by Kathryn Thompson

I don't usually notice the Mercury Music Prize. I heard a brief clip of the 2024 winner, English Teacher, on a UK news podcast, though, and something made me look for more. (Somebody mentioned that they were from Leeds and I'm from the north of England myself, so maybe that helped.) I found the album, 'This Could Be Texas', on Spotify and dug in at random, expecting to be disappointed, the next big thing in the emperor's new clothes. Still, start with track three because that's usually a strong one, right?
 
I find 'Broken Biscuits', an off-kilter waltz about hard times and managing the unmanageable. It has rumbles and angles, complex rhythms and the sort of piano that sounds tinny and unnerving; the sections of spoken word are in an accent that I could have heard on the bus as a kid in Greater Manchester. It comes to a wailing end in brass and this is, somehow, not at all what I was expecting. 

I skip back to the track before, because who calls a song 'The World's Biggest Paving Slab'? That turns out to have a classic post-punk lead bassline, metronomic drums, and a woman talking to the world, about the world and her place in it, in her own voice - and then it blossoms into the open, sparkling sound of the chorus and I know I've been hooked.
 
'I'm Not Crying, You're Crying' is built of more familiar things - kind of Sleater-Kinney meets Bloc Party with a side of Manic Street Preachers - but still does something new with it. 'Mastermind Specialism' is another unnerving waltz, a lullaby sung over the discord of the mechanical, material world, and what even is 'Not Everyone Gets To Go To Space'? A rumination about the fundamental inequality of things (if everyone had the same, would we value it) or a critique of privilege and people's strange ideas about what they've earned, or, well, just making something out of all of that, that has me abstractedly singing "who built the ships" at strange moments?
 
I can see why people have heard (the song called) 'R&B' and thought of Wet Leg, what with the flat affect and general limber electro-ish post-punk-ness, though sometimes I wonder if that just means 'detectably British female voice'. The lyrics are about expectations and what might happen if we refuse to pander to them, though, which seems like a different approach, less guarded with irony. "If I have stuff to write, then why don't I just write it for me?" 

Perhaps that's the key question of the album. I suspect 'Albatross' wasn't written for her, see, and it's one of the most mundane, plodding songs on the whole album; even the singing is in the pop-approved, arch-vowel, vocal-fry style, although there is a bit of art-rock promise in the clicky, ascending end. I’m glad I didn't start at the first song of this album or I'd have bounced right off. 'The Best Tears Of Your Life' is the other clunker, to my ears, and interviews I've seen suggest it happened under studio pressure. You have to try things out, sure, but some things just don't fire.
 
The real measure, to my mind, is that there's some music here that I wouldn't have thought I would like to listen to, and yet I do. 'Sideboob' sounds like a daydream in a deckchair in the fleeting British sun, and it's about missing home in the shape of a local landmark. 'You Blister My Paint' is both sparser and darker, the sort of audio hallucination that reaches out from the edge of uncomfortable, unsatisfying sleep. 'Albert Road' is heart-breaking, really, a lament for missed opportunities, and it’s far too close to home for me to ignore, even if I have travelled far away. 

'Nearly Daffodils' was a single, and is it a pop song? About a relationship? While also having the most driving, energetic, busy rhythm of the whole thing and a distinct art-rock carelessness about whether any of it fits with expected structure? And I think that's what this album does best; questions and conversations and propositions, often up-close and personal. (The band name is because they all liked their English teachers at school.) The sounds shimmer or ring or wail or whisper or squeak or rattle, here, because we don't know whether that works but it's worth a try, because there isn't an easy answer or a single right answer. Pop's confidence that it knows what you like can be reassuring, but maybe behind that front, this is the nuance there could always be. 

​Jonathan Oglivie’s Head South evokes 1970s Christchurch in a low-budget, low-lit, snappy and video-driven homage to punk rock’s untimely Antipodean afterbirth. Oglivie was in Christchurch post-punk act YFC (originally Youth For Christ) so he knows the territory, plus he directed iconic Flying Nun videos including “She Speeds” for Straitjacket Fits and “Cruise Control” for the Headless Chickens.

Ed Oxenbould is the twitchy teen protagonist who has to fight fear to start a band in a scene where monosyllabic minimalism is de rigeur, accompanied by sneers and withering glances. Oglivie keeps the camera tight on the protagonists, evoking adolescence’s claustrophobia and self-obsession, while covering over the 2011 earthquake’s destruction of most of the original locations. The design evokes Kiwi suburban slumber, a restless sleep haunted by distant disasters (Erebus) and the unquiet spirits of the city of the plain’s Gothic past. Yesterday’s technologies – Italian sports cars, Flymos, stereograms, Pong (the computer game), Ace Tone organs, and battered pushbikes, hum with local (Toy Love, the Gordons, The Scavengers) and imported sounds (Wire, Public Image, Magazine). Benee is authentic as a shop assistant turned songwriter who Oxenbould tries to cajole into his group. Marton Csokas as Oxenbould’s Dad nicely mixes Man Alone and superannuated lounge lizard. True, the film has a lot of loose ends, sidesteps the bootboys, and stops too abruptly, but it is cool, knowing and funny enough to be worth the time of any NZ music fan.

