A closet mixed lo-fi record that rewards patient listening

There's a particular charm to records made in spaces never meant for recording. A wardrobe off a Brunswick share house, a linen cupboard in a Newtown terrace, a sleeping nook behind a drum kit in a Perth practice room — these cramped spaces have shaped independent music for decades. When an artist mixes such a record on headphones, they prioritise close-up listening over polished, room-fitted sound.

The new full-length from Melbourne artist Clementine Vex, titled Hiss & Hum, arrives as a love letter to exactly this kind of constraint. Mixed entirely on a pair of battered Sony MDR-7506s inside a hallway closet, the record trades the customary clarity of modern indie production for something hazier and more human. Vex, formerly the frontwoman of bedroom-pop trio Halverson, tracked the basics using a single SM57 and completed the mix in the same closet where she recorded the vocals.

The record sits comfortably within the wave of Australian indie releases favouring texture over sheen. Triple J has championed similar approaches through its Unearthed program, and Melbourne's Corner Hotel has hosted showcase nights for artists working in this vein. Vex's album feels like a companion piece to the lo-fi folk scenes brewing in Fitzroy and Collingwood.

What follows is a close listen to how those choices affect the listening experience. From how the bass frequencies behave on earbuds to the strange pockets of silence between tracks, Hiss & Hum makes a strong case for the closet mix as a legitimate creative decision rather than a compromise.

The allure of the closet mix

The closet itself becomes an instrument. Hanging coats absorbed the early reflections that would normally bounce off a flat wall, leaving the vocal microphone with a drier, more immediate signal than Vex could achieve in her living room. The effect is audible from the opening bars of the title track, where her voice sits right at the front of the stereo image, almost touching the listener's ear. There's no studio reverb tail softening the delivery.

This choice changes the emotional contract of the record. A song mixed in a conventional studio invites the listener into a polished, professional space. A song mixed in a closet invites them into the artist's bedroom. The distinction matters for a writer like Vex, whose lyrics lean heavily on domestic imagery: unmade beds, radiators clicking on at 3am, the sound of a neighbour's television through a fibro wall.

The record behaves differently across playback systems. Played through over-ear headphones, Hiss & Hum reveals layers of guitar noise and room tone that feel almost ASMR-adjacent. Played through phone speakers at a mate's arvo barbecue, much of that detail collapses. The album demands a quiet, attentive environment, which is either a limitation or a feature.

What headphone mixing does to the low end

Mixing on closed-back headphones fundamentally changes how low frequencies are balanced. Without room modes reinforcing the bass, a headphone mix tends to need more low-end energy on tape to translate convincingly to other systems. Vex has compensated for this. The kick drum on tracks like "Pavement Light" hits with a soft, padded weight that feels felt rather than heard, and the bass guitar growls with a woody resonance.

The midrange gets crowded as a result. On "Sweater Weather (Brisbane)", the acoustic guitar, vocal, and shaker compete for space in a way that would be considered amateurish in a commercial studio context. Within the logic of the record, that crowding creates urgency. The songs sound like they're being played in a small room, because they were mixed in one.

Vex isn't the first artist to work this way. The lineage runs from early Sebadoh and Beck recordings through to Australian practitioners like Julia Jacklin and Stella Donnelly, both of whom have experimented with intimate, room-led production.

Track-by-track: hushed and halogen

The album opens with "Halogen", a slow-building folk piece that introduces Vex's vocal style — breathy, slightly nasal, and oddly affecting. The mix positions her voice slightly left of centre, with a fingerpicked acoustic guitar panned hard right. A curious buzzing in the background turns out to be the fluorescent light in the closet, which Vex decided to leave in rather than edit out.

The standout moment arrives with "Moth", a hushed ballad built around a single piano note repeating beneath a vocal melody that recalls Mazzy Star at their most spectral. The headphone mix gives the piano a weight that feels almost physical. Lyrically, Vex is on strong ground here, with imagery of kitchen windows and streetlights rooted in the inner suburbs of Melbourne.

