Hilltop Hoods hit the Tweed

AFTER nearly three decades in hip hop, Hilltop Hoods frontman Matt Lambert still can’t quite believe how far the band has come.

Reflecting on the group’s 28-year career ahead of their Northern NSW show at the Rolling Sets festival, Lambert said that early on, he never thought it would be a career at all.

“At the time we were just knocking about, and we wouldn’t have been able to get past the first stage because we were actually learning that it was a career in the first place,” he said. “I dropped out of high school really early, and I was working in factories and labouring, and I imagined that’s what I’d be doing for the rest of my life.

“I couldn’t even conceptualise the idea of having a career in music, so we’ve been fortunate, and lucky with the people around us, the timing and everything else.”

The first meeting of band members was not initially promising.

“I first met Dan (Daniel Smith, aka MC Pressure) at Blackwood High School in South Australia in year 8, and we hated each other,” Lambert said.

“I was a metalhead and rocked up with a denim jacket with Motorhead patches and stuff on it, and he was a hip hop-head, but he brought me around eventually.

“We started writing rhymes as a joke, and then it progressed from there, and by the time we were in our mid-teens, we had a few friends who were MCs.

“One of them told us about a guy they knew making his own beats, and that was Debris. We hadn’t seen anyone like that before, so it was really exciting, and we clicked and have been together ever since.”

For Lambert, now 48, his Adelaide home is his refuge when the Hoods aren’t taking over the world’s biggest stages.

“I’ve got my studio here on the property where I work from, and when I’m home, I’m a bit of a hermit,” he said.

“I’ve got a dog, he’s a cavoodle, and he and I are like Ghostface and Rae – we’re just everywhere together.

 

“And I’ve got a young family with seven and nine-year-old daughters, so I don’t need to find a way to spend time. My time finds a way to spend it on me.”

The Hilltop Hoods’ new record, Fall From The Light, their first in six years, took out the No.2 spot in triple j’s Hottest 100 of Australian Songs and marked a high creative peak for the trio.

“We had come off the back of a 100-day tour, then COVID hit, and we had a few false starts heading towards an album,” Lambert said.

“We would drop a single, and we’d be feeling things were going back to normal as far as touring went and then realise that it wasn’t.

“So we’d pull back again, because we’d seen so many people go out and just struggle against everything that was going on.

“That played a big part in the time that it took but also paid dividends because we were doing a lot of revising and reflecting and dropping things that weren’t working.”

The band recently returned from a European tour, performing in Germany, the UK, Austria, Switzerland and the Czech Republic.

Next month, they’ll headline the Rolling Sets music, surf and skate festival at Duranbah Beach in its Northern NSW debut.

Joining them on the bill are Spacey Jane, Parcels, The Jungle Giants, Flipturn, Speed, MAY-A, The Terrys, DICE and Blusher, among others.

For tickets to the festival on November 29, visit events.humanitix.com/rolling-sets-2025-tweed-heads