The first new song since Georgia Lines’ 2024 debut, The Rose of Jericho, forgoes the kitchen-sink approach of that album which leaned towards epic piano ballads. It’s nifty in its arrangement, intimate in its delivery, melancholic in mood despite the title, and it’salso slightly reminiscent of latter-day Everything But the Girl. As well as being a leading contender at this week’s Aotearoa Music Awards, Lines has a show with the APO alongside Hollie Smith, Louis Baker and Nikau Grace at Auckland’s Civic on June 15.
Motorway
by Fazerdaze
A sweetly scorched new track that wasn’t on Fazerdaze/Amelia Murray’s second Aotearoa Music Award-nominated album, Soft Power, last year. But had it been, it would have added some kick to the set that tended to bury her voice and the melodies in the fuzzy dreaminess of its production. This one lets the light in nicely, builds momentum throughout, and as the title suggests, it’s a fine addition to any on-ramp traffic jam playlist. – Russell Baillie
South Coast
by Deva Mahal ft. Estère
Well, in the competition for sexiest song released this NZ Music Month, we have a winner. Hawai’i-born Mahal, the daughter of blues legend Taj Mahal, started her music career when she lived in Wellington as a teenager. This track, with is reference to the city’s craggy Cook Strait foreshore, is a collaboration with fellow capital city identity Estère, and it’s enough to turn any howling southerly into something warm and steamy. See video for more proof. – Russell Baillie
Mystery Love
by Racing
And the prize for the best guitar solo in a NZ Music Month release goes to this track by Racing, which also takes second prize too because there’s more than one. The Auckland band, which picked up where its forbears The Checks left-off when it comes to retrofitted dancey rock music, is on its way to a third album. Mystery Love gets things off to a sunny, bluesy, groovy start helped by that guitar, as well as drums that are doing very Charlie Watts things to push it along. – Russell Baillie
Although they describe themselves as folk-rock this six-piece from Wellington Te Whanganui-a-Tara here serve up heroic, driving rock in the manner of post-punk bands like Skids, the Ruts (without the reggae) and a small measure of early U2. Their third single and the most stirring, which suggests they on their way to somewhere. – Graham Reid
Got to Have Love
by Pulp
The second single from the forthcoming reunion album by the Britpop band is an extravagant wall-of-sound disco-rock fantasia that recalls them at their heights of 30 years ago. Frontman Jarvis Cocker’s pleadings about love suggest he’s swopped his old ironic detachment for something more human, just as fellow, lanky, suit-wearing cult figure Nick Cave did a while back. – Russell Baillie
Rocket
by Robbie Williams, Tony Iommi
“Irrepressible” remains the rusted-on adjective for onetime UK showbiz wonderboy Williams, who last year got his own biopic Better Man which portrayed him as a primate – cue therapy-speak about him being “unevolved” – and which tanked at the box office, even in parts of the world where he once sold records. Anyway, he’s got a new album titled, somewhat cheekily, Britpop. On this amusing first single he’s got Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi playing over his usual speed limit on a song that suggests an Oasis LP track flicked to 45rpm. A pitch for the Gallagher brothers’ reunion support slot perhaps? – Russell Baillie
Elderberry Wine
by Wednesday
Wednesday is the North Carolina band fronted by Karly Hartzman, which features singer-songwriter MJ Lenderman on guitar, though as a non-touring member with his own solo career having taken off with 2024 album Manning Fireworks, and him and Hartzman splitting as a couple. The gently twangy, gritty and quite gorgeous Elderberry Wine is the lead single for the group’s sixth album, which is down the country end of the group’s approach which has veered towards a kind of Americana-shoegaze on its previous five. – Russell Baillie
One of the great but much over-looked American songwriters, Phillips – formerly of the alt-rock band Grant Lee Buffalo – explores the fast-forward modern world with trepidation: “Driverless cars on Market Street around every corner, but what’s to stop us before we turn on each other.” Being closer tonight doesn’t mean a loving relationship but “the touch of a finger [and] we’re closer to heaven”. The end of days as a melancholy acoustic ballad, and a song announcing a new album In The Hour of Dust (September 5). – Graham Reid
Sailing Away
by James McMurtry
Sounding even more like Johnny Cash, the broody songwriter (son of award-winning writer Larry) sets his sights on Washington D.C. but also wonders if he should still be in this music industry. And “it’s been so long now I don’t know who we are”. An angry lament for a lost America, his battered soul and “sailing away, feeling faded and I’m not okay”. Powerful and personal country-rock. – Graham Reid
John Psathas – Leviathan: The All-Seeing Eye, III.
I was on the verge of recommending John Psathas’s whirling Tarantismo for the latest NZ Music Month Song of the Week, but I was recently reminded of the same composer’s Leviathan, a more ambitious work recorded and released last year by Orchestra Wellington. Leviathan is one of Psathas’s percussive, saxophone-y, widescreen epics, and its audiophile-level recording was made possible through a generous bequest from Margaret Doucas. Doucas was a Wellington lawyer, born in Greece, who moved here as a five-year-old. She believed in philanthropy – after her death in 2016, $1 million went to the SPCA, and her estate continues to parcel out to worthy recipients. OW got $170,000 to record Leviathan, serious cash by NZ classical album standards, and the orchestra is hugely proud of the result. “This album is one of OW’s most important contributions to our culture,” says Marc Taddei, the orchestra’s music director, “and the quality on every level of production is clearly world-class.” #NZMM – Richad Betts
Unlock this article by subscribing to our Winter Sale offer
