Rock’s not dead. At least, that’s the word from researcher Charlotte Markowitsch, a PhD Candidate at RMIT studying the popular trajectory of rock in the 21st century. 

According to streaming statistics, rock overtook pop and hip-hop as Australia’s leading genre in 2025, defying predictions of declining relevancy. 

There has been a slate of left-turns into rock and adjacent genres by popular artists in recent years—including Charli XCX’s aptly titled “Rock Music” and rapper A$AP Rocky’s “Punk Rocky”. 

Albums like Olivia Rodrigo’s you seem pretty sad for a girl in love (2026) and The Strokes’ Reality Awaits (2026) play with rock themes while innovating the genre with digital production techniques like hyper-compression and exaggerated autotune. 

There is space for newer rock artists like Geese, who toured Australia this year with support from Melbourne-based group Radio Free Alice, to find an active audience of Gen Z listeners. 

However, these contemporary releases are not reaching the same heights in streaming numbers as legacy acts. Markowitsch’s research showed that “rock's contemporary popularity and resurgence in Australia remains closely tied to twentieth century music”. 

This is unsurprising considering the common “rockist” way of discussing the genre, which has been cemented by decades of critics who’ve constructed a male-dominated “pantheon” of untouchable “rock gods” like Jimi Hendrix and Mick Jagger—these chosen few are worshipped and defended in gushing Jack Black-growls across the world, even to this day.

The overwhelming trend in listening data over time is towards American and British acts. 

Markowitsch noted that “despite the upswing in Australian listeners, [the rock resurgence’s] most streamed artists are mostly international”, with AC/DC being the only domestic act among Australia’s ten most streamed rock artists—like Radiohead, Fleetwood Mac and Queen. 

She found that the bias against local Australian acts isn’t confined to rock, citing APRA AMCOS Year in Review data which reports a drop in Australian content in all local music streaming from 13.6 per cent in 2021 to 9.5 per cent in 2025. 

Markowitsch explained that Australians tend to discover rock as a genre in four ways. Ambience, hearing rock around the home. Another is rituals and family activities which involve music. The third is storytelling, like when your older relatives tell you about their favourite memories of gigs. Finally, there is validation—praise or correction for musical choices.

So, rock isn’t dead, but Australia’s relationship with the genre is noticeably different in 2026—where Link Wray’s 1958 song “Rumble”, which used a pencil-holed amplifier in one of the first documented examples of electric guitar distortion, was banned for fear it might incite a riot, rock in Australia today is a family affair. 

It’s a site of nostalgia for many, tied to formative memories of Saturday morning airings of Rage, and your Mum’s box of cherished vinyls—comfort music, biased towards the time-tested greats. 

There’s nothing inherently wrong with this shift; genres have to evolve, after all. But it has left many asking one question—when will the current generation of rock greats like King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, Amyl and the Sniffers, Eddy Current Suppression Ring, or Gut Health, receive the same adulation?

Image source: School of Rock