want your mother and your old life”, she echoes again and again. Nicklin also covers the PJ Harvey song “Teclo”, because, she shrugs, “why not?” She laughs at herself and repeats, “Why not, why not, why not?”, and I feel some foreshadowing of the rest of the night.

Later on, Jacklin says to a whooping crowd, “Thank you for coming, this is our fun project.” It’s a perfect one-sentence distillation of what Phantastic Ferniture aims to be, and achieves – fun. Hailing from the Blue Mountains outside of Sydney, the band is made up of old friends with lots of shared history. Jacklin is joined by Elizabeth Hughes on guitar and backing vocals, Ryan Brennan on drums, and Harry Fuller on bass. From the moment I see Hughes and Fuller cracking jokes and having a laugh while setting up, it is clear that the band is at home with each other and on stage.

After riling up the room with the pumping 90’s hit “Better Off Alone” by Alice Deejay, the band walks out triumphantly to open their set with “Take It Off”, which begins slow and sexy, over a menacing guitar riff played by Hughes. Jacklin’s mic begins cutting in and out, a technical difficulty that unfortunately continues throughout much of the show but becomes somewhat of an inside joke between her and the crowd. She laughs and takes first Hughes’ mic, then Fuller’s, and as the song builds to its peak – an impressive high note she holds effortlessly – the band seems unbothered, jumping up and down and grinning.

For fans of Jacklin’s solo work, myself included, Phantastic Ferniture is an opportunity to see her outside of her natural folk habitat, and she doesn’t look out of place, not in the slightest. During “Mumma y Pappa”, a funny, cautionary tune whose central refrain is “Mumma and Pappa bear said never play with fire,” she is headbanging like a true rockstar.

With a decidedly garage-pop sound, the 9-track Phantastic Ferniture LP landed in 2018 between Jacklin’s first and second solo LPs, 2016’s Don’t Let the Kids Win and 2019’s Crushing. Rather than the lyrically-ornate, narrative-driven, dialled-to-perfection songs we know to expect from Jacklin, Phantastic Ferniture’s sound is looser, messier, and more playful. The songs are easy to jump around and wave your arms to. You can sing along to them on your first listen.

Now, with two new singles, “Change My Mind” and “Dare to Fall in Love”, released in September of this year, the band has a bit more material to add to their small but mighty arsenal. There’s a clear thesis statement in songs like “Dare to Fall in Love” and “Dark Corner Dark Dancefloor” that sticks to the brain like spaghetti thrown at a wall. Their choruses come quickly and rip through you; without warning, you are mouthing the words: “Go on, reach out and grab it/Dare to fall in love on a burning planet,” or “I’m just gonna, gonna, dance, dance baby.”

The select few songs that do touch on more personal topics are less measured and more rowdy. “Uncomfortable Teenager” brings a defiant tone to escaping adolescent struggles: “Get the fuck out/Move to the city baby/It’ll all work out”. As Jacklin harmonises with Hughes on this one, they smile at each other, as if only they are in on the secret that they did, in fact, both move to the city, and it did, in fact, all work out. Cursing a past lover is not a sorrowful ballad but rather an unserious roast on “Bad Timing”, where, alongside bashful guitars and relentless drums, Jacklin demands, “When you get back/Would you let me know/If sleeping around set you free?”

Before I know it, the time comes for the last song. “I wonder what it is,” Jacklin smirks. It’s no surprise to any fan of Phantastic Ferniture, to whom “Fuckin’ and Rollin’” has become an undeniable classic. At their first ever show back in 2018, the band even played it twice, and tonight, there’s enough energy coursing through Double Whammy that I think it could happen again. But alas, once will do for tonight. I guess it “just feels right…”

As the music fades, Jacklin instructs everyone to close their eyes. The stage lights turn red and green, betraying their final treat – a messy, perfectly imperfect cover of Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You”. Jacklin sings to an exuberant room that laughs along with her when she messes up the lyrics, or rather, doesn’t bother to get them right. It’s a fitting way to end the night: dancing and never taking it too seriously, that’s the Phantastic Ferniture way.