Yilila: Manila Manila [2005]

When Yilila Band released Manilamanila in 2005, it felt like someone had plugged Arnhem Land straight into an amplifier. The album is a riotous, joyful collision of tradition and innovation — a vivid testament to how Indigenous music can evolve without losing sight of its roots. It’s funky, fierce, and defiantly original, the kind of record that rewires your expectations of what “Australian rock” can sound like.

Yilila hail from Numbulwar, a remote community on the Gulf of Carpentaria, and their sound is every bit as distinctive as their homeland. Manilamanila fuses ancient songlines and ceremonial rhythm with punk attitude, reggae grooves, and electric energy. The result is a heady mix — part desert jam, part dance-floor explosion, part cultural transmission. It’s music that laughs at categories.

The album’s title track, “Manilamanila,” is an irresistible call to movement and unity that pulses with infectious energy. Sung in both Wubuy (Nunggubuyu language) and English, it captures the band’s bilingual brilliance: local stories told through global grooves. Elsewhere, tracks like “Dhumbala” and “Ayanjanarri” layer traditional melodies over driving electric guitars and dub-inflected basslines, creating something that feels both ancient and cutting-edge.

Frontman and songwriter Garrick “Yilila” Smith delivers with unfiltered charisma. His vocals carry the authority of ceremony and the swagger of rock ’n’ roll, often switching between languages mid-verse. Behind him, the band’s rhythm section drives the music forward with thunderous intent — proof that the pulse of the Top End can hit as hard as any city backbeat.

What makes Manilamanila extraordinary is its refusal to dilute or translate its cultural identity for mainstream comfort. This is music made for its own people first, but it welcomes everyone to listen, dance, and learn. The guitars may crunch, the bass may boom, but the heart of it all is the ancient rhythm of Country.

In a national scene often too eager to fit Indigenous artists into “world music” boxes, Yilila blew those boxes apart. Manilamanila is unapologetically local and gloriously global — a living bridge between ceremony and celebration, ancestral law and electric rebellion.

Nearly two decades on, it still sounds fresh, alive, and urgent. Manilamanila is an act of cultural vitality — proof that the oldest living cultures on Earth can make the newest, wildest music imaginable.