You Can Do Everything Right and Still Eat Shit
Riverine on his new album, dark mode, creativity, fame, community and living with intention
One of my favourite people on the planet is Riverine.
When we (rūku and I) first began immersing ourselves in the Melbourne music scene in 2019, Riverine was one of the first people we truly connected with.
He played at our Dutch Boys launch party at Laundry Bar in Fitzroy as a solo act and soon after appeared as one of my first music guests on the Slap Happy podcast, which you can watch here.
In mid 2025, we finally reconnected to cook up the CHAMP CAMP EP.
Then, at the end of 2025, he decided to go dark mode to cook up a new album. No calls, clients, bookings, texts or socials… just a burner phone for emergencies.
Some people called it extreme, I found it fascinating and truly inspiring.
In a single month, he completed 12 songs from start to finish:
Writing
Recording
Production
Instrumentation
Mixing and mastering
Booking a listening party
Creating the content & planning the rollout
For anyone who has ever created music, this is impressive… but the quality of the music is what makes it really, really impressive.
What makes it more impressive is the mountain he had to climb to get to that place.
Four years ago, Riverine packed up his life and moved to Mexico. The dream move. The big swing. It fell apart in months. He came home to his parents’ place in Brisbane with nothing in the bank. Had to borrow money from them just to buy a car.
A year later, he was in Perth, playing for YNG Martyr on a run of festivals. Although he was on a stage in front of thousands of people, the $2 Hungry Jacks brekkie he bought that morning was a gentle reminder of how far away he was from ‘making it’.
Through the grind of independent artist life, he kept a promise to himself—that one day, when secure enough, he would take an entire month off just to make music without the anxiety of covering bills or the fear of missing out.
Then last year his royalties finally ticked up.
And instead of seeking more and doing what most people would do (eg. quietly move the goalposts and keep grinding), he sat himself down and asked the hard question:
“You’ve wanted to get to this point for so long. You’re here now. Are you going to follow through, or are you just going to keep chasing more?”
Then in a moment of clarity, he found the answer…
“More never comes”
So, he blocked out October. Told his clients weeks in advance. Turned the phone off. Kept his word.
We sat down at the beginning of the year to chat about his experience.
Here are 6 things I took from a conversation with Riverine:
1. More never comes
More is an illusion.
And typically, it never arrives. The search for more money creates the eternal race for more money (ie. the rat race). The search for more efficiency creates a tiring pursuit of 1% improvements (ie. Brian Johnson).
More is never enough.
Riverine told me about mates of his who said, “I’ll just do this corporate job I hate for six months, save up for the EP, then quit and chase the dream.”
Seven years later. No EP.
The finish line you’re waiting for doesn’t define itself. That’s your job. You have to call it. He got to the moment he’d fantasised about for nine years, and the only thing left to do was follow through.
Most people don’t. He did.
2. You can do everything by the book and still eat shit
Before the album, Riverine spent months doing everything the music marketing gurus on YouTube tell you to do. Single every month. Gaming the algorithm. Pigeonholing himself into the version of his music people found easiest to swallow.
It felt empty. And it didn’t even work.
So when it came time to release this album, his logic was simple:
“I can do everything textbook and still eat shit and get no results. I may as well make this album and release it exactly how I want to, because I can eat shit regardless.”
So he did it his way.
All the intention, weird stuff and wholeheartedness that he knew were most aligned with his true self. And, the reality is that the weirdest choices on that album—the ambient tracks, the metal breakdowns, the stuff no marketing guide would ever sign off on—that’s what people responded to most.
As he put it:
“The most idiosyncratic, unique things about you are what you need to lean into the most to make anything worth checking out at all.”
You might as well do it with your chest out. And if you eat shit anyway, at least it tastes better that way.
Not 100% sure about the science behind that, but it feels right to me.
3. The well isn’t bottomless—your community fills it
His little stint in Mexico was a brutal reminder of the importance of community.
He’d always seen himself as disciplined and motivated. Then he landed in a country where he knew nobody, on the opposite time zone to everyone he loved, and the well he’d been drawing from for years just... wasn’t there.
There was no escaping the reality of what the community gave him.
Discipline is one ingredient in the making of the ‘independent artist’ burger. The burger isn’t complete without a bunch of other goodies: studio drop-ins, gigs, sessions, and mates.
Now, Riverine is one of the most committed people to the scene that I know.
His support of and commitment to his fellow creatives are unmatched.
The community, the lifestyle and the friends you make along the journey are more important than we give them credit for.
Sometimes you have to go halfway around the world to find out.
4. Trust creates speed
Riverine produced my CHAMP CAMP EP, and those sessions were some of the most fun I’ve had making anything. We moved fast. Not because we rushed, but because we trusted each other.
This is an idea I first heard from Patrick Bet-David a few years back on a podcast.
If you trust someone, you don’t have to second-guess. They make a suggestion, you action it because their taste and quality have already been battle tested.
CHAMP CAMP came together in pretty quick time because I trusted Riverine.
He said a thing, I did a thing, and vice versa.
On the podcast, he told me the flip side of that as a producer. He stated that the least confident artists are the hardest to work with. They micromanage. Forty-eight notes on one song. They self-attack their songs the same way they self-attack themselves, hacking at every little piece, chasing a perfection that doesn’t exist.
All of that finessing just leaves you with a “sterile turd”, he said.
If you’re insecure, you grab for control. If you back yourself, you can let go. And letting go is where the speed and the magic live.
5. Celebrate the moment while you still can
Neither of us did a big launch show. We both did listening parties instead. Just a few homies in a small room, a couple of beers and the full projects played front to back.
I personally loved my listening party and wouldn’t have changed a thing.
Riverine echoed my sentiment…
“Even if I did nothing else, that listening party was enough.”
And then he went further:
“If it’s just moments like that over and over again until I die, I’m happy.”
You don’t have to be perfect; you just have to be present. Celebrate the things that matter, while they still matter and while you still can.
Sometimes that is enough.
6. We confuse fame with skill—but at what cost?
Riverine had some great insight into the idea of fame.
And the pitfalls of being famous.
Every artist you’ve ever loved only reached you because they had some degree of fame. Their music found your feed, your mate’s playlist, your radio. So without realising it, you conflate the thing you love (the music) with the thing that delivered it (the fame).
“The odds of your favourite album of your entire life being from an artist with 60 monthly listeners are pretty low.”
Then you start creating, and slowly the hunger shifts. It stops being about making the thing and starts being about being seen making the thing. Riverine has seen this compromise artists and mates over and over again.
Fame usually equals money, or the idea of having lots of stuff—Riverine had a very pointed thought on that:
“If we just want to make money, go into literally any other industry.”
Make the music. Do the listening party with your mates. Be happy with that. If more comes, great. If it doesn’t, you still made the world a bit better.
Final Thoughts
He signed off the podcast with an absolute zinger…
“Our capacity as creatives, and as people, to bullshit ourselves is profound.”
Every year, he said, he tries to get a little more honest with himself. A little deeper. A little scarier. Because that’s where the good work is, and that’s how you sleep at night knowing you did this thing properly.
If you want to watch the full chat with Riverine, you can do so below.
Also, go check out his album like the birds do.
That’s it from me this week, gang.
With gratitude,
SAV
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