Yeah Bagel

Some bands sound like they have been assembled by committee.

Dr Sure’s Unusual Practice sound like they were discovered in a shed behind the committee building after the committee had been dissolved, audited, rebranded, set on fire, and replaced by a malfunctioning synthesiser with strong opinions about landlords.

Good.

There is too much music now that arrives pre-sanded. The edges are removed. The politics are mood-boarded. The danger has been wrapped in soft-launch language and asked to consider its market position. Against that beige little plague, Dr Sure’s Unusual Practice arrive twitching, grinning, wired to the mains. They are not here to provide ambience for the content economy. They are here to make the room feel unstable in a useful way.

The project circles around Dougal Shaw, the Central Queensland-born, Naarm/Melbourne-based artist behind the Dr Sure persona, but “solo project” feels too small for the machinery at work. Dr Sure’s Unusual Practice is less a band than a whole stubborn ecosystem: records, videos, artwork, stage uniforms, label infrastructure, political bile, communal sweat, private obsession, public eruption. It is a laboratory where punk is not treated as a historical costume but as a method. Not spikes and nostalgia. Not a museum mannequin with a safety pin through its pension card. Punk as permission. Punk as refusal. Punk as “what happens if we follow this wrong wire and see which wall starts smoking?”

That is the thing with Dr Sure’s Unusual Practice. The name sounds like a fake medical clinic you find on a side street in a paranoid cartoon, but the diagnosis is usually correct. Australia is burning. The world is shrinking into screens. Work is eating life. Fascists are trying on new hats. The future has been privatised and then sold back to you as a subscription tier. Dr Sure sees the rash and refuses to prescribe calm.

The early material had the bite of wonky, groove-based post-punk, all angular hips and itchy slogans. The West came out in 2019 sounding like someone had tipped a newsfeed into a cement mixer with DEVO, The Fall, Eddy Current Suppression Ring, garage rock, civic disgust, and a cheap keyboard that had just read the front page. Then came the bushfire-era urgency of Scomo Goes To Hawaii and While Aus Burns, records that did not politely “respond to the moment” so much as grab the moment by its linen resort shirt and shake it until the ash fell out.

This is one of the central powers of Dr Sure’s Unusual Practice: they understand that political music does not have to sound like homework. The sermon is dead on arrival if the rhythm section cannot move bodies. Their best songs do not stand at the front of the classroom pointing at a chart. They come clattering down the hallway in boiler suits, spilling ideas, knocking over bins, yelling something half absurd and half prophetic.

By Remember The Future? Vol. 2 & 1, the Practice had become more elastic, more fully itself. The songs could be guitar-led, synth-stabbed, motorik, paranoid, silly, furious, communal, all in the same breath. A lot of bands talk about “world-building” now, usually meaning they have chosen a font. Dr Sure actually builds worlds. Crooked little civic zones. Alternate municipalities. Offices where the printer has joined a union. Dancefloors where the walls are listening but the bassline has already escaped.

Then came BUBBLE, which felt like a pressure chamber opening. Recorded in solitude over a short burst, it pushed further into synths, drum machines, Krautrock pulses, new wave oddness, and electronic play. The title could have meant isolation, or protection, or delusion, or the weird membrane between your head and the catastrophe scroll. In Dr Sure’s hands, it became all of those things at once. BUBBLE is twitchy and lonely but not defeated. It understands that absurdity can be a survival tool. When reality becomes grotesque, surrealism is not escape. It is a torch.

That line runs into Blue and the 2025 Blue/Bubble compilation, where the so-called between-albums material becomes its own strange chamber. The songs feel intimate without becoming small. They are compact, bright, synthetic, uneasy. Pop music viewed through a cracked visor. Sadness with elbows. Protest with a cup of tea gone cold beside the machine. This is Dr Sure’s sweet spot: making the homemade feel expansive, and making the expansive feel hand-cut.

But Total Reality is where the band’s current force really blooms. Released in 2024, it feels like the sound of the whole operation stepping into a larger room and refusing to behave just because the ceiling is higher. There is art-punk in there, yes. Synth-punk too. Krautrock propulsion. New wave angles. Post-punk agitation. Horns. Barks. Riffs. Group vocals. Strange little trapdoors. It is busy in the way a city is busy, not in the way a hard drive is busy. Things have purpose. Even the chaos has somewhere to be.

“Celebration”, which appears on Open Format Transmission 2026.02 at 01:00:55 is the second track on the album.

The title matters. Total Reality sounds like a threat, or a software update, or the name of a wellness cult run by estate agents. It also captures the strange daily condition of being alive now: every disaster immediate, every opinion weaponised, every image flattened into feed-gruel, every genuine feeling forced to compete with a sponsored interruption. Dr Sure’s Unusual Practice do not try to float above that. They plunge into it wearing protective goggles and come back holding a riff.

Live, the band seem built for combustion. Shaw may be the nucleus, but the current Practice is very much a working unit, a road-worn collective where the songs become more physical, more feverish, more ridiculous in the best sense. This matters because too much contemporary underground music gets trapped in the digital terrarium. It looks active, but never sweats. Dr Sure’s Unusual Practice sweat. They tour. They make things. They drag the project into rooms. They treat community not as a caption but as a verb.

There is something deeply Australian in the whole thing, too, though not in the lazy export-brand sense. Not sunburnt larrikin cosplay. More the particular Antipodean talent for turning civic rot into absurdist propulsion. The Saints are somewhere in the bloodline. So are DEVO, Talking Heads, The Velvet Underground, Tropical Fuck Storm, The Drones, and the whole long guttering tradition of artists who realise the joke and the emergency are often the same animal viewed from different angles.

Then there is No Pigs/Desksitter, the 2025 seven-inch, which sharpens the blade again. No Pigs is Dr Sure in classic mode: funny until it is not funny, cartoonish until you notice the teeth. Its anti-authoritarian charge is not subtle, but subtlety would be cowardly here. The song understands that fascism rarely announces itself as fascism. It arrives as order. It arrives as common sense. It arrives as the farmer explaining why the animals simply need firmer management. Dr Sure’s answer is rhythm, chant, refusal, and a very loud door being kicked open.

What keeps the band from becoming a pamphlet with a chorus is joy. Not cheeriness. Not optimism as a scented candle. Joy as voltage. Joy as collective noise. Joy as the moment the crowd knows the system is stupid and so is despair, and for three minutes everyone chooses motion instead. This is why Dr Sure’s Unusual Practice can be political without becoming stiff. They know the body is part of the argument.

That is the unusual practice.

Not diagnosis from above. Not cleverness for cleverness’ sake. Not “post-punk” as a genre tag for young men in black shirts looking worried near a brick wall. Dr Sure’s Unusual Practice make music that behaves like a living, mutating zine: pasted up, ripped down, corrected in marker, shouted across a room, passed hand to hand, smuggled through customs inside a broken drum machine.

They are prolific because the world keeps producing symptoms.

They are funny because despair without humour is just another locked door.

They are political because neutrality is usually just power wearing slippers.

And they are thrilling because, beneath the oddball suits and synth squiggles and sideways slogans, there is a serious belief in the old dirty miracle of bands: people in a room, making something together, louder than the machinery that wants them isolated.

Dr Sure’s Unusual Practice are not offering a cure.

They are offering a treatment plan.

Turn up. Tune wrong. Build the world sideways. Dance while the machine checks its paperwork.

The doctor will see you now.