Inspired by the handing back of Uluru to its traditional owners, Midnight Oil wrote 1987’s “Beds Are Burning”, a fist-pumping protest anthem that echoed far beyond its original context and became a Top 10 hit in half a dozen other countries. “I think in Australia there was a little bit of reluctance initially to pick up on it and give the song a big hurl,” lead singer Peter Garrett tells Apple Music. “[But] once that started happening in other places, people came back for a second bite of the cherry, and the rest is history.” That certainly wasn’t the first time the Sydney band had been overtly political—see the 1983 single “Power and the Passion”—but the song was striking enough to draw attention back to The Oils’ impassioned albums, which gradually evolved from punky pub rock (the Cold War-fuelled “Cold Cold Change”) to more melodic New Wave (“Blue Sky Mine”, about an outbreak of asbestos-related diseases among miners in Perth). Garrett’s stint in environmental politics paused his musical output in the early 2000s, but the band had lost none of their fiery spirit or articulate delivery on 2022’s “At the Time of Writing”—released just a few years before the 2026 death of drummer and founding member Rob Hirst.