Naarm/Melbourne art-pop duo GATC (Gypsy & The Cat) might be the most outlandish band to emerge from Australia’s new millennium music scene before they vanished. Now, for the first time in nearly a decade, Xavier Bacash and Lionel Towers are touring behind their ambitious debut Gilgamesh – with its epic single run “Time To Wander”, “Jona Vark” and “The Piper’s Song” – amid prevailing 2010s nostalgia. And GATC’s catalogue is surely ripe for reappraisal. They delivered imaginative concepts, unusual sonic hybrids and, yes, hooky songs. In 2025 Gilgamesh resonates as a soundtrack to another time and place.
“The funny thing is the biggest record we ever made was one when no management, label, publisher, no one, was involved,” Bacash, GATC’s frontman, recalls while talking to Rolling Stone AU/NZ. “We were just two kids above a mechanic making a record all by ourselves with no input whatsoever.”
Last summer, GATC performed a comeback gig in their hometown. However, the band’s Instagram was hacked towards the end of 2024 which “completely derailed” a Gilgamesh 15th anniversary tour, Bacash rues. “We kind of weren’t really sure if we would do more shows.” GATC proceeded with the Corner Hotel date as they’d sold ample tickets. “The show was a success – it wasn’t a sell-out, but the room was full of fans and they just knew every word. We walked off stage like, ‘Wow, that was better than we expected.'”
Bacash and Towers bonded as resident DJs at the hipster laneway club, Roxanne Parlour, in the late 2000s. “It was kind of French house stuff – it was not the most underground thing, but it wasn’t commercial music, either.” The two started a band, with Bacash on lead vocals and guitar and the classically-trained Towers playing keys. They’d initiate an exhilarating sound with inflections of yacht rock, New Romantic synth-pop and dream-pop.
GATC had largely finalised 2010’s cult Gilgamesh – its narrative inspiration the ancient Mesopotamian literary masterpiece, The Epic Of Gilgamesh, when former Bros bassist Craig Logan signed them to RCA Records in the UK. The pair temporarily relocated to London, premiering live. The rapturous “Time To Wander” was selected as Gilgamesh’s lead track.
Gilgamesh proved a triumph in Australia – GATC embraced by the national youth broadcaster triple j. Their debut peaked at #14 on the ARIA Top 50 Albums Chart and was eventually certified Gold. Three hits landed in triple j’s Hottest 100 (the highest, what Bacash refers to as the “Fleetwood Mac-esque” “Jona Vark”, at 64). GATC received two nominations at the ARIAS, including ‘Breakthrough Artist – Album’. However, shortly after the band joined Sony, Logan moved on and the label’s ensuing lack of direction halted their ascent as Australia’s next global superstars. Gilgamesh charted across Europe but wasn’t issued in the UK.
“We were caught in a really difficult place, where we’d unfortunately signed a deal to a record label that was basically in freefall,” Bacash relates. “That didn’t help things, because in that moment where we were at high-rotation on triple j etc – I mean, for the first year, we didn’t have a film-clip for ‘Jona Vark’.
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“At the time that kind of stuff mattered, because you still had Channel [V] and MTV playing that stuff. That was another way of getting quite popular, as opposed to just radio. Streaming wasn’t really a thing either then. Spotify was really, really new. So we missed the boat on a few things that I think would have given us that real leg up in terms of exposure.”
In 2011, GATC performed at Big Day Out. But they were subsequently forced to cancel an appearance at Coachella as Sony declined to fund it. Their momentum slowed.
Today, GATC’s contemporary, Josh Simons, who led Naarm/Melbourne alt-rock outfit Buchanan (and is now CEO of Vinyl Group), believes that such bands fell victim to music industry flux.
“Almost all of us who were part of that Class Of 2010 got screwed by way of timing. The teams we built around our debut albums were experts in selling physical records, but by the time our second albums came around, all that mattered were streaming numbers. Different skillsets, different consumption habits. Triple j couldn’t keep up or decide who it wanted to support or who it wanted to be, and so a generation of extremely talented artist projects were lost due to an instantaneous drop in support.”
GATC departed Sony, but talking to rival companies was off-putting: “All these record labels were filled with real estate agents – it’s like they weren’t professionals at music anymore. They were just trying to sell you something. Their speakers weren’t working in their offices where they’d listen to music.”
In 2012, GATC independently released their sophomore, The Late Blue – mixed by MGMT producer Dave Fridmann. MGMT had followed their 2007 classic Oracular Spectacular with a radical departure in Congratulations – and, similarly, the eccentric GATC cut a “more live full band kind of thing” and shed the euphoric synth-pop for acoustica, neo-psychedelia and Balearica. “It’s almost like they’re entirely opposite ends of the spectrum musically.”
The restless Bacash didn’t want GATC to be predictable. “I was very keen on never repeating something we’d already done.” Yet the duo returned to the ARIA Top 50 and finally played the US.
