Pleasure Club is the live music venue Newtown's been quietly building toward for a decade. The 300-capacity King Street room, with a 4am licence and a stage built into a former cinema proscenium, has programmed six nights a week of original local music since opening in late 2025.

The booking policy is genuinely catholic — Sydney-based jazz, garage rock, electronic, hip hop — with the same level of front-of-house care applied across all genres. The bar runs a deliberately playful cocktail list including a much-photographed Vegemite-and-Cherry-Ripe drink that the bar manager swears 'genuinely works'.

For an inner-city scene that has spent years complaining about the loss of small-to-mid venues, Pleasure Club is the corrective — and Time Out's reviewer says it is already the most important room of its size in the city.