​Matthew Bannister

​The musical ‘Hamilton’ – full title, “Hamilton: An American Musical” – covers the life of one of America’s founding fathers, Alexander Hamilton, and his involvement in the American Revolution. While this musical has become world famous over the last few years, there exists another story set to music about a totally different Hamilton, half a world away. Our Hamilton. Kirikiriroa.

​After watching ‘When the Cows Come Home’ last week, I was reminded of another Hamilton related music film that I hadn’t yet managed to see, 2019s ‘Daffodils’. Luckily, it turns out it is also currently freely available in New Zealand, on Māori+.
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Set in Hamilton, the movie is a love story of sorts that features a mix of mostly classic kiwi songs from different eras, re-imagined and sung by the characters in the film. Adding to the local connection, former Hamiltonian Kimbra plays Maisey, the daughter of the two primary characters.

Throughout the movie we also see nods to classic Hamilton locations, albeit appearing to be from an alternative universe. In the first couple of minutes we see Maisey’s father Eric (George Mason), in 1966, driving a 1963 Ford Zephyr away from the Riverina – a pub that once stood on the corner of Grey St and Clyde St, where I personally saw many bands play back in the early ‘90s. The Riverina of the movie world has a superficial similarity to the curves of the real thing, but isn’t nearly as grand. He drives off to the tune of Bliss by Th’ Dudes’, a song that matches the sentiment of some of the boozy nights I remember there. Travelling from there across the river, he drives under an arch featuring a large sign for “Hamilton Domain, Lake Rotoroa”. This arch is only barely reminiscent of the Swarbrick Memorial gates that would have been driven through to enter the domain at this time, but it does work to set the scene. It is here Eric meets Maisey’s mother, Rose (Rose McIver), by the lake’s still seasonally blooming daffodils. The lake, though, appears here to be more of a pond than the more expansive Lake Rotoroa. And then there is the movie attended at the Embassy Theatre, which clearly isn’t situated on the main thoroughfare of Victoria St. Despite all this, I have to say it is fantastic to see a movie that is set in Hamilton… these are merely the troubles of watching a movie as a local who has spent far too long in the same city. We have a further scene soon after in a hall representing the Starlight Ballroom, formerly of Anglesea Street, but as this one is from well before my time, it doesn’t pull me out of the movie world in the same as the other locations.

We have plenty of re-imaginings of classic New Zealand songs within the film. While being driven from the lake, Rose sings a rendition of Bic Runga’s Drive, not as far from the original as many of the other songs in the film. ‘She’s a Mod’ follows up – this is actually a song by British band The Senators, which featured drummer John Bonham, later of Led Zeppelin, but it was certainly made most famous here through the cover by Ray Columbus and the Invaders. We also get fun versions of Crazy? Yes! Dumb? No! by The Mint Chicks, and Anchor Me by The Muttonbirds. However, I don’t feel all the songs work as well. The Swingers Counting the Beat, for example, doesn’t do it for me at all. Maybe it is a song that I have been too close to in the past to hear in this modified way. Further, the song plays with Eric, at the start of a trip to Britain, thinking about Rose who is left behind in New Zealand, and the focus is heavily on the “thinking about you” lyric – sometimes the links between the songs and the scenes all just seem a bit too obvious. Chris Knox’s Not Given Lightly playing through the engagement and wedding scenes I view similarly. Tally Ho! by The Clean, There is No Depression in New Zealand by Blam! Blam! Blam!, I’ll Say Goodbye, Even though I’m Blue by Dance Exponents and Jesus I was Evil by Darcy Clay are also songs that vary in my appreciation of them, with the latter, in particular, just downright annoying. Nevertheless, the best covers in my opinion are always those where songs are reimagined, rather than faithful re-enactments of the original, and I commend the filmmakers for not taking the easy road on these. Maybe because of the familiarity of the originals, they will just need a few more listens, but that isn't a luxury I have as a viewer when they are embedded within a movie. And despite the feeling of being a little too obvious, they do serve their purpose in the film. None of the songs in the film have any real Hamiton connection, unfortunately, but I can’t use that as a criticism. Go find Greg Pages’ film The Locals if you want some good Hamilton music content (The Datsuns, Rumpus Room, Inspector Moog and Mobile Stud Unit).

What about the film itself? Well, as mentioned, it is a love story, inspired by real events. The story fills in the bits between the songs, but it is the music that dominates. As such the story is fairly simple, and overall it is difficult to feel like much actually happens. I can't help but feel that something more significant needed to happen. For me, it is certainly the reimagining of the songs and the nods to Hamilton that I will remember it for, rather than the story. 

Ian Duggan

‘When the Cows Come Home’ was released into cinemas a couple of years ago, but I hadn’t managed to catch it until this week, with it recently having become available on TVNZ+. Why are we covering a film at Hamilton Underground Press that on the surface appears to be about cattle? Well, the connection is that the primary focus of the movie, herdsman Andrew Johnstone, was previously the vocalist in late-'80s Hamilton bands ‘Three Men Missing’ (from which three members went on to HUP favourites ‘Grok’) and ‘Hoola Troupe’. 