GATC’s 2016 outing, the panoramic Virtual Islands, fulfilled a trilogy – the group staging another stylistic reinvention with songs like the genius pop-opera “Odyssey Of The Streets”. Alas, it was slept-on.
“A lot of people missed what we were trying to do – and I think even triple j at the time were very unsure of what we were trying to be,” Bacash says. “So that was, I guess, from an artistic perspective, slightly upsetting. It ultimately was to the demise of the band, where we just couldn’t get people to come on that journey with us artistically.”
Virtual Islands was their swansong – GATC announcing an amicable break-up on Facebook prior to release. “It had gotten to the point where we just didn’t have enough support across the industry and from our fanbase to continue making music we wanted to make. And so we just had to make a tough decision in the end.”
Homegrown indie-dance bands from the late 2000s and 2010s such as Cut Copy and The Presets, both aligned with the ubiquitous Modular Recordings, plus Empire Of The Sun remain popular because of enduring industry and media backing.
Formed in 2003, the same year MySpace launched, The Presets performed to sentimental millennials at 2024’s Live At The Gardens. Their proto-EDM has been widely synced, while the First Nations hip-hop supergroup 3% sampled the electro-pop anthem “My People” for “OUR PEOPLE” – winning ‘Song Of The Year’ at the National Indigenous Music Awards (NIMAs). Empire of the Sun established themselves on the global festival circuit with the major label Walking On A Dream.
The Presets and Empire were also well represented in triple j’s (rockcentric) Hottest 100 Of Australian Songs last month – GATC campaigning for bops like “Jona Vark”.
Other bands from that era showed promise but never achieved a commercial zenith to become household names and are now either underrated or unjustly forgotten. GATC are in good company with Midnight Juggernauts, Van She, Lost Valentinos (mercurial live, vocalist Nik Yiannikas channelling Michael Hutchence) and The Bumblebeez.
Still, it’s notable that, in a predominantly white Australian indie-dance scene (mirrored in the 2020s’ indie sleaze aesthetic revival on social media), GATC and Midnight Juggernauts had members of colour – Bacash’s heritage Lebanese and Towers’ Pasifika. “Looking back, there could be something to it,” Bacash ponders. “As a young kid, 22, 23-years-old, we were definitely sort of in board meetings with very male-dominant, white environments… maybe, as a group, we were missing the language to kind of ‘bro-down’ with those people in those boardrooms to maybe get that funding. I don’t know if that really mattered. But I still went to private school, so I can’t say that I don’t come from some privilege as well.”
Primarily, Bacash reckons that GATC were “always misunderstood” – and that both GATC and Midnight Juggernauts were too heterodox, veering away from what in 2014 Fairfax (dismissively) dubbed “the triple j sound”. “Maybe there were things musically that we were trying to do, particularly after the album one, that I think became too challenging,” he reasons. “Maybe it was more that we just wanted to do more weird stuff and there wasn’t an appetite for it!”
The direct Bacash is critical of triple j with its generational and increasingly homogenous commercial programming. “The Australian music industry in general just has an obsession with new and young bands and acts. It very rarely will follow a project all the way… in this country we are interested in developing, but not fostering, careers.”
The GATC members have each pursued solo endeavours. In 2017, Bacash headed to Denmark – where he met his Swedish partner – and dedicated himself to underground electronic music. Ever DIY, Bacash introduced Sonny Ism – “lo-fi house, disco” – with 2020’s Union: Integration Of The Shadow via his own imprint Northern Underground Records, determined “to keep exploring this tangent of more adventurous, risktaking-type music and songwriting.”
As the pandemic receded, Bacash resettled in Naarm/Melbourne and devised a second vehicle, Now Always Fades, traversing ethereal wave, trip-hop and ambitronica – a recent LP Into The Doldrums championed domestically by consistently cutting-edge community radio. Meanwhile, Towers has branched out as a songwriter, producer and composer – among his credits Guy Sebastian and Tia Gostelow (remember 2018’s mega-hit “Strangers” featuring LANKS?).
Bacash is circumspect about GATC presenting a fourth album – the precariousness of music discovery a deterrent. “You’re screaming into a void a little bit with releasing new music,” he admits. “We talk about it – but it’s kind of like, ‘Is it just for our fans? And can we even reach our fanbase anymore?’
“To put time into a record, you wanna feel like it’s gonna go somewhere; it’s gonna make a splash somewhere.
“Without the support of triple j or Double J, I think it makes it difficult for us to commit to wanting to do more music. But, yes, there is more music. It’s more about what we’d need to do to finish it.”
Live, GATC will celebrate Gilgamesh and revisit other favourites from their own Australian odyssey. “We’ve just had lots of people year after year writing to us like, ‘Oh, when are you gonna do more shows?,”’ Bacash says. “And so I think, when the 15th anniversary thing came up, we were just like, ‘Oh, we have to do it as friends. We just have to get back together and do justice to all the time’ – like it’s a pretty decent chunk of our life spent on this band.”
Click here to see GATC’s upcoming anniversary dates.
