Hockey Dad’s debut EP, released in 2014, is the product of a year spent relentlessly practicising and refining their craft in front of Wollongong’s sweatiest fans at the tiny Rad Bar. The extent to which Dreamin’ can reflect this youthful and carefree energy, across just five tracks, is genuinely powerful.

Here we have an absolutely insane drummer in Billy Fleming who is consistently firing on all cylinders (if you’ve seen him live, you’ll know just how drenched he gets after only a few songs) and the affable vocals of Zach Stephenson, who sings about what any other 18-year-old in a sleepy, coastal town would: the surf being dead, lusting for a girlfriend, and life getting too repetitive. The lyrics aren’t anything groundbreaking, but are immensely charming, as if they’re taken from diary entries; I also think this works fine because Hockey Dad are a band more exciting on stage than in the recording studio; repetitive or simple choruses mean more time for their audience to sing back, like in the epic slow-burner “Seaweed”, and the raucous encore staple “Babes”.

When I think of Australian surf rock music, Dreamin’ is what plays in my head—this EP genuinely changed things in our indie scene, making way for a new era of scrappy rock bands to emerge from their garages and start uploading to triple j Unearthed. Recently, I finished reading Glen Humphries’ touching and comprehensive love-letter to the Wollongong music scene and this EP in particular, a thick book fittingly titled Lull City. Not only is this an effortlessly brilliant debut, but one that actually helped put our city on the map, an astonishing legacy.