My first experience of Andrew was a few years after these bands, when he released his solo album ‘The Wallflower’ in 1994. However, my memories of that night appear to have become corrupted over the years. Nevertheless, I do remember Andrew’s somewhat theatrical performance, which completely threw me. By the end of the night, I was not sure what to make of the music, or the man.  
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Film maker Costa Botes I encountered not long after, through his 1995 mockumentary ‘Forgotten Silver’. Playing on TV One, it told the story of a pioneering, fictitious, New Zealand filmmaker called Colin McKenzie. Many in the country were as discombobulated by the film as I was with Johnstone’s Wallflower performance. I missed the beginning of the film, and for a while was fascinated by the story I was watching. Very quickly, however, I felt foolish for believing what I had been watching, as it rapidly moved from one outlandish scene to the next. Surely everyone else could tell this was a work of fiction?! I enjoyed the rest of the film, laughing at the absurdity of it all. Going to bed that night, I listened to talkback – a ritual at the time that helped me fall sleep – only to be dumbfounded to find that there were many who had watched it with a less than critical eye, still somehow believing everything they had watched, and regaling the host with stories of the achievements of this amazing man. The next morning was a different story, with the callers to the station angry and what they saw as a deception. All of this made for one of my most memorable filmic experiences of all time.

So how did these two worlds collide, with Botes coming to make a movie about Johnstone? Andrew, it turns out, is an accidental film star. Filmmaker Botes ‘friended’ him on Facebook, thinking he was someone else he knew. Despite soon realising he had gotten the wrong person, Botes was enjoying Andrew’s posts about his cows, particularly of Maggie and Tilly, their behaviours, and his relationship with them. Soon Botes felt this might make an interesting film. The focus of the film was meant to be about the cows, but once filming began, Andrew quickly became the central figure.
The film starts gently, following the original focus of the cows themselves. This resonated with my own upbringing on a small Waikato dairy farm, limited enough in size for all the cows in the herd to be known to my father by name. Other similarities included the lack of need or want for dogs or motorbikes, and an understanding of individual animal’s behaviours that seemingly didn’t appear apparent to the farmers on larger properties. Nevertheless, I suspect that these commonalities are likely where the similarities between Andrew and my father end.

From there, the film takes a shift left, looking into Andrew's life and some of the factors that shaped him – from his childhood and family tragedy, his mental health issues which became amplified through his teenage years, the influence of Catholic schooling, and his time as an artist and worker at Hamilton’s DVD rental store Auteur House. And, of course, into our wheelhouse, his musical career. The film jumps briefly into the making of ‘The Wallflower’ and his friendship with collaborator Zed Brookes (which continues today), and also covers his time as a valued contributor and editor of Rip it Up - until, of course, it all went wrong.

Through all of this, Maggie and Tilly aren’t too far away. Not a mockumentary, and not quite what we can call a music biography, this is a fascinating look into the life of an interesting and sometimes complicated individual. It’s taken too long for me to watch it, due to a lack of easy accessibility. But that isn’t an excuse now. If you are in New Zealand, you too should be sure to watch it while it is freely available. 

​Ian Duggan

Today is New Album Day for Troy Kingi (Te Arawa, Ngāpuhi, Te Whānau-ā-Apanui). Leatherman and the Mojave Desert is the eighth instalment in his 10-10-10 project - a race to release 10 albums in 10 genres in 10 years. Leatherman is a rock album, desert rock to be precise, preceded by two blazingly fun singles. The release tour is coming soon, including Hamilton’s Last Place on September 20. 

A couple of weeks ago Max caught up with Troy, a guy who has literally made an art form, and a career, out of unpredictable swerves. It’s not only that none of his albums sound anything like each other, but that the process changes each time, too. In the case of Leatherman and the Mojave Desert, recording doubled as a get-lost-and-find-yourself trip overseas. It also led to a documentary series, an invitation to join a star-studded show in Las Vegas next year, and a live setlist that will feature Troy Kingi playing covers of…Troy Kingi songs.

Start with Troy Kingi’s Desert Hīkoi, on TVNZ+. It follows Kingi and his band to LA, through the dusty nowhere of the Californian desert, arriving at Joshua Tree’s famous and storied recording studio, Rancho de la Luna. The four episodes, each around a quarter of an hour long, are gone too fast. It’s a beautifully assembled series. It had to be, because Kingi arrived in the US dealing with a years-long creative block. He took time - and some distinctive measures - to address this problem while director Tom Hern filmed as much as he was allowed to (psychoactive substances yes, sweat lodge ceremonies no). Half of the series is over before the music even starts.

Kingi says, “I talk in the documentary about trying to find that flow that I had earlier on in my career. I was still trying to write - Desert Hīkoi doesn't show me writing stuff in the dark and that - but the way that they've put it together reflects that I was searching for something, and not exactly knowing what it was. Tom Hern is great at making a good story arc, and it’s reflective of how the first three or four days were. We were basically just meeting people and having experiences.”

Those people and experiences include Dr Sean Milanovich, an elder and historian from the area’s indigenous Kawiya tribe, and a long trek with him through the desert, up a mountain, and into a cave - and a different spiritual dimension. 
 ​

Not every musician would ask a tribal elder to help plot a course out of a creative deadend, especially when they're already bouncing ideas off Rancho De La Luna owner Dave Catching (Queens of the Stone Age, Eagles of Death Metal) and, earlier in LA, Serj Tankian of System of a Down. But for Kingi it was a natural thing to do.

