04/09/2026
25 years ago The Herd dropped their self-titled debut.
Label founder and Herd member reflects on how it all came together:
"The first Herd album was an interesting experiment in sacrificing our egos and combining to a greater whole.
It was a reaction to the two previous compilations on Elefant Traks where we had been building our names from the ground up from Sydney (and Blue Mountains) based bedroom musos to proper recognition.
The idea of The Herd was an amorphous mystery blob of musicians, where even our names were not on the CD; instead we each devised an artist logo to indicate our involvement in the different songs.
At the end of 2000 l was exhausted after running the Sound Summit independent label conference. Although I had roped in a bunch of my friends to help, I felt like I was drowning in admin. I lamented with Ozi Batla that we needed to get back to writing music - the reason we got into this in the first place. He offered up his family's holiday house in Summerland on the Central Coast.
So we packed up our studios and headed up there for 6 weeks, inviting the label heads and friends that were keeping the lights on.
We all had part time jobs, so there was a lot of commuting back to Sydney each week. It meant that each time we were up there, there would be different permutations of musos there. There was a sea of equipment with keyboards, computers, guitars and a drum kit.
We would start a variety of tracks with who was around and the producers would tinker with them over the following weeks and months.
For example 'Scallops' was inspired by lunch from the local fish'n'chip shop - where we were instructing them on how to make scallop burgers - as most of the crew were vegetarian at the time. Freestyles started as we were chomping down.
There were a few exceptions: X-continental was a journal entry from Batla's travel diary put to a beat I was working on, DASE'n was a 40 min jam with Alejandro using this software I wrote, cut down to something presentable.
Poetically, the Herd's first presentation to the world was at the next Sound Summit in 2001 in the back room of the Cambridge in Newcastle - the vibes were so high that it felt like the crowd was going to break through the floor. We knew it was the start of something special, who could have known all the fun, experiences and tour carnage from that moment over the next 25 years."
