Indy Yelich has just released a new single, East Coast. Photo / Elinor Kry
Ask Indy Yelich what she misses about New Zealand, and she’ll start ticking off a laundry list of what makes up the quintessential Kiwi childhood: walking around barefoot; meat pies and $1 bags of feijoa lollies from the dairy; sausage sizzles and jumping off wharves as a teenager.
“It’s so nice to hear a Kiwi voice,” she tells the Herald from amid a New York heat wave.
Yelich, 25, may be known as the younger sister of pop star Lorde, but she’s established herself as an artist in her own right. At the time of writing, she’s preparing to release her new single East Coast on June 28, the follow-up to her 2023 debut EP, Threads.
“This is the first song that I’ve put out in a long time,” she says of the single, written after a “pretty intense breakup”.
“I was going through a pretty up-and-down relationship and when I wrote it, I was going back and forth from East to West very consistently on a plane. Like, for probably about six months I had all my belongings in a little carry-on.
“The desire to be young and free was just not what the reality of my life was and it was quite cathartic to write it.”
East Coast feels like the ultimate road trip song - it evokes the sun in your eyes, rolling down the car windows, turning the volume all the way up.
“I literally wrote it when I was driving on the PCH [Pacific Coast Highway] in the back seat of my friend’s car,” she says.
“I was reading these essay-length texts while my friend’s in the front seat with the windows down, having fun ... and so the chorus really feels like wanting to push that feeling.”
For Yelich, the song sums up “figuring out what it means to have an identity outside of a relationship and a man”. Through the process of writing it, she says she’s learned to speak up for herself - not just when it comes to romantic relationships, but in her career as a musician.
“It taught me to advocate for myself - believing in my own voice, believing in the melody, and believing that I know, for example, what sounds best for my voice. Believing that I can hear how I want the song to come out.”
Does the new single mean there’s an album in the works? Yelich smiles. “All I can say is that it’s part of a forthcoming project.”
Performing live is also on the radar. “I would love to be back on stage soon,” she says, adding that she hopes to play a show in New Zealand one day. “I would love that. Gosh, doing a festival there sounds like a dream.”
Before turning her pen to songwriting, she released two poetry books, Sticky Notes and Dudette. Does the writing process differ between the two mediums?
“Writing those books really helped me with songwriting, because I had a few years of a chance to explore language in more of a free manner,” she says, adding with a laugh, “When you’re writing songs you have to really get to the point, ‘cause you don’t have like 100 words, tons of pages.”
It’s been six years since she made the move to the US, a step she says was the key to finding her voice.
“You don’t really know that many people, you really have to figure it out for yourself. And I think that vital independence was very necessary to my career.”
Now, she says, “I feel most like myself in the city, on the East Coast,” likening her love of New York to a “long-term crush”.
“There is no feeling like when you have just touched down after a really long flight and got off the plane,” she gushes.
“Getting in the Uber or a cab, I just put on some really dramatic 70s music, and that rush going into Manhattan over that bridge, it’s just amazing. You wind the windows down and you just hear all the people. You could almost cry.
“And it feels like I’m coming back to myself every time.”
Her other home, though, is Aotearoa. When she touches down in Auckland, running into the ocean is first up on her to-do list, before spending time with her parents and her dog, Al Pacino.
“I was there in January and I was there three weeks, and I brought my roommate back with me, and the first thing I did was take my shoes off and run to the vines out the back of our house and get passionfruit,” she recalls.
“I just pulled it off the vine and bit it open. She was like, ‘Don’t you need a knife?’ I was like, ‘No, just crack it open with your teeth’ - the best.”
Most of her memories of growing up in New Zealand revolve around summer. “I just miss the water so much ... being like 15 and jumping off a wharf, it was always really cold, but you’d wear your cutest little bikini from probably Supré,” she says, laughing.
“I miss walking around New World. I just miss how everyone says hi on the street.
“Randomly, I remember a lot of sausage sizzles, just like my dad’s work parties, my primary school fundraisers. That’s, like, New Zealand.”
It’s those moments she treasures more than ever now that she lives on the other side of the world.
“I really appreciate how I was raised. There’s such an air of caution in New York, especially with kids, but being raised in Aotearoa - you kind of realise it a bit more as you get older - it’s just so beautiful. You just bike around by yourself, you bike to school.”
Yelich grew up in Devonport, in a home filled with books - mum Sonja is a poet too - and music: Cat Stevens, Bon Iver, Annie Lennox and Simon & Garfunkel.
“I always listened to what my dad would sing and what my mum would play at dinner parties. I was really inspired by that kind of thing, and by what my sisters would show me.
“It was really exciting to grow up with books and grow up with music in the house, and then doing music lessons and playing piano and playing clarinet, things like that. And then finding that love again in later life,” she says.
“Have you ever had this experience where your parents listen to a certain song, and then you rediscover it like 10 years later?
“You’re like ‘oh yeah, this is sick!’ Like Talking Heads or The Smiths. My parents had really good taste, I just didn’t know it,” she jokes.
Yelich is a self-described “mischievous middle” child, between older sister Ella, 27, and 22-year-old brother Angelo, who is based in London.
She says of her sister, “It’s so awesome to have such a familiar figure in this industry who I feel like I can trust.
“She really taught me to advocate for your own voice, like, you are a master of your own craft. You are your own person with your own voice and owning that is the best thing you can do, otherwise you might lose that.
“If there’s a problem sometimes, like I’ll need her advice and I will take it, because she has such a wisdom, you know, and I really need that sometimes.”
Outside of the music industry, theirs is a typical sister relationship. “She’s like my best friend. She’s never going to be that mad if I steal all her clothes,” Yelich jokes.
“The other day, I saw this little lip gloss - I don’t think she knew that I took it - it was like this Tower 28 or something. I took it, put it in my bag and then I’ve used it. You know, things like that.
“It takes you a little while to realise when you’re younger that your sisters will be your best friends when you’re older and it’s just so special having the familiarity, especially with someone who knows you. It’s your blood.”
The value of sisterhood is just one of the things Yelich has learned throughout her 20s.
“They say when you’re 25, your brain really forms - I didn’t believe that. But it is so much better getting older. I’m so different than I was at 20,” she says.
It’s that sense of self, of having gone through the growing pains and finally understanding who you are, that she hopes to have captured in East Coast.
“It feels so good to have nailed this feeling and like, believe it - it’s a really good feeling.”
Bethany Reitsma is an Auckland-based journalist covering lifestyle and entertainment stories who joined the Herald in 2019. She specialises in telling Kiwis’ real-life stories, money-saving hacks and anything even remotely related to coffee.
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