Short Stack

Short Stack formed in 2005 in Budgewoi, New South Wales, Australia, as an Australian punk-pop trio whose members—Shaun Diviney on lead vocals and guitar, Andy Clemmensen on backing vocals and bass, and Bradie Webb on drums and keyboards—first connected while attending the Hunter School of the Performing Arts. After inking a deal with Sunday Morning Records, the group issued its initial recording, the Shimmy a Go Go EP, in 2008; the project yielded videos for both the title track and “Drop Dead Gorgeous,” along with a Top 40 single for the former. Its successor, “Princess,” climbed to number 11 on the Australian singles chart in early 2009. By then the band had already cultivated a teenage following through successive one-off hits and intensive online promotion, most notably via MySpace streams of its singles and YouTube postings of its videos. Throughout 2008 and 2009, Short Stack logged countless Australian dates, supporting Simple Plan, Metro Station, and the Veronicas while also mounting modest headline runs that mixed an album’s worth of original songs with covers of Kylie Minogue’s “Can’t Get You out of My Head” and the Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop.” The group’s long-playing debut, Stack Is the New Black, arrived in August 2009 and debuted at number one; its lead single, “Sway, Sway Baby!,” peaked at number two, and “Ladies and Gentlemen” followed later that year.