After eight years crafting fearless, empowering anthems that shook up Australian music, beloved Melbourne trio Camp Cope signed off with a final farewell show at the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall in October 2023.

The ARIA-nominated trio got the rousing send off they deserve, as singer-guitarist Georgia McDonald, bassist Kelly-Dawn Hellmrich and drummer Sarah Thompson celebrated a career hard fought – and won – on their own terms.

Formed in 2015, Camp Cope exploded with the unvarnished power punk of their self-titled 2016 debut, a top 40 hit that earned the band critical acclaim and a prestigious Australian Music Prize nomination. Led by the ferocious “The Opener”, a rallying cry against gendered inequality in the music industry, 2018’s alternately intimate and cathartic How to Socialise & Make Friends blasted into the national top 10, scoring the trio an ARIA nomination for Best Rock Album. Following Georgia Maq’s synth pop solo debut Pleaser in 2019, Camp Cope returned with 2022’s Running with the Hurricanes, a soulful, big-hearted record that featured a collaboration with Courtney Barnett and earned the band a second Australian Music Prize nod. It was to be their swan song.

As McDonald once said, “Camp Cope is in defiance of everyone who’s tried to bring us down, and it’s like: Well, you can’t, because we have each other, and we’re a mountain together.”

Presented by Sydney Opera House