A freeway bridge kissing game just became Melbourne's most colourful new single. Here's the story.
Melbourne/Naarm producer Jack Quigley just dropped Dhunkasho, the buoyant first single from his sprawling new project Upstream Trilogy.
Dhunkasho, Somali for kissing, is sung by Brisbane-based performer Qare The Mask, whose smooth vocal top-lines this technicolour track. The words were written by lyricist Nadia Faragaab, who drew on a real kissing game played on a freeway bridge – one that only ends when a passing car beeps its horn.
That giddy, romantic energy comes through in the bubbling synth lines that climb and fall through the track, while the electro drums shuffle along like leather shoes on a glitter-covered dancefloor.
New music, Melbourne – Upstream Trilogy
- Artist: Jack Quigley
- Track: Dhunkasho
- Featuring: Qare The Mask
- Out: 3 July, here
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Dhunkasho blends disco, psychedelic textures and a distinct afro-futurist flair into something that feels equal parts familiar and entirely new, and it lands as the launch point for a much bigger body of work from Quigley.
Upstream Trilogy is a three‑album cycle of collaborative pop works, unfolding as successive releases across 2026 and 2027, with a new single arriving roughly every few weeks; Dhunkasho is the debut single from Volume 1. You can check out the music video here.
Between 2020 and 2023, he travelled from the Warnayaka Art Centre in the Tanami Desert to Cairo, Barcelona, Palermo, Beirut, Djibouti and Addis Ababa, recording with 51 musicians across four continents and eight languages along the way.
The full project was tracked across 12 studios, mastered by Grammy-nominated engineer Nick Herrera and produced by Stefano Pizzolato, making it one of the more ambitious undertakings to come out of Melbourne’s independent music scene in recent years.
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This article was made in partnership with Boss Fight PR.
