Book pairings for trending ANZ artists of 2025
Every family has its road-trip quirks. Some people pack way too much party mix. Others refuse to stop until the petrol light has been on dangerously too long. In my house, the biggest drama doesn’t come from directions, detours or dodgy servo pies. It comes from one simple question: “So… what are we listening to?”
If your family also has a line drawn in the sand between music lovers and bookworms, you can probably relate. The choice between cranking up your favourite song on Spotify or tuning into your audiobook on Libby can be a tough one to make, but who says you can’t have both a great story and an epic soundtrack riding shotgun?
We’ve taken five of today’s trending artists and paired them with stories that match their vibe, creating a summer road trip atmosphere everyone can enjoy. Think of it as a perfectly blended playlist: part music, part audiobook, all good energy.
x Tame Impala
One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel García Márquez
Generations rise, fall, and somehow come back again. This novel is a dizzying, dreamy ride through the Buendías family’s tangled lives, where past and present collide in the most delightfully chaotic ways.
Like One Hundred Years of Solitude, Tame Impala mirrors a sense of looping time, but with basslines that cycle endlessly, synths that shimmer and dissolve, and rhythms that seem to fold back on themselves.
x The Kid LAROI
Normal People
by Sally Rooney
Awkward texts, stolen glances and endless tension. No, I’m not talking about Love Island Australia (though we certainly can). This slow-burn romance follows two painfully shy students as they navigate friendship, love and growing up.
The Kid LAROI captures the same anxious rhythm of modern intimacy: that swirl of “Do they like me?” and “Why can’t I say what I mean?” that defines early love and heartbreak.
x Royel Otis
The Remains of the Day
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Memory is an unreliable narrator, a lesson Stevens, a devoted English butler, learns as he takes a road trip and slowly unravels a lifetime of loyalty, missed chances and unspoken truths.
The tension between past and present is one of the quiet emotional engines in Royel Otis’s latest album hickey, and it’s what makes the pairing with The Remains of the Day so resonant.
x Dom Dolla
Rave On
by Matthew Collin
Dive into the electrifying rise of electronic music and club culture, tracing how underground scenes, DIY parties and illegal warehouses transformed into a Global movement.
Where Rave On charts the roots of rave, Dom Dolla represents its evolution, all built on the irresistible pull of losing yourself in the beat alongside hundreds of strangers who suddenly feel like mates.
x Amyl and the Sniffers
Yellowface
by R. F. Kuang
In Yellowface, a writer with a toxic hunger for recognition steals a deceased colleague's manuscript and passes it off as her own. What unfolds next is a darkly funny spiral of lies, ambition and identity crises.
Amyl & the Sniffers’ punk attitude thrives on rebellion, confrontation and tearing down pretension. That energy pairs perfectly with Yellowface’s critique of literary culture.
Find all these titles and more on Libby, the free library reading app from your public library.
*Title availability may vary.
Published Nov 20, 2025
Marissa Perschke
Marissa Perschke has a passion for travel and love of reading that led her to join Libby’s experiential marketing team in 2019. As the full-time traveler with the Library Vehicle on the Fiction and Film Tour, she helps library patrons across the U.S. and Canada learn how to use the Libby and Kanopy apps. On her long drives between cities, she’s usually listening to magical realism or adventure memoirs.