If you’re chasing the best Pinch Points songs, you’re chasing three short, sweaty, brilliantly written records worth of Melbourne post-punk that never once runs out of nervous energy. This Narrm-based four-piece — Isabella Orsini on drums, Acacia Coates on bass, and guitarists Jordan Oakley and Adam Smith trading off spoken/sung vocal duels — has built a catalogue across their 2018 debut EP Mechanical Injury, the 2019 breakout LP Moving Parts, and 2022’s more ambitious Process that rewards close listening as much as it rewards pogoing in a sweaty pub basement. I’ve spent a stupid amount of time with these records, and this is my rundown of the twenty tracks that best capture why Pinch Points deserve a spot in your rotation.
Before we dive in, a quick note on how to actually hear this stuff: Pinch Points’ guitars are jagged, close-miked, and full of transient detail, so the difference between a decent pair of earbuds and something with real clarity is night and day. If you’re curious how your current setup stacks up, our earbuds comparison guide breaks down what actually matters for catching those spiky guitar tones.
Woomera
The opening salvo of Mechanical Injury sets the template immediately: a coiled, hiccupping guitar riff, motorik drumming from Orsini, and vocals that snap between deadpan spoken verses and shouted hooks. Recorded in the band’s own Coburg house in a three-hour blitz back in 2018, “Woomera” has a scrappy, live-take urgency that studio polish would only ruin. On headphones you can hear the room bleed in the drum mic, which somehow makes the track feel more honest rather than lo-fi for lo-fi’s sake.
Jellybrain
Widely considered the standout of the debut EP, “Jellybrain” pairs breathless, slashing guitar apostrophes with lyrics about the deadening effects of television consumption. It’s a two-minute sprint that never settles into a comfortable groove, which is precisely the point — the arrangement mirrors the scattershot attention span it’s satirizing. Bandcamp reviewers have singled it out repeatedly as a favorite track, and live it becomes a genuine mosh trigger, all elbows and shouted backing vocals.
Young
“Young” leans into the Wire and Kleenex influences the band wears openly, with an angular guitar figure that refuses to resolve where you expect. Coates’ basslines here do a lot of quiet heavy lifting, anchoring the chaos with a steady, almost dub-adjacent pulse under all that fretwork. It’s a song that rewards a second and third listen once you stop bracing for the next tempo shift and start following the low end instead.
Liquid Stone
This one is a masterclass in tension and release, building a single riff into a genuinely uncomfortable pressure before letting it snap. In the band’s live sets it’s frequently stitched together with “Ground Up – System Failure” into one continuous, exhausting run — a combo their own fans have called exceptional in interviews. On record it’s shorter and tighter, but you can still hear the seams where the live version would normally explode outward.
Teflon
A guitar line flits and spasms over a rock-steady drum pattern here, and critics have zeroed in on “Teflon” as proof the band could write something both nervy and genuinely catchy in under two minutes. The push-pull between Oakley and Smith’s guitars is the whole story — one plays it straight while the other keeps needling at the edges. It’s a great entry point if you want to understand the male/female, spoken/sung vocal interplay that defines this band’s early sound.
Ground Up – System Failure
The EP’s manic closer stretches a single hiccupping riff to its absolute breaking point before it fully collapses around the one-minute-thirty mark, then drags itself back up to start the cycle again. It’s a structural trick that shouldn’t work as well as it does, and it tells you everything about the band’s obsession with capitalism, burnout, and machinery as a lyrical metaphor. Mastered by Calum Newton, the low end here has just enough grit to feel dangerous without ever tipping into mud.
Ouch!
Kicking off Moving Parts, “Ouch!” announced a heavier, thicker-toned version of the band without abandoning what critics dubbed their “smile-punk” sensibility — aggressive instrumentation paired with a genuine sense of fun. The Needle Drop and other outlets picked up on this record specifically for how much more confident the production sounds compared to the scrappier EP. If you want a single track to hand someone who’s never heard Pinch Points, start here.
Spelt Out
There’s a clarity to “Spelt Out” that separates it from the murkier corners of the catalogue — the vocal interplay is mixed right up front, and the guitars lock into tighter unison stabs rather than constantly working against each other. Lyrically it’s got that same anxious-energy throughline the band mines throughout Moving Parts, but the arrangement gives it room to breathe between the jabs. It’s a great late-night car song, oddly enough, despite how caffeinated it sounds on paper.
Stranger Danger
This track leans harder into post-punk minimalism, with sparse verses that explode into full-band choruses built for shouting along. The dynamic range here is genuinely impressive for a DIY-adjacent punk record — the quiet-loud shifts land with real impact rather than feeling like an obvious trick. It’s one of the tracks that made Channel 9 and the Australian Financial Review sit up and take notice of a band that, on paper, looks like a niche underground concern.
Shibboleth
“Taut, snarling post-punk” is how one reviewer summed up “Shibboleth,” and it’s hard to improve on that description. The title itself signals the band’s interest in language, exclusion, and identity, themes that run under the surface of the whole Moving Parts record even when the songs are ostensibly about something else entirely. Live, this is one of the tracks fans specifically call out as a favorite, and you can hear why the moment the chorus guitars lock in.
Stainless Steel
Where a lot of this record is deliberately jagged, “Stainless Steel” finds a groove and actually rides it for a while, giving Orsini’s drumming more room to build momentum rather than constantly stopping and starting. The title’s industrial imagery fits neatly alongside the band’s recurring fascination with machinery, bodies, and wear-and-tear as metaphors for burnout. It’s one of the more mixing-forward tracks on the record, with clearer separation between the two guitars than you get on the scrappier EP cuts.
