Vindictive Youth

Operator Please were a group of Queensland teenagers who made music that sounded like it shouldn’t hold together but somehow did. Their breakthrough came with Just a Song About Ping Pong, a track so absurd and so purely fun that it should have been a novelty and wasn’t. Everything about them worked as a package: the age, the barely-controlled chaos, the sense that someone’s amp was about to give out. Amelia Zadro held the whole careening thing together vocally, and their 2008 debut Yes Yes Vindictive delivered on the promise. They had that specific energy of people who haven’t yet been informed of what they’re supposed to be incapable of.