There’s a school of thought in international television that says Australian stories need to be softened at the edges to travel, make sure to swap the slang, neutralise the references, don’t scare them off with too many snakes and spiders, and license music that could have been made anywhere. Heartbreak High spent three seasons doing the complete opposite, and hit the global top 10 in 53 countries whilst at it.
The show’s music supervision is a useful place to start when trying to understand why. Across 24 episodes, music supervisors Jemma Burns and Charlie Lempriere placed 128 songs into the world of Hartley High; a fictional school in Maroubra that traditionally would have had no business being watched in living rooms across Europe, Asia and North America, and yet.
The choices weren’t safe, the first episode of the final season opens on INXS and closes on alt-J via Budjerah, Spiderbait, and Hozier without pausing to explain itself. The finale runs from Charli XCX to Dom Dolla to Silverchair’s “Straight Lines” to Mallrat in the space of forty minutes. The entire show reads like a playlist made by someone who actually cares about music, because it was.
Burns, who won an AACTA for Best Soundtrack for Season 2, has spoken about the deliberateness of this: the idea that the show’s music had to reflect what it actually means to be a young person in Australia, not a globally palatable approximation of it.
That specificity, counterintuitively, is probably what made it resonate everywhere else. For the final season, she and Lempriere described the brief simply: go all in on homegrown sounds while honouring the show’s global reach. The resulting tracklist — Genesis Owusu scoring two separate moments in Episode 4, Amyl and the Sniffers turning up in the same episode as Wolf Alice and Jennifer Loveless, Barkaa in Episode 3 alongside Saweetie — achieves something most internationally distributed shows can’t manage: it sounds exactly like where it’s set.
Will McDonald, who plays Ca$h, put it simply ahead of the finale release. “There’s an Australianness to the show,” he said. “And I think the music helps carry that forward.” He talked about Diorama — Silverchair’s 2002 album, which appears in Episode 2 with “Israel’s Son” — the way people talk about albums that are load-bearing parts of their identity. “I could listen to it for the rest of my life and be very, very happy.”
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The music in Heartbreak High works because the people making it actually care about it. Burns came up through the Australian music scene before she came up through film. Her co-supervisor, Lempriere, is embedded in it. The result is a soundtrack that doesn’t feel curated from the outside, but instead by people who were already in the room.
Burns and Lempriere’s own description of Season 3’s sound — “a raucous blend of the zeitgeist rubbing shoulders with the pop canon, bombastically hurled against a prime high school handball wall” — is accurate and also tells you everything about the sensibility at work.
What Heartbreak High figured out, and what most internationally distributed Australian shows still haven’t, is that leaning into specificity isn’t a risk. The assumption that global audiences need familiar reference points is increasingly wrong, and the numbers bear it out.
“We have really incredible artists here who created iconic music,” McDonald said. That’s a statement about the past.
But the show’s final tracklist, Barkaa next to Saweetie, Ayesha Madon next to Peter Andre, Mallrat closing the finale, is a statement about what comes next.
Heartbreak High spent three seasons arguing that Australian music belongs in that conversation. The argument is won, the playlist lives on, the lesson, hopefully, now does too.
Heartbreak High Season 3 is now streaming on Netflix.
