Dope Lemon is the alter-ego of Australian artist Angus Stone, who started the project after a decade in an indie duo with his sister.

When it comes to new bands – or, in this case, new to me – comparisons with other artists are lazy but inevitable. At the risk of laziness, I have to confess that as soon as I heard this I imagined Dylan fronting the Velvets. If Lou & Co had been Australian.

They’ve been going for a decade in their homeland but I’ve never heard of Dope Lemon before.

I can’t help feeling that if they’d come along in the mid-Seventies the UK music press would have been on the case – and record companies would have been flying journos out to Oz to fawn over them.

I can just sink into this song and luxuriate. Everything about it hits the spot: the lazy rhythm, the country-adjacent guitar, the languid twang of the vocal.

The biog I found online tells me Dope Lemon is the alter ego of Angus Stone, “already established internationally as one half of sibling indie-pop duo Angus & Julia.”

After a decade working with his sister, he launched the Dope Lemon project in 2016, writing songs and jamming with friends in the home recording studio on his farm.

After a debut album he paused the project for a two-year hiatus to make another album with Julia, reviving Dope Lemon in 2019 with a conceptual rebirth, portraying himself as “a mystical creature of leisure” called Smooth Big Cat.

Who knows what he was growing on that farm!

Several summery lo-fi albums have followed, but this tune – Marinade – was the first track on his first album, Honey Bones, released ten years ago.