Barely Human: dispatches from an underground music anti-history,

by Max Easton

BARELY HUMAN is an underground music anti-history that has taken many forms since 2015: a series of print essays, a podcast series, typewritten zines and bootleg mixtapes. This book collects all the works written over this ten year period, reassembled, re-edited and rearranged to draw a pseudo-lineage from dirty blues, subversive folk, sixties counterculture and proto-punk, through to the punk and post-punk movements, and finally, to the splintered subcultures of the contemporary DIY underground.

291 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2024

About the author

Max Easton is the author of a trilogy of Sydney-based novels that include The Magpie Wing (2021, longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award), Paradise Estate (2023) and Now, Autonomy (2026). He runs Barely Human, a zine and tape label exploring underground music's ties to subculture and counterculture, and has played in several Sydney punk bands including BB & the Blips, Romance and The Baby. His fiction and cultural criticism has appeared in Sydney Review of Books, The Lifted Brow, Meanjin and HEAT.