​“It's just the way that I've been brought up. Especially coming from such a small town, Te Kaha down the East Coast, if you have visitors you welcome them in. It goes back to the core thing of pōwhiri onto a marae. When someone first comes on to the marae they’re waewae tapu, which means ‘sacred feet’, until that exchange breaks that tapu or the taboo-ness. Then you can walk around without having that hanging over your head. That's always been my thinking and all my friends who are Māori artists have that same core value.
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“My thing was, if we're going over there we have to at least meet some tangata whenua who can do that for me, for my spirit. That’s so I feel calm and feel that I can come and work on someone else's land, essentially. It was quite crucial and quite essential that we did do that,” Troy says.

After being sure to meet Dr. Milanovich, Kingi was less clear on what would happen next. But he was happy to be led into the wilderness.

“I've always been known to not read the run sheet until the day. As long as I know where I'm supposed to be at a certain time. I don't look too far ahead. So it was a surprise to me that we were going to have this massive hike into the middle of nowhere. But going out there was probably my favourite part of the whole thing! Especially in America, where you feel like every place has been touched by millions and zillions of people. But this place? Not many people have seen it. It felt really special in that way,” he says.

“Wherever I've been overseas, any country I've been to, I meet indigenous people and I automatically feel at ease. Essentially we have the spiritual realm that we try and connect to. The essence of it is that we’re all people of the earth.
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“Honestly, after we've hung out long enough, all indigenous people just, like, feel Māori to me. In America I don't know if they took anything away from me apart from just feeling like they're hanging out with their family. All I can say is it felt real natural.”

​There was no deliberate attempt to fuse any of this with the music of Leatherman and the Mojave Green. Kingi says, “I was just trying to take in my surroundings, take in experiences and let them speak for themselves. As far as the album trying to sound indigenous? I wasn't trying to do that. A few of the things we did there ended up becoming songs, like 'Hot Medicine' after we did the sweat lodge.

“I feel like every experience - whether it's indigenous, whether it's just meeting someone on the street, whether it's taking a hike through the desert - is going to add something to what you're creating. If we were writing this album in the snow in Alaska, it would sound completely different. I feel like the desert itself had a big part to play and connecting with Dr. Mailanovich helped my mind and spirit ease into the surroundings and be able to let nature in, basically, and feel comfortable doing that.”

Troy Kingi’s 10-10-10 project, now 80% done, is a uniquely ambitious and difficult way to go about making music. His seven albums before this one have been dirt blues, psychedelic soul, roots, funk, folk, 80s synth-pop, and ambient-ish instrumental. It’s been like this since Guitar Party at Uncle’s Bach in 2016. 

So after acclimatising to the desert, and the land of the Kawiya, and even the potentially overwhelming history of Rancho De La Luna (Queens of the Stone Age! Dave Grohl! Kyuss!), there’s something else to prepare for. Rock.

To make ten albums in ten genres is a challenge that many musicians wouldn’t want to take on in an entire career, let alone one decade. Spotify is littered with unloved and unconvincing efforts to change course even once, from Snoop Dogg’s reggae album to Andrew WK’s piano ballads.

On top of that, ten albums in ten years is a massive undertaking. Very few artists write and record so fast for so long, and when they do quantity often wins over quality. But Kingi hasn’t been phoning it in. He’s won the Taite Prize, APRA Silver Scroll, and multiple NZ Music Awards and Waiata Māori Music Awards.​

Troy is quick to find new grooves and absorb different subcultures. The harder part is adding something, rather than just playing along, and he’s largely pulled it off every time. If anyone has the recipe for successful shapeshifting and regrowth, this is the guy.

He says that the hardest turnaround was from funk (The Ghost of Freddie Cesar) to folk for his fifth album, Black Sea Golden Ladder. “I had a vague idea of what I wanted to do but that didn't really pan out when I started writing. Luckily I had Delaney [Davidson] come on board and help guide me through that section, through a style that he's lived in for a long time. That was a lot of learning, having to essentially compromise. Up until then it wasn't exactly easy, but I felt like I was starting to get into a zone where it was getting too comfortable.”

When it comes to making the next switch, and the next, he says, “I don't really have the blueprints. The only way you can do that is to embrace it fully and jump in head first, and in some ways forget the previous albums. Just look at the one in front of you. You’ve got to relearn a few things and change a few habits. Going into any of these projects, I want it to be as authentic as possible. I don't want it to be pastiche or like I’m mimicking the style of the genre
​

“I ask myself: Can I be authentic and can I do it and feel comfortable with what I've created? Not like I'm putting an act on or anything. Can I actually just do it for what it is? There's a few genres I steered away from, knowing that I could never do them complete justice. Jazz, for instance. I'm not a schooled musician. You have to have more knowledge than I have to do that. I could bring a lot of cool cats, mean jazz people, in but I'd still feel like a fake-ass dude.”

Fake-assery was never a risk with the rock album. This is a return to the music that Troy loved as a teenager.

​“I knew rock was going to be somewhere along the line, but I wanted to explore other things first. I always felt like it didn't matter when I came back to rock. I thought, why don't I try and tackle a few harder ones, and then come back so we can have a bit of a break at some point. I felt like it'd be an easy one,” he laughs.

“Easy in my mind!”

The crew playing on Leatherman all go way back. Bassist Marika Hodgson is one of Troy’s best friends, “the one you can rely on”. Drummer Treye Liu and guitarist Ezra Simons have their own history.

