Fortitude Valley’s new album Part Of The Problem, Baby seems to smile at you through the speakers. 10 joyful tracks of brightly sun-soaked guitar pop with the light sweetness of classic indie and the weight and bounce of pop-punk, this is the kind of blazing, soul-hugging power pop that’s hard to come by. 

The drums crash and the guitars shimmer with a fuzz that bites around Laura Kovic’s warm and charming vocal delivery. There’s no nasally whine or bratty sneer that would make for an easy pop-punk comparison. Instead, the mood is more like jangle-pop, but with a sonic weight that could blow most indie bands off the stage. It feels instantly familiar, and yet quite difficult to compare to anything else in the current landscape.

There’s a contrast between the sheer happiness of the sound and the sadness running through the lyrics that hits hard. Rather than being saccharine, it’s joyful despite everything. Totally is a gorgeous sing-along full of shiny guitars built around the chorus “You totally fucked it”. Fortitude Valley make music that sounds like skipping down a sunlit path while texting your ex something passive-aggressive. The subtle keyboard textures in Video (Right There With You) feel like the nostalgia of a coming-of-age movie montage, whilst Sunshine State radiates pure serotonin even as it wrestles with miscommunication and uncertainty.

Part of the Problem, Baby is full of energy without aggression, and sadness without despair. Into The Wild leans into soft major chords and beautiful reverb, offering a moment of glistening calm before the album’s final track, and the whole 35 minutes is universally appealing. There’s a thread running beneath the breakup songs summed up in the title track’s refrain, with a devastating chorus dressed up in bright harmonies. It gestures toward a broader feeling that’s echoed across much of 2025’s best music: the paralysis of knowing how broken things are, and how small we feel within it.

Instead of stewing in guilt or lashing out in rage, Fortitude Valley have decided to channel their negative feelings into the unapologetic joy of making something beautiful anyway, and the album feels more like a warm, melodic rebellion than a retreat from the world’s problems. On one hand, punk has always been overtly sermonising, furious to the point of confrontation, and on the other side bookish indie often sidesteps any meaningful engagement with politics altogether. Fortitude Valley write honestly about relationships, heartbreak, and loneliness, and yet underneath it all there’s a recognition of the larger systems we’re all trapped in that never preaches or poses, but instead offers an emotional realism in a broken world.

Sonically, the guitars shimmer and jangle with a sweetness reminiscent of Johnny Marr while the rhythm section slams like Weezer or Green Day. Over the top the vocals float soft and unforced like Belle and Sebastian, and the emotional tone of this big-hearted combination is bittersweet and brimming with noisy, hopeful sadness.