Baby Animals

Baby Animals dominated Australian music in the early ’90s with a heady mix of hard-rock riffage, swaggering glam attitude, and heartfelt lyrics. Cofounded in 1989 by guitarists Dave Leslie and Suze DeMarchi—the latter a powerful singer with a bluesy rasp to her voice—the band topped the Australian charts with their 1991 self-titled album, thanks to a string of singles including the strutting “Early Warning” and the meditative rocker “One Word.” Tours opening for Bryan Adams, The Black Crowes, and Van Halen followed, setting the stage for their second album, 1993’s Shaved and Dangerous, which was another commercial success. Baby Animals broke up in 1996, but they reunited in 2007 and have navigated lineup changes while continuing to tour and record new music. The bittersweet but optimistic 2018 single “Tonight”—a song DeMarchi wrote in the wake of her father’s death—preceded a 2019 greatest-hits album that contained another hard-hitting new song, “Marseilles.”