“I've known Treye since he was at high school. I was a few years older, tutoring guitar. I met Ez then too. He and Treye were both in a band called Milk that won the Northland Rockquest. And I just remember hearing them practise at school and thinking, far, that drummer! He's freakin’ amazing! So I pretty much stole him from his band and 15 years later he's still here. It's pretty cool,” Troy says.​

Meanwhile, Ez’s band Earth Tongue are on tour right now in Europe. If you're trying to remember when you first heard of them, that might be a few months ago when opened for Queens of the Stone Age, who Ezra first discovered thanks to Troy, in his role as guitar tutor back at Kerikeri High School. Two young rock fans in the north of New Zealand, bonding over CDs that had been recorded at - yep - Rancho De La Luna.

Knowing each other so well, and for so long, would surely have helped when the band had only a few days at Rancho to work out and record a lot of songs. The sessions, overseen by Dave Catching, got a lot of work done.

​“I've always been the one who didn’t study until the week leading into an exam. If someone gave me three years to write an album, I'd probably still write it a couple weeks before getting into the studio. You have to set goals and boundaries. Otherwise, you could go around in circles of ideas for ever and ever. I have got a lot of friends that do that very thing. It's good to know that on this particular date we're gonna be in the studio, so I've got to start getting my head into the zone,” Troy says.

Even so, his way of working stood out to a man who you might think had seen it all. 

​“I think Dave thought I was a crazy man, the way that I was working and churning out stuff. He was watching songs being formed then recorded in real time, at lightning speed,” Troy says.

Catching was so impressed that he invited Troy into a special project of his. The Rancho De La Luna 30th Anniversary album is going to bring together some massive acts, and there’ll be shows in Las Vegas and LA next year as well.

Troy says, “Vegas is the main release show. We’re still waiting for firm dates. Pretty much most of the crew that have worked with Dave or recorded stuff at Rancho will be part of this so, shit, it'll be amazing.”

At the time Troy’s contribution was just another song to add into a busy session.

“Dave had a couple of riffs that he played, and I formed the structure of the song real quick. Within an hour we’d recorded the bones of it. I had no words for it until the last day of vocals. Well, actually, I still had five songs to record vocals for on the last day, and they all had no words. So the night before, I wrote lyrics for 'Ride the Rhino', which is the opening track on the album and probably my favourite. It’s very Black Sabbathy. Then I fell asleep.

“I was waking up at five every day for some reason over there. I knew what had to be done and I just started smashing out the lyrics. We had about half an hour before going to the studio and I still hadn't written anything for Dave’s song. The words came really fast. I wrote them, we got there, and it was the first song that I tracked that day. Dave loved the concept, loved the words.”

Four lyric writing sessions and five lead vocal takes in one day. I just need to write that again. Four lyric writing sessions and five lead vocal takes in one day. 

“I’m not saying that my lyrics are good. People might think that they’re pretty shit, but lyrics have always come really fast to me and I’ve always written them last. I'll have a beat or a style or a few chords first, and flesh out the whole song. I'll sing the melody and I'll just keep going over until it's an interesting melody to me. Once that's all done I put the words to it,” he says.

It wasn’t always like this. Troy has stories about songs he agonised over for a year or more. The way out was to cut down on self-judgement.

“Time’s never gonna stop. So I let the wall down to see what happens when you just write, just let it flow. Then the words just come. There might be three or four words that are cringy, and those are the ones I'll change. That's my litmus test. If I can sing a song from start to finish without being like, ‘augh, I'm not sure about that part’, then I'm happy. Any parts that are like that, I just keep smoothing it over, changing words until something clicks.”

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And so to the national tour. How does a guy with so many different styles in his back catalogue approach a thing like that?

“It's gonna be a full-on rock concert,” he says, “even if I do [older] songs like ‘Aztechknowledgey’ or ‘Grandma’s Rocket Poem’, I’ll be doing rock covers of my own songs.”

The sold out signs are nearly up and Last Place is going to be packed. Kingi wasn’t looking for larger venues, though. “If everyone can't get in, then everyone can't get in. It’ll make everyone that can get in feel special. I want it to be intimate and squashy and sweaty.”

​“I’m looking forward to it, but it's probably the hardest set I've ever had to learn! There's some hard riffs, man, and it makes me want to not play guitar so I don't need to think too much! You’ve got countermelodies going over different rhythms on the guitar...it’s the most I’ve ever practised in my life. It’s bloody hard.”

The band can’t rehearse all together until Ezra’s back from Europe. Troy says, “We'll have maybe a week of rehearsals before we get into the tour, and then as soon as we finish he's off again. Then we've got a few other shows, so I'm trying to find someone at the moment to fill his boots on screaming and guitar duties.”

Even if the gig is full-on rock, there’s no telling what sort of music the average Troy Kingi fan wants to hear. Describing the audience that he’s built throughout 10-10-10, Troy says, “I’ve differently got the stayers that have been there since the start, but I'm also picking up new ones at every stop. 

“Going back to the [fifth] album with Delaney, we played somewhere and a whole Māori crew come through. I think they were expecting to hear the [roots album] Holy Colony, which was two albums before that! And this was a sit-down, really theatrical thing - a thinking type of concert. I was just, oh man, I hope these guys are going to be alright. Afterwards I went out to sign stuff and they come up with one of my albums and said that was the best concert to ever been to! That’s cool, man! You never know what anyone's gonna get out of it, especially if they're not getting what they’re expecting.”

