By fusing myriad roots traditions with contemporary and classic rock and pop, songwriter Dan Sultan conjures the varied tones of his home country of Australia in his bare-desert blues and big-city soul. He was born in Melbourne in 1983 and spent his youth looking up to guitar heroes like Jimi Hendrix, but he embraced a decidedly folky sound on his debut album, 2006’s Homemade Biscuits, with songs like the horn-blasted “Your Love Is Like a Song.” Sultan is first and foremost a storyteller, and his 2009 record, Get Out While You Can provides one of the best examples of his skills as a wordsmith: the dark, hard-knock-life tale “Old Fitzroy.” In 2014, Blackbird signaled a heavier rock sound (see the swaggering “Under Your Skin”), and 2017 brought Killer, which he opened with a nod to his Indigenous roots on “Drover”—about the 1966 Wave Hill walk-off strike—and added a weighty gospel edge to on “Kingdom.”