Kae Tempest — City Recital Hall, Tuesday 9 June
Kae Tempest is a poet, rapper, playwright, novelist, and one of the most formally restless artists working in the British tradition,. Arriving at City Recital Hall for a single night on June 9, touring in support of Self Titled, their fifth studio album and the most intimate record of their career.
Released in July 2025, Self Titled is built around Tempest’s gender transition and the complex, layered experience of self-recognition across time. It is a record concerned with the distance between who one has been and who one is becoming, and Tempest approaches that distance with the precision and generosity that has defined their best work. On ‘Know Yourself’, they rap alongside a vocal sample of their younger self — a technically simple device that lands with unusual emotional force. The album features collaborations with Young Fathers, Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys, and producer Fraser T. Smith, and received a Metacritic score of eighty-five.
Tempest has long drawn from hip-hop’s formal traditions while moving freely between spoken word, theatre and recorded music. The result is a body of work that resists easy categorisation and rewards close attention. City Recital Hall, with its exceptional acoustics and intimate scale, is an ideal setting for an artist whose primary instrument is language.
Midweek Minds: Legally Bonded — State Library of NSW, Wednesday 10 June
Each Wednesday during Vivid, the State Library of New South Wales hosts Midweek Minds, a series of rapid-fire keynote talks directed at the creative industries and the intellectually curious. The final instalment, Legally Bonded, takes up a question that has become increasingly urgent across every creative discipline: in an era defined by algorithmic circulation, AI-generated content, and the perpetual renegotiation of fair use, what does it mean for an artist to own their work?
The speakers bring distinct and complementary perspectives to the question. Mindy Seu is an American artist, technologist and academic whose research centres on the histories and cultures of the internet. Shaun Daniel Allen, known as Shal, is a Bundjalung painter whose practice moves between cultural traditions. Jason Phu is a Sydney-based multimedia artist whose work draws freely from comics, pop culture and image vernaculars that exist in perpetual dialogue with questions of ownership and reproduction.
The conversation is framed around both the threats and the possibilities presented by a creative commons in flux. It is among the more pressing intellectual conversations Vivid has offered this year, and the library is among the city’s most beautiful rooms.
Roxane Gay In Conversation — City Recital Hall, Friday 12 June
Since the publication of Bad Feminist in 2014, Roxane Gay has been one of the most widely read and argued-with cultural critics writing in English. Her work spans memoir, fiction, cultural commentary and opinion journalism, and it is characterised by a willingness to hold complicated positions with clarity, across race, feminism, pop culture and politics.
This event, part of Vivid Minds’ Creative Trailblazers series, places Gay in conversation with Narelda Jacobs OAM, the Whadjuk Noongar journalist, author and broadcaster. Gay has demonstrated across her career that her most illuminating thinking tends to emerge in exchange with other great conversationalists. Readers of Hunger, Difficult Women and her collected essays in Opinions will find the evening familiar in the best sense. Those coming to her work for the first time will find an entirely sufficient introduction.
The Black Angels — Carriageworks, Thursday 11 June
The Black Angels formed in Austin, Texas in 2004, taking their name from a Velvet Underground song and their sound from the darker currents of American psychedelia — Roky Erickson, Syd Barrett, Arthur Lee, the droning repetitions of early garage rock pressed through a modern political sensibility. Twenty years on, they remain one of the more vital bands working in that tradition, and this year they return to Australia to mark the anniversary of Passover, their 2006 debut, performing it in full.
Passover was the record that demonstrated the psych revival of the early twenty-first century had great aesthetic ambitions, not merely nostalgic ones. Its hypnotic, heavy structures are built on cycling guitar lines, insistent percussion, and Alex Maas’s keening vocals. ‘Young Men Dead’, ‘The First Vietnamese War’, and the closing eighteen-minute ‘Call to Arms’ established the template from which the band has never strayed far.
