The Next Big Things In Australian Music

The new-age Von Trapp family ... the sisters of Stonefield, Hannah, Amy, Sarah and Holly Findlay. Rachel Olding and George Palathingal anoint 10 diverse emerging Australian acts as this year's Next Big Things in music. Four rocking sisters from a farm in Victoria. A hip-hop crew that cheated death. A singing, songwriting admin assistant who was told to "fill up the coffee machine" one time too many. To say that Metro's latest, and perhaps greatest, batch of Australian artists to watch in the coming months comes from a wide variety of backgrounds and covers most musical bases is something of an understatement. From Perth to Sydney via Tassie and Melbourne, here are the 10 new acts we think are going to be dominating Australian charts and your own playlists in 2011. Advertisement: Story continues below Click for more photos The next big things in music Punk-pop fusion ... Tonight Alive. Photo: Daniel Boud STONEFIELD Genre Alt-rock with a flower in its hair.From Darr aweit Guim, Label Unsigned.Coming gigs March 9, 8pm, Beach Road Hotel, Bondi, 9130 7247, free; March 10, 8pm, Manning Bar, University of Sydney, 1300 762 545, $40 (supporting the Besnard Lakes). They're the new-age Von Trapp family. The four Findlay sisters - Amy, 21, Hannah, 18, Sarah, 16 and Holly, 13 - grew up on a hobby farm about an hour outside Melbourne. Their parents were not musicians but loved Frank Zappa, Fleetwood Mac and all sorts of 1970s rock. In 2006, the sisters each took up an instrument and started music lessons with a teacher who lived next door. At home they'd muck about playing Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin covers together and wearing clothes made out of curtains (we suspect). Is it any surprise they formed a band? ''Well, we thought, 'Why not?' because we were all living in the same house,'' lead Rosetta Stone Language vocalist and drummer Amy says casually. She wrote their first two singles as a university assignment. They then sold out of CDs at their EP launch and at only their second interstate gig, the One Movement festival, impressed the booker for Glastonbury so much he signed them on the spot for this year's festival. For Holly, the youngest Findlay, the bigger the gig, the happier she is. ''So she's very happy,'' Amy says. Foreign Lover and Through the Clover are quickly infiltrating radios and festival stages, all powerful '70s hippie rock and girl-power vocals. And, not surprisingly, their parents are their roadies, manning the merchandise stand and carting the band around the country. ''They love music,'' Amy says. ''They always told us to make a career out of what you love.'' TIMJEAN Genre Synth-pop.From Perth and Mandurah, Coming gigs April 30, 8pm, Oxford Art Factory, Darling hurst, 9332 3711, $17. A chance meeting at a train station and a MacBook started it all for West Australian duo TimJean. And that's pronounced Jean, as in Jean-Baptiste or Jean-Pierre or Jean-Christophe Capotorto, who was just 15 when he bumped into a distant friend, Tim, 19, at Mandurah train station. Jean invited Tim back to his dad's place to eat pizza, drink cola, muck about on the computer program Garage Band and, consequently, record the synth-pop-tastic anthem Come Around. ''I think age is irrelevant to making music,'' says Capotor to, now 17. ''For us, we've just been getting in my room, jamming out and having fun. For us, that's music.'' Before the year was over, they'd written all the songs on the album Like What, to be released in April. Then came a Triple J Unearthed High win, trips to the US to showcase their music, a deal with Universal, spots at the Park life and Good Vibrations festivals and the tag of ''Perth's Passion Pit''. ''It went from hanging in our bedroom to becoming a bit more serious. I was totally confused; I had no idea what to do,'' Capotor to says of the attention that followed the Triple J competition. ''I was a little 15-year-old coming home from school to an email flooded with offers from around the world. I'd be replying to these bigwigs, it was crazy.