TASH SULTANA
“It’s this tinny little fuckin’ banged-up screechy motherfucker!” Tash Sultana is talking about the first distortion pedal they ever owned and, you have to admit, it sounds pretty rad.
“When I was a kid, I heard these grungy, distorted guitar tones, and that blew me away,” says Sultana, who identifies as non-binary and uses they/them pronouns. “I was just like, ‘That is fuckin’ nuts’. My mum took me to the music store when I was maybe nine and I didn’t know that you could plug your guitar into a pedal and an amp and change the way that it sounded. I’d tried out a few and they’re obviously really expensive for somebody that didn’t have two sticks to rub together. Then I found this little shitty distortion pedal that was 20 bucks. Cheapest one. To this day, that’s the one I use when I rip a solo.”
That pedal has seen some things, because of late those solos are usually heard reverberating around arenas. In the past decade, Sultana has gone from playing open-mic nights as an under-age kid and busking on Melbourne’s Bourke Street to breakout YouTube success, a buzzy breakthrough EP in Notion and a debut album, Flow State, that kicked down further doors on its way to Australia’s No.2 spot.
