Karate Boogaloo

Australian instrumental funk quartet Karate Boogaloo has built admiration through irresistibly catchy original material and a committed retro-soul approach. After stockpiling numerous covers, the ensemble broke through with the 2020 originals collection Carn the Boogers, then steadily expanded their audience and catalog by issuing another set of self-penned tracks, Hold Your Horses, in 2024.

The Melbourne, Australia-formed group consists of Henry Jenkins on bass, Hudson Whitlock on drums, Calum Riley on organ, and Darvid Thor on guitar; all four first met as preteens in school. Bonded by a shared passion for R&B forebears such as James Brown, the Meters, and Booker T. & the MG’s, they began reshaping assorted soul and pop numbers into their throwback framework via the KB’s Mixtape series, delivering live-in-studio interpretations of tracks that other artists had sampled. Volume one appeared in 2018, with a follow-up devoted entirely to 1980s material arriving the next year.

Unknown to their growing supporters, Karate Boogaloo had already laid down a full album of originals a year before KB’s Mixtape, Vol. 1 was conceived. Carn the Boogers, titled after an indecipherable chant heard at an exuberant concert that later supplied the band’s fans with an offbeat nickname, was recorded identically to the mixtape sessions—live to tape and without overdubs.

Those taut, near-cinematic grooves finally reached the public in 2020 thanks to indie imprint College of Knowledge, after which Karate Boogaloo made up for pandemic-related downtime once stages reopened. A third mixtape arrived in 2021, this one limited to songs and themes drawn from film and television, prompting the quartet to sign with Colemine Records for their second soul album, Hold Your Horses, in 2024.