Shady Nasty

Shady Nasty formed in Sydney in 2015 when three classically trained musicians who had met at the same high school decided that jazz was only the starting point. Kevin Stathis on vocals and guitar, Haydn Green on bass, and Luca Watson on drums built a sound that refused to sit still, pulling together punk, post-punk, hip-hop, and electronic textures into something that music writers kept reaching for unusual language to describe. "Street-level and fully world-built" captures it well enough: the music feels lived-in and architecturally dense at the same time.

Their early years produced a run of powerful singles that built a devoted audience in Sydney and eventually much further beyond. The track "HARDSTYLE" (2023) is a useful entry point, its title pointing toward the group's love of intensity and their willingness to treat genre conventions as raw materials rather than blueprints. Australian indie radio station FBi Radio became one of their key champions early on, a relationship that would eventually culminate in something significant.

Their debut album TREK arrived on February 21, 2025, self-released and produced by Kim Moyes of The Presets. Eight tracks, twenty-one minutes, every second purposeful. FBi Radio named TREK their Record of the Year for 2025, a recognition that captured the excitement the record generated in Australia's most attentive music circles. Rolling Stone Australia included the band on their "Future of Music 2026" list and ranked the album among the 50 Best Australian Albums of 2025.

Also in 2025, Shady Nasty released "Air Maxes" on Steel City Dance Discs, a collaboration with Irish DJ and producer KETTAMA and English producer Fred again.. The track exists in two distinct forms: a slow ambient version and a propulsive dancefloor mix courtesy of KETTAMA, which also appeared on KETTAMA's debut album Archangel. The collaboration brought global attention to the band partly because Fred again.. publicly called Shady Nasty "literally his favourite band in the world right now," a declaration made on his Twitch stream that spread quickly and opened their music to audiences who had not yet found them.

HARDSTYLE 2 followed, including a remix by Lou Nour, extending the band's reach further into electronic and dance worlds while preserving the urgency and physicality that make them unmistakable. Their live performances have developed a reputation for intensity and unpredictability, the kind of sets that become stories people tell afterward.

Shady Nasty occupy a genuinely exciting position in contemporary music: a band rooted in Sydney's independent scene, backed by some of the most respected names working today, and making records that sound like nothing quite else. The combination of Kim Moyes's production sensibility, the band's formal musical training, and their appetite for collision makes for something with real staying power.