Milton Man Gogh - Fully Stretched (2025) [Hi-Res]

Australia’s avant-bogan jazz trio Milton Man Gogh (MMG) return with Fully Stretched, their first new release in four years. Written during two residencies at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Canada, the album distills the trio’s uniquely chaotic vision into a sharp, collaborative statement that is as restless as it is refined.

Since forming in 2016, MMG - Andrew Saragossi (winds), Zac Sakrewski (bass), and Ben Shannon (drums) - have carved out a reputation for uncompromisingly complex yet playful music that crashes jazz headlong into metal, electronica, and absurdist storytelling.

With Fully Stretched, the band revisits the collaborative ethos that fuelled their earliest work. For the first time in years, the trio had extended time to rehearse, write, and experiment together in the same room. Across six weeks at Banff, they tested ideas, tore them apart, and rebuilt them - channeling the same pressure-cooker energy of their early days, but with the maturity and scope of a decade-long partnership.

Lore has always been central to MMG. Each release adds a chapter to the strange, tragicomic tale of Milton, their fictional anti-hero. Fully Stretched finds him reeling from past cosmic misadventures - having murdered a mid-tier jazz trio, stolen a magic box, broken the space-time continuum, and rewritten reality itself.

Now, Milton floats through the banality of everyday existence: bored, stressed, haunted by the knowledge that while reality has shifted, his crime still occurred. Each track offers a vignette from this fractured timeline: the absurd, the traumatic, the funny, and the quietly devastating.

Recorded between Hunting Ground Studios (Brisbane) and Banff’s Telus Studio, the album showcases the band’s trademark blend of unpredictability, technical ferocity, and irreverent humour - tempered with fresh textures and surprising influences. Saragossi leans into the sharper timbres of the soprano sax, Sakrewski expands the harmonic palette with electric bass, and Shannon mixes precision with chaos behind the kit.

The result: a sound that’s equal parts Ornette Coleman, Dick Dale, and a HSV Clubsport ploughing through your living room wall.