Sidewinder were one of the great underrated Australian bands of the 1990s. Like Sydney-siders Drop City, the Canberra-born brothers Nick and Martin Craft crafted some amazing songs, most notably on the band’s incredible second album, Tangerine, where they experimented with sound and style and substance to great effect.

Like several bands though, they got lost in the merger between Polydor and Universal Music Australia, and splintered as a result. Unfortunately it’s taken until 2005 – some eight years since Tangerine – for Nick Craft to re-emerge as the Zillions, who have signed directly with an English label after he moved to London in the wake of Sidewinder.

The spacey swirl is back in effect, as it was on the likes of “Intensify” and “Hippopotta M”, with “Your Eyes” an absolutely stunning moment on the Play Zig Zag Zillionaire EP. In some ways, the sound of the Zillions is both rougher and smoother than Sidewinder at the same time – the influence of the impenetrable jingle-jangle of my bloody valentine is more pronounced, but the rock action found on songs like “Titanic Days” or the poppy “Here She Comes Again” is long gone.

Instead, songs like “Raincoat Girlz” are lush and all over the place, while “Saturday’s Child” is the sort of song that you long to be cleaned off its barrage of noise so that it can find a place all over the radio, but it just wouldn’t be the same without it. The Zillions may ostensibly be a three-piece, but there’s so much going on in these six songs that you simply don’t know how they could reproduce such dense textures in the live format, but you can tell they’d be a fascinating viewing as they experiment within the confines of the stage. The pretty keyboard-lead “One Step Behind Me” closes the EP out in grand style, leaving you gagging for more, and merging the folkier elements of Badly Drawn Boy with the Zillions’ sonic influences. The album can’t come soon enough.