The Northside Pleasure Club - Shadow

​The Northside Pleasure Club

Shadow
self-released; 2026

By Jamie Funk

The Northside Pleasure Club make no attempt to disguise where Shadow comes from. Across eight songs and roughly 29 minutes, the Melbourne group works within a vocabulary established decades ago: folk-rock, country, Americana, organ, electric guitar, vocal harmonies, and arrangements that rarely stray far from traditional song structures. Charlie Coupland’s writing frequently recalls the 1960s and ’70s, but the album succeeds because the band understands the mechanics of that music well enough to keep familiarity from becoming imitation. Shadow is deliberately old-fashioned, and mostly convincing on those terms.

Coupland started The Northside Pleasure Club in Melbourne in 2017, working with drummer and Soundpark Studio owner Andrew Hehir, guitarist Nildo Orso, keyboardist Julitha Ryan, and bassist Michael Pollitt. Shadow follows Drifters Highway and Wildboy, with Kavisha Mazzella contributing backing vocals to the latest record. Several of its songs, including “Shadow,” “Halls of History,” “One in a Million,” and “Words,” appeared as singles before being collected here. Much of the album responds to contemporary uncertainty, particularly the title track, where Coupland turns surveillance, espionage, and mistrust into something resembling a Cold War narrative.

“Shadow” immediately establishes the record’s 1970s aesthetic. I think there is a strong Neil Young quality to it, particularly in the loose relationship between the vocal, guitar, and rhythm section. Structurally, there is nothing complicated happening. The 4/4 beat and relatively straightforward chord progression are almost aggressively conventional, but the recording gives the song enough character to justify its simplicity. “Lost Boy” follows a similar blueprint with more force behind it, pushing further into the rock music of the late ’60s and ’70s.

“Long Distance Blues” is one of the album’s stronger arrangements, with organ, guitar, and vocal harmonies filling out the track without overcrowding it. “Crazy Thing” felt more laid-back and reflective to me, while “Shaded with Blue” continues the record’s preference for melody over unnecessary complexity. By “Halls of History,” the increased use of backing vocals has become one of Shadow’s defining features, giving its mid-tempo rock a greater sense of scale. “Words” has its moments as well, before “One in a Million” closes the album in a distinctly different register. Written by Coupland for his wife Veronica, it is lush, slow-moving, and dreamlike, with Mazzella’s backing vocals becoming particularly effective here.

Coupland’s reference points are rarely difficult to identify. Neil Young, Tom Petty, The Rolling Stones, and the Traveling Wilburys all seem close at hand, and listeners looking for radical reinvention will not find much of it on Shadow. But originality is not the album’s primary argument. These are well-written songs performed by musicians who know how this kind of music is supposed to work, and the production gives them enough texture and warmth to avoid sounding like exercises in nostalgia. Shadow is a very good record built from familiar materials, straightforward in construction but consistently well executed. It’s good. Take a listen.

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