Melbourne's Leaps and Bounds festival is turning Fitzroy and Collingwood into one giant gig for ten days

Melbourne's inner north is about to turn into one enormous, slightly chaotic gig for ten straight days, and nobody there is going to complain about the cold.

Leaps and Bounds Music Festival is back in its full ten day format from 16 to 26 July, spilling out across Fitzroy, Collingwood, Abbotsford and Richmond in the way only a proper City of Yarra event can. This is the most Melbourne way possible to spend a winter fortnight, wandering between pubs and DIY spaces pretending the cold does not exist, because the lineup makes it genuinely worth the effort.

A few dates are worth circling now. Saturday 18 July brings IN MOTION, part of the HIGH GROUND series, taking over The Night Cat, The Evelyn Hotel and Punters Club in one big venue crawl, with Public Figures and Skeleten among the acts. Collingwood's newest venue, a converted train carriage called Trainscendence, hosts Loco Motion across two days, a genre spanning weekend built for all ages and featuring Charlie Needs Braces.

Thursday 23 July has PBS broadcasting live from the Yorkshire Stingo Hotel in Abbotsford, hosted by Melbourne radio staples Crispi and Ernie, with a genuinely stacked lineup including Georgia Fields, Charles Jenkins, Leah Senior, Rhiz and the Sugarplums, Sarah Carroll and Ella Hooper. That is the kind of bill that would usually anchor its own ticketed night, here it is just one Thursday inside a much bigger festival.

The whole thing wraps up Sunday 26 July with the Leaps and Bounds Record Fair at Collingwood Town Hall, one of Melbourne's biggest inner city record fairs, packed with rarities, bargains and the kind of vinyl digging that eats an entire afternoon without you noticing.

Most of the program is free or genuinely cheap, which is exactly the point. This is not a festival built around one headliner and an inflated ticket price, it is ten days of Melbourne's live music culture spread across pubs and venues you probably already walk past. Pick a night, pick a suburb, and go see something you would not normally have on your radar.