The pace of 10-10-10 means that even before anyone had heard Leatherman and the Mojave Green, and well before the release tour, Kingi has already been getting ready for what’s next. It’ll be a big change, of course.

​“I've stopped listening to rock music. I give myself maybe a month to not think about anything, and then I start listening to music in the next style. That's what I've done with every album up to this point. But it is a hard thing to do when you haven't even brought out the last album,” Troy says.

“My next album is hip hop. I might end up rapping on some of it, but not really. I'm not a rapper! I want to produce it. I sent out the call to most of my favourite NZ rappers and MCs, and I got a hundred percent hit rate. Everyone's come back saying yeah, we’re keen to be part of it.

“The concept is that there are 10 artists I’ve asked to work with. We're just going to go into the studio for one day per artist, and we're going to write the song on the day. By the end of the 10 days we should have at least the foundations of the album. Then I'll probably give myself another week to do overdubs, and then sit on it for a little while. You can only do so much in a short amount of time and then your ears just stop working. Then I’ll come back to it, see all the holes and the mistakes, and start cleaning them up.”

Sadly, Hamilton Underground Press is officially not cool enough for inside scoops. “I don't want to tell you who's coming on board yet, I'll leave that for a later date,” Troy says.

“So that's what I've been doing in the background, but you can never give yourself fully to it until the one before it has finished. We’re not finished until the album is out and we’ve toured New Zealand. You can only do so much prep work. My mind is still not fully there because I'm thinking about what we're about to do with this rock album.”

If you’re quick enough to grab one of the last few tickets, you’ll be able to see exactly what he does with Leatherman and the Mojave Green at Last Place on September 20.

Thanks to our Quick-fire reviews of all 68 albums nominated for the 2024 Taite Music Prize, loyal HUP readers will already know that Demons of Noon’s Death Machine is “a bloody good album that might even win some new converts to the metallic side”, and that on Infinity Ritual’s EPII “the riffs are properly catchy, the vocals are mostly decipherable, and there’s the right amount of bounce for headbanging”. Now both bands are teaming up to tour the country on the back of those same new(ish) releases.

Max Johns spoke with Adam Colless (guitar, Infinity Ritual) and Jonathan Burgess (bass, Demons of Noon). Jono’s bandmate Scott Satherley (guitar) turned up a little late but still got a few words in as well. 

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HUP: Hi guys. How did your two bands end up touring together?

Jonathan (Demons of Noon): We both mutually respect each other's music, and we both put albums out last year. Infinity Ritual snuck theirs through as an EP for some reason. I met Adam in person when he came to our show in Valhalla in Wellington. We got to talking that night, and we came up with this idea to tour our albums. It feels really good to join forces to go around the country. It's a lot more comforting than doing it by yourself.

Adam (Infinity Ritual): Absolutely, yeah. Captain Planet.

Jonathan (Demons of Noon): With our powers combined! Then we also noticed we both have a song called ‘Succession’ on our new albums. So we named it the Succession Tour. We might have a competition about who did ‘Succession’ best. It's also a great opportunity to come up with some Succession TV show memes to promote the tour.

Adam (Infinity Ritual): Yeah, one of the greatest shows.

HUP: You play relatively different styles of metal, and there’s no headline band for the tour. Do you think you’ll draw a different crowd into each corner of the bar, or will your fans have more love than that?
​
Adam (Infinity Ritual): I think there'll be more love in the room. It’ll be a Doom gathering. Both bands share common elements in our influences, we come from the same sort of place, but with the metal that we play we're a bit different. 
It's an awesome pairing because when you see the Demons, Jonathan and the guys, get together it's such an experience. One thing we're quite excited about is playing at least one or two new songs in each show.  

Jonathan (Demons of Noon): I’m feeling the love, too. This is a more complementary thing, rather than pushing the boundaries of varied lineups. We’ve picked up a whole lot of cool local support bands, too.

Adam (Infinity Ritual): Jono’s managed to sort out some awesome opening acts. In Hamilton it's Wolf Wizard, which has got me very excited. We’ve been talking to those guys for a couple years now and now we get to actually meet up and play with them. I'm really looking forward to Hamilton; it's gonna be a lot of fun.

Jonathan (Demons of Noon): We’ve got to give a shout out to all the bands that are going to be joining us on the tour. Obviously Wolf Wizard, but all the others as well. From Moose Mountain have switched into the Christchurch lineup. Soulseller in Dunedin have been extremely supportive and helpful, and we’re got High Lords in Wellington - they're the guys from Beastwars going undercover and playing instrumentals. 
​
And we're excited to be playing with The Death Spell in Auckland, because quite a cool thing has happened here. Like us, they put out an album last year as well. There's a thing called the Doom Charts, which is a collection of doom reviewers who vote on these charts each month. All three of us have spent some time in the Doom charts for our albums, which is an honour - a dream come true.

Adam (Infinity Ritual): It is, yeah. Making New Zealand Doom alive again.

Jonathan (Demons of Noon): And it’s a huge lineup in New Plymouth. We're playing Battle for the Mountain 2, which is a sort of big festival show with a whole pile of bands. That was a case of good timing. It’s been organised by a guy called Jesse, who's in Caldera. They recently got the New Zealand support slots for EYEHATEGOD. That’s a total coup for them, stoked about that. 