Put Out
Fans have named “Put Out” a favorite for good reason — it’s the song that best captures the “driving too fast on desert roads, yelling all the words” feeling that one Bandcamp reviewer used to describe the whole record. The arrangement is direct, hook-forward, and built to be shouted back at the band from the front row. It’s proof that Pinch Points could write something immediate without sacrificing the angularity that makes them interesting.
Ouch!!
The bookend to the album’s opener, “Ouch!!” closes Moving Parts by revisiting the same riff-DNA with a rowdier, more unhinged energy, like the band decided to end the record exactly where they started but louder. It’s a smart structural choice that ties the whole nine-track run together into something that feels like a genuine album rather than a loose singles collection. On a good pair of over-ears you catch just how much extra grit got layered into the guitars for this closing statement — worth checking against our headphones comparison breakdown if you’re shopping for gear that can handle this much high-end distortion without getting harsh.
Reasons To Be Anxious
Opening Process, the band’s 2022 album recorded with producer Anna Laverty — known for her work with Courtney Barnett, Nick Cave, and The Peep Tempel — “Reasons To Be Anxious” signals a clear sonic leap forward. The production is fuller and more deliberate than anything on the earlier releases, with room-filling drums and guitars that finally get proper separation in the mix. Lyrically it sets the tone for an album explicitly engaging with mental health struggles, a theme Laverty’s warmer, more spacious production serves incredibly well.
Am I Okay?
The question-mark title says it all, and this track digs directly into the mental health themes that define Process as a whole. There’s a vulnerability here that the earlier, more purely riff-driven material didn’t always make room for, and the vocal performance leans into that rawness rather than hiding behind irony. It’s one of the clearest examples of how much the band’s songwriting matured between 2018 and 2022.
Haruspex
Named for the ancient practice of reading entrails for omens, “Haruspex” is one of the darker, more atmospheric moments on Process, trading some of the earlier records’ sprint-tempo urgency for something more deliberately unsettling. The arrangement gives space for texture and dynamics that the band’s earlier, more compressed recordings simply didn’t have room for. It’s a song that genuinely benefits from a quiet room and good headphones — the low-level details in the mix get lost in a noisy environment.
Virga
Virga — the meteorological term for rain that evaporates before it hits the ground — gives this track its central image, and the band uses it as a metaphor that fits neatly alongside Process‘s recurring interest in environmental collapse and catastrophic bushfires. Musically it’s one of the more restrained cuts on the record, letting tension build gradually instead of detonating in the first thirty seconds. Anna Laverty’s production instincts show up clearly here in how much patience the arrangement is allowed.
King Rat
“King Rat” brings back some of the band’s more aggressive instincts, with a guitar riff that gnaws at the same phrase the way the EP-era tracks used to, but with a much bigger, more confident low end underneath it. It’s a good example of how Process manages to sound like a genuine artistic evolution rather than an abandonment of what made the earlier records exciting. The interplay between Oakley and Smith’s guitars is as sharp as ever, just recorded with far more clarity this time around.
Kompromat
A politically loaded title for a politically pointed record, “Kompromat” is one of Process‘s most propulsive tracks, built on a bassline from Coates that refuses to let up. The album as a whole engages with structural collapse across so-called Australia — from First Nations incarceration and deaths in custody to gendered violence — and this track channels that anger into something genuinely danceable, in a nervy post-punk sort of way. It’s a strong argument for why Process deserved the attention it got from the international post-punk press upon release.
Capital
Closing in on the back half of Process, “Capital” continues the band’s long-running interest in economic critique that goes all the way back to Mechanical Injury‘s factory-and-machinery imagery. The maturity in the songwriting is obvious when you put this side by side with the EP-era material — the ideas are the same, but the execution is far more controlled and confident. Meanwhile, the mix gives the rhythm section noticeably more room than the earlier records ever did, letting Orsini and Coates drive the track rather than just support it.
Taken together, these twenty tracks map a band that got sharper, weirder, and more emotionally direct with every release without ever losing the propulsive, anxious-energy core that made Mechanical Injury so exciting back in 2018. For more deep dives like this one, browse our full archive of song breakdowns and artist spotlights — there’s always another underrated band worth obsessing over.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is in the band Pinch Points?
Pinch Points is a Melbourne (Narrm) post-punk band made up of Isabella Orsini on drums, Acacia Coates on bass, and guitarists Jordan Oakley and Adam Smith, who trade off spoken and sung vocal duties throughout their catalogue.
What is Pinch Points’ best album?
Opinions genuinely differ here. Moving Parts (2019) is the fan-favorite entry point thanks to its hooky “smile-punk” energy, while Process (2022), produced by Anna Laverty, is the more thematically ambitious and sonically polished record.
What genre is Pinch Points?
They’re generally classified as post-punk or indie punk, with critics drawing comparisons to early Wire, The Fall, and Kleenex, alongside contemporaries in the Australian garage-punk scene like Amyl and the Sniffers and The Chats.
Who produced Pinch Points’ album Process?
Process was recorded with Anna Laverty, a producer known for her work with Courtney Barnett, Nick Cave, and The Peep Tempel, and it marked a noticeably fuller, more dynamic production style compared to the band’s earlier self-recorded releases.
Where does Pinch Points come from?
The band is based in Narrm, the Wurundjeri name for so-called Melbourne, Australia, and their lyrics frequently engage with local political and social issues, including bushfires, gendered violence, and First Nations incarceration.
What is a good starting song for new listeners?
“Ouch!” from Moving Parts is the most accessible entry point, balancing the band’s angular guitar interplay with an immediate, singalong chorus that captures their “smile-punk” appeal without demanding prior context.