Later tracks like "Sweater Weather (Brisbane)" and "Garage Band" lean more heavily on electric guitar, and the headphone mix shows some strain. The distortion on the lead guitar in "Garage Band" clips slightly in a way that would have been caught on studio monitors, and the snare drum sounds more like a cardboard box than a proper instrument. These flaws accumulate across the final third.

The closing track, "Closet Door", returns to the room itself. It's a field recording of Vex humming a melody while packing away clothes after the final mix session. It runs just under two minutes and serves as a signature, reminding the listener where all of this sound came from.

Why it travels well on a Melbourne tram

There's something about listening to Hiss & Hum on public transport that feels right. The 96 tram from Brunswick to St Kilda, the 86 along Sydney's Anzac Parade, the bus from Fortitude Valley into Brisbane's CBD — these routes have their own ambient hiss, their own rhythm of stops and starts. The record's lo-fi aesthetic slots into those environments without fighting them.

This is partly because the production choices anticipate the listening conditions of a commuter. Vex's vocal sits forward enough to cut through the rumble of a train, but the instrumental beds are textured enough to reward deeper listening with proper headphones. It works as both background and foreground.

The songs reference movement and place too. "Pavement Light" was written while waiting for a late-night bus on Sydney Road. "Sweater Weather (Brisbane)" namechecks the Brisbane River and the Go Between Bridge. These local references give Australian audiences a thrill of recognition. Hearing your own city mentioned in a song, sung by an artist who knows its weather and geography, creates a bond that streaming algorithms rarely manage.

For fans of this kind of intimate indie production, there are plenty of touchstones worth chasing. The article on five indie rock albums from 2013 that predicted today's sound at Lady Indie offers a useful historical map of how this aesthetic evolved.

The wider landscape of lo-fi and its discontents

Hiss & Hum arrives at a moment when lo-fi indie has become almost a genre in itself, with its own conventions and clichés. The "recorded in a bedroom" credit is no longer a marker of outsider authenticity; it's a marketing angle. Major labels now sign artists specifically because they can credibly claim DIY origins. The closet mix, in this context, risks feeling like a costume rather than a method.

Vex largely avoids this trap by being explicit about the practical reasons for her choices. Renting a proper mixing studio was prohibitively expensive during the recording period, and the closet offered the quietest space in her share house after her housemates went to bed. The headphone mix wasn't a romantic gesture; it was the only option available between midnight and 6am. That honesty rescues the record from feeling like an aesthetic affectation.

There are still moments where the lo-fi framing feels self-conscious. The fluorescent light buzz on "Halogen" might be charming, or it might be a knowing wink at the listener. The closing field recording on "Closet Door" similarly straddles the line between honesty and performance. These choices don't sink the record, but they reveal the awkward position of any artist working in a deliberately constrained mode in 2026.

Where to listen and what to play next

Hiss & Hum is available on Bandcamp, Spotify, and as a physical cassette through a small Sydney label. The cassette includes a download code and runs at a price point that's accessible without feeling like a charity purchase.

The recommendation below points to a different genre entirely, but one that shares the same hushed, after-dark sensibility. If you're craving more of that quiet intensity, Tamil late night melodies deliver a similarly absorbing listening experience.

Worthwhile starting points in the Australian indie lo-fi space include:

• Julia Jacklin's Pre Pleasure, which mixes folk intimacy with broader sonic ambition
• Stella Donnelly's Beware of the Dogs, recorded with similar attention to room tone
• Maple Glider's I Get Into Trouble, a Melbourne-recorded set that shares Vex's knack for domestic imagery
• The early EPs of Gretta Ray, which move between polished pop and stripped-back folk

The cassette version also includes a bonus track, "Closet Door (Reprise)", which is a fully mixed version of the field recording that closes the standard edition.

What lingers after Hiss & Hum finishes is not the novelty of its production circumstances, but the strength of its songwriting and the specificity of its world. Vex has made a record that sounds like a particular place and a particular time — a closet in a Melbourne share house, late at night, with the door closed against the rest of the household. The headphone mix isn't a gimmick; it's a way of letting the listener into that space. Whether you enter it on a tram, in a quiet flat, or through earbuds on a morning walk, the record rewards the same attention that went into making it. Patience, close listening, and a tolerance for imperfection turn out to be the only real requirements.