Greg Stehle, the mind behind Bendigo-based project Heisenberg Principle, is clearly operating in a pocket of indie rock that isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel—but maybe just give it a good spin down the hill to see where it crashes. His new single ‘Bachelor of the Year’ is track number five in the rollout to his upcoming album Icarus, and it’s arguably the most laid-back and least self-serious entry so far. Which, honestly, is kind of refreshing.

Thematically, the track is a tip of the cap to regular Aussie dudes—you know, the kind that get called NQR (not quite right), but still somehow manage to be charming, useful, or at least not completely intolerable. Greg’s trying to carve out space for these guys in a music landscape where masculinity often gets put under the microscope, sometimes justifiably, sometimes not. And while that could’ve easily gone sideways into some cringy “not all men” rhetoric, ‘Bachelor of the Year’ keeps it casual. It just kinda exists in that middle zone of “eh, some guys are weird but not evil.”

Musically, the song is hanging out somewhere between ZZ Top’s denim-soaked guitar swagger and the kind of big, reverb-heavy chorus that you might get from early Phil Collins. The rhythm section keeps things locked down in a way that’s functional more than flashy. Stehle’s performance is relaxed, almost conversational, like someone telling you a dumb story over a dartboard at the pub. There’s a charm to how loose it is, though it also means the track doesn’t have a lot of forward propulsion—it kind of chills in its lane and lets the vibe do the heavy lifting.

Now, if you’re Gen Z, you might still find something to latch onto here. And the subject matter is vague and dryly humorous enough to translate across age groups. Compared to the previous singles off the upcoming Icarus LP, this one is probably the most unserious, the most rock-forward, and the least conceptually heavy. And honestly, that might be what makes it stick.

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