Adam (Infinity Ritual): It's a big deal. They're awesome kids, man. I call them kids, but just they’re only bit younger than us. They've got this amazing sludge tone. Unique's not the right word, but it's very them. It's heavy, and they're just awesome. A great bunch of guys. So we're over the moon that they've got those shows.

HUP: New Plymouth is your home turf, right, Adam?

​Adam (Infinity Ritual): Yes where we're from good old Ngāmotu, under Taranaki, which is awesome. And in New Plymouth it's quite amazing, because we had a scene a few years ago which died an honourable death. Then since covid there has been a massive resurgence of really awesome underground music coming out now. We’re stoked because we got to come up at the same time as all these other bands now. For us it's a cool throwback to the ‘90s when there was Sticky Filth and all these other bands. Another chapter is happening for heavy music in Taranaki.

[If you’re after an intro (or a throwback) to the original Taranaki Hardcore days, get started with 1994 compilation New Plymouth Rocks Hard on Bandcamp.]

HUP: What do you think led to separate bands emerging at the same time?

Adam (Infinity Ritual): I would say all of us being locked up. Personally, I loved lockdown. I indulged in good beers, and we had phone parties and good times like that, but everybody got a bit of an itch. There's not too many venues in town but a couple were starting to come up. The great thing was that people just wanted to come out to see live music again, which had kind of died off. It's been awesome. 

That’s given people the drive to actually give this a crack in our hometown. It gives us that confidence, and now we’re heading out to see the country with the Demons. People will see and hear this emerging scene coming from New Plymouth again. Then to bring the Demons of Noon to end the Succession tour here, that's very cool.

HUP: Jonathan, last time we spoke to you in 2021 I asked what your local scene is like in Auckland but you didn’t know yet!

Jonathan (Demons of Noon): No, we’d just unveiled ourselves in Wellington and we were leading up to our first Auckland show.

HUP: So, let’s try again. What’s the metal scene like in Auckland?

Jonathan (Demons of Noon): The scene in Auckland is wonderful, but it has its challenges. It ebbs and flows. The big news at the moment is that The Wine Cellar has closed down after 20 years. Rohan (Evans) is taking a well-deserved rest. That's emotional for us because it's the venue that we grew up in. It’s where we first started playing in our early days. Rohan looked after us the whole way through. But it's extremely positive because they're knocking out the wall between Whammy Backroom and the Wine Cellar, and turning it into a 500 person venue called Double Whammy. Next door, Whammy Bar will remain as normal. It's a great evolution for that place.
​
Lucy Macrae and Tom Anderson from Whammy will run the new venue too. They really hold up the music scene - they're both involved in promotion and Tom's a big production guy in town. Whammy’s a good place for them to store all of their gear, so consequently it has a really good backline available.

HUP: Are there enough local metalheads for 500 people to fill Double Whammy?
​
Jonathan (Demons of Noon): There's a small and very engaged metal scene here. A cool thing that's happening is that the kids are really getting into metal again.

Adam (Infinity Ritual): Yes!

Jonathan (Demons of Noon): Early 20-year-olds are starting death metal bands and black metal bands, really hardcore bands.

HUP: Have either of you played Hamilton before?

Adam (Infinity Ritual): We played Nivara Lounge about two years ago with the Venom Dolls from Auckland. There were two other bands from New Plymouth in town, so we just decided to all meet up and meet Ivan there. A few people came out, which was awesome. I love the place.

HUP: Will the Nivara Lounge stage be big enough for all the Demons of Noon? You’ve expanded between your first EP and last year’s album. 

Jonathan (Demons of Noon): We’re technically a six piece but one of our singers, Aria, recently had a child. So on this particular tour she has been replaced by...umm...a Juno synth...

HUP: Infinity Ritual’s a bit different - just the three of you, right?
Adam (Infinity Ritual): That's correct. The line-up has been the same since we started, straight after the first Level Four lockdown. Mark, our drummer, owns Vinyl Countdown, which is a record store in New Plymouth. He used to run Real Groovy in Wellington so he's got a big reputation. I’d seen him playing in a covers band for a few years, so I knew he liked heavy music and asked if he’d ever be keen on a jam. Jase, our bass player, was another customer that bought records off Mark. Se he asked, ”hey, on the off chance, would you want to be in some stony, fuzzy, doomy band thing?”

We were originally gonna be a four piece. We intended to get a bass player so Jason and I could both play guitar. Then one day Jase just decided to bring a bass to practise, just so we get some ideas, and he just hasn't given it up. Suddenly he’s coming to practise with 8 by 10 Ampeg and he's fully committed to bass. He loves it! He keeps buying heaps of bass gear, so that's a good sign. 

Jonathan (Demons of Noon): It's the gear that counts, right?

​Adam (Infinity Ritual): 100%, yeah, haha, there's a whole aesthetic.
​

HUP: How would you describe what the good readers of HUP will hear from your bands when they come to Nivara Lounge on August 23?

Adam (Infinity Ritual): We usually call it a heavy wall of noise. There are elements of doom, stoner, and in some ways groove metal is a big influence for us as well. We've got the guilty pleasure of loving Pantera and that sort of stuff, so elements of that come out. But mainly the stonery, fuzzy, doomy stuff.

