Cody Jon

In December 2023, Cody Jon’s face was up on the screens over Shibuya Crossing, advertising his own headline show across town. He was unsigned then and is unsigned now, a theatre kid from Sydney’s suburbs who writes, produces and stacks every vocal on his records himself, and whose audience found him the way audiences find anyone now, one For You page at a time.

He was performing in professional musical theatre at ten. When his voice broke at twelve and the songs he’d trained on stopped sitting in his vocal range, he opened GarageBand and started writing ones that did, and the theatre stayed in everything since: he directs his own videos, stages his own shows, and puts his saddest lyrics over his most danceable production, a trick he picked up from Lily Allen records.

The records themselves sound like a turn-of-the-millennium boyband run by one person. The harmonies stack the way *NSYNC’s did, the drums come out of The Neptunes’ playbook, and the jazz voicings underneath have earned him Laufey comparisons alongside the Timberlake ones. He has his own name for it, generational dysmorphia.

triple j Unearthed made him a Feature Artist in 2023, the year of his second EP DEATH WOBBLES, and the reviews on his page kept circling the same reference, Justified. By then the momentum was already offshore: write-ups in MTV and ELLE Japan, NCT’s Jaemin among the followers, sets at SXSW and BIGSOUND. Last November he co-headlined Sydney’s Metro Theatre and released “Keyring”, written with Oscar Sharah and Pat Byrne, a jazz-leaning single about a relationship that broke up over and over without ever ending. Laughing at the pain while still living through it, by his own description.

Cody filmed a session on our roof in 2022, “Becky’s Plan” and “dirty dancing”, performed for the cameras and the crew. Mood on the Roof Nights puts an audience in front of him for the first time on this stage, gathered on every side for a full set in the round. He’s told interviewers what he expects a room to feel by the time he’s done with it: “They are gonna leave here enjoying my music.”