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Dear Seattle in Newcastle – review and photos

September 16, 2026

Everyone loves a good regional tour, stopping at places off the well worn touring track. Fortunately for Newcastle, we have been considered regional for the sake of Dear Seattle’s latest tour where they’ve brought Seahaven out on their first ever Aussie tour, despite the Californian band playing together for nearly 20 years!.

Finding Better Health opened the night with a less than full room, but they made the most of the ears they had to win over at King St Hotel. There’s an indie/punk streak running through their sound that feels unmistakably Australian, unpolished in the right places, and even with the crowd still trickling in they played as if it was a packed house.

Bad Neighbour have been turning up plenty in my Spotify playlists over the past year and seeing them live felt well overdue, and they didn’t waste the opportunity. Whatever expectation had built up from the algorithm, they matched it, translating whatever’s been catching ears online into something that actually holds up in person. Infectious riffs and melancholic vocals play a large part of their sound and I won’t wait so long before catching them again.

Then came Seahaven, on their first ever run of Australian shows after the better part of two decades as a band, and frontman Kyle Soto looked genuinely struck by it.

There’s something in watching a band who’ve spent that long building a following from a distance finally get to stand in front of it, and Newcastle gave them exactly the welcome you’d hope for a band who’d travelled that far to find out fans existed here at all. New material sat alongside the older favourites with the crowd eating it all up.

Dear Seattle closed it out with the kind of ease that comes from being such a road-tested live band. Frontman Brae Fisher has that rare stage presence where charisma doesn’t feel performed, it just turns up naturally between songs, and it had the whole room bouncing and singing along from the first note to the last. They showed why they are one of the country’s premier indie punk rock bands with ample sing along chorus’ and angst with an Aussie twang.

This is the sort of feel good music that brings groups of friends together to bond over a shared love of music and the sort of screw the world, we have each other vibes, that leave you on a high as you walk out of the venue back to reality.