Jonathan (Demons of Noon): We describe ourselves as a big, warm, air massage. A lot of volume, a lot of very slow riffs, a lot of low tuning. Quite a few people on stage, and and ethereal witchy tones from the girls. They’ve really kicked us up a notch and made us the band that we are.

Adam (Infinity Ritual): It's beautifully haunting seeing Demons play live.
​

HUP: If this tour leads on to bigger things, where do you guys hope you'll be playing next year?

Jonathan (Demons of Noon): Australia.

Adam (Infinity Ritual): Yeah, let’s go to Ozzy. Even if this tour is unsuccessful!

Jonathan (Demons of Noon): I was in Brisbane a couple of weeks ago, and there’s a specialty heavy metal record shop. So I made a point to get over there to say hi and start building a connection. The guy there told me about a few festivals and things, so we've got something to start with.

Adam (Infinity Ritual): Awesome, that's the way.

HUP: Those connections are crucial, eh? 

Jonathan (Demons of Noon): We have no budget on this tour. So it's been a case of, “hey, would you like to play with us in New Plymouth? And, furthermore, can we stay at your house?” Adam and Jesse said yes straight away. So that's a mark of a great man.

We're doing pretty well with couches to crash on. One of the High Lords is putting us up in Wellington, our drummer Joe's parents are putting us up in Dunedin. My friend Tony is putting us up in Christchurch. 

Adam (Infinity Ritual): Coins are quite tight.

[Scott Satherley, Demons of Noon guitarist, joins the call.]

HUP: Hi Scott, you’ve turned up just in time for me to say that I’m all out of questions.

Jonathan (Demons of Noon): Scott, tell Max about the new songs that we're planning to play.

Scott (Demons of Noon): Geez, where to begin. ‘Coward’ started as quite a funny idea of coming up with a song that's all hate, like a diss track. Just unleashing, but it's not actually about anyone. We’re just dissing someone who’s a real piece of shit. It was real fun doing that, just making shit up and pretending that it's a person we hate. So that's coming.

HUP: Who do you think about when you're playing it?


Scott (Demons of Noon): No one really. Well, maybe myself.

Jonathan (Demons of Noon): That's probably a significant portion of the Doom genre. Diss tracks to yourself.

Adam (Infinity Ritual): Yeah, yeah, self-loathing.

Jonathan (Demons of Noon): We're very lucky to have Scott on board, because he's an extremely talented artist. He’s put together the posters and all the artwork for the tour.

​Adam (Infinty Ritual): Awesome posters. 

Scott (Demons of Noon): Through my work I found a lot of open source content that the Met Museum has let out into the world. You can kind of just use any of these good old images freely, without getting in trouble. If you go to the Met Museum and search ‘hell’ you get this slew of beautiful, beautiful imagery. Not having a lot of time to draw up my own, I just trawled their archives.
​
HUP: They're genuine works of art. Hopefully they’ll attract heaps of people through the doors up and down the motu.

The Succession Tour reaches Hamilton's Nivara Lounge on Friday August 23. Get tickets from Under the Radar, and/or message us on Facebook before the end of July to be in to win a double pass. 

EP II by Infinity Ritual and Death Machine by Demons of Noon are streaming and selling on Bandcamp right now.

​I went to my first listening party a few weeks ago, but I arrived fashionably late. As such, I only caught the tail end of the first airing of Beat Rhythm Fashion’s ‘Critical Mass’. What I did manage to hear at the time sounded great, however. And after slipping out of the party unnoticed, without the need for any awkward goodbyes, I explored the rest of the album as soon as I could.

Like my tardiness at the listening party, this review is also overdue. A lot has happened in the intervening there weeks; The album made a brief appearance at number five in the charts of albums by New Zealand artists, and cracked the top 40 in the overall album charts! Is that enough for you to go and check it out already?
​
It has been five years since the release of Beat Rhythm Fashion’s comeback Tenterhook album, and a lot has happened in the world between those times. While the pandemic affected us all, it affected us all differently, and we all looked at the happenings though our own lenses that have been crafted by our past experiences and cultural upbringings. Through a lot of this album, BRF main-man Nino Birch pours his experiences and thoughts into this album.

This is an album full of crafted and thoughtful lyrics. The press release came with a detailed explanation of every song: there is a lot of rumination on the personal effects of the pandemic on Nino’s life, on relationships ranging from the personal to international political, and on conflicting worldviews. Not wanting to sound like a school report here, but Nino is clearly a deep, contemplative and reflective thinker, who is capable of looking both inward and outward.

Some songs to give you a taster of the album? If you were a fan of the ‘80s BRF singles, especially, start with ‘No Wonder’ – the guitars here are as close to classic BRF as you can get – and the magnificent ‘Fall & Rise Again’. 

​Ian Duggan

with Ian Duggan

​Repairs' new album ‘Disappointing Sequel’ was released yesterday, and they are playing Hamilton in support of this tomorrow! That's the 19th of April 2024, at Last Place, supported by Empress and Halcyon Birds. I was having a first listen as I thought about these questions, and I can tell you it sounds fantastic! I spoke with guitarist Martin Phillips about the album, self-deprecation, mechanical pocket calculators, and more!

‘Disappointing Sequel’ is your follow up to 2020s ‘Repeat, Repeat’. In that album, the themes running through it included anxiety, feeling isolated, disillusionment, searching