⊸ Entertainment ⋅ By Emily Kulich
Published at 8:49am on Saturday 2 August 2025

We talk radio and “teenager” with inner north electronic artist Fresh Hex.

This article appeared in our 1 August print edition. A longer version is in the works – head to sub.MerriMirror.au to get notified when it’s out.

Original photo by Jade Florence

You’ve got a DJ set on national radio this weekend!

I do! This is very exciting for me because I’ve been Fresh Hex for a long time, and I don’t think I ever had the serious acumen to be offered a Triple J Mix Up [set]. Something has clicked in the last, I want to say 12 months, where I think people are excited about what I’m doing, and I’ve sort of found something that’s really exciting for me.

I approached the mix from a very specific… how can I word this in a way I don’t sound totally pretentious? I wanted the mix to be dizzying, and I wanted it to have flickers of familiarity for [everyone], regardless of their age or what they like.

There’s technically 63 songs in the [60 minute] mix, but some of them will occur for eight bars, or 10 seconds, or maybe it’s just a tiny little micro-sample of a sound. The idea was I wanted it to feel like a bit of a companion piece to the ‘teenager’ concept for me, which, of course, is like a gift to my teenage self; a celebration of what I was going through as a teenager and the kind of sounds I would love to make or play.

I [layered songs] in a way that’s meant to feel like a rush. I like the idea that people would hear one element of the song and go, ‘oh, sick, I f—ing love that song,’ and then it just never plays.

In April you released your mid-00s-club-callback debut EP, ‘teenager’. You really pushed old iTunes as the platform on which to get the album!

I still like being able to buy music. Yeah, I mean, I’m going to come out and say ‘I f—ing hate streaming.’ A lot of this really comes from digging into old hard drives for some tracks I used to play when I was deejaying when I was quite young. I couldn’t find a song so I went looking for it; it wasn’t on Spotify, it wasn’t on iTunes, it wasn’t on Amazon, it wasn’t on Bandcamp. I thought ‘Holy f—, that MP3 was a collectible!’ It doesn’t exist now.

Local bands, including Skink Tank, Dr Sure’s Unusual Practice, PROKOP and, most recently, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, have pulled music from Spotify because of its CEO’s enormous investments in weapons manufacturing. Would you go so far as to do the same?

I’m already looking into it, 100 per cent. I think that you don’t get to be CEO of a company like Spotify, and send artists emails about how much you’ve paid out to the music industry, and then, when the opportunity to reinvest your personal wealth comes up, you don’t put that into music, you don’t put that into artistry, but you do put that into ways to dismember, maim, kill, damage and ruin societies.
I think, if that’s what you’ve decided to do, then you need to step down from the Spotify platform. I don’t want you anywhere near artistry or music or making decisions around what we do as artists.

Catch Fresh Hex on Triple J Mix Up at 1am Sunday 3 August, and find their music on Bandcamp or iTunes.

See the full 1 August 2025 print edition

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