I was in Peru back in 2008, and I was sitting next to an Australian on a train. She had her iPod earphones in and I had mine, and we were going back and forth playing music for each other. A lot of the stuff she was playing me I was already familiar with, so it was just a fun DJ game. But then she put on “Vitriol,” a song by an Australian band called Bluejuice that had been popular in Oz but never made it to the United States. It was fantastic, and it has a spectacularly weird and funny music video to go with it. I’ve since put it on a ton of my playlists.
As you would probably expect, this happens a lot while people are traveling: we discover awesome new bands. It might be a band that was playing live at a bar in a new city, maybe it was on an unfamiliar radio station, or maybe it was just a good old-fashioned iPod swap. We asked our Matador audience on social media for some great bands they discovered while traveling, and here’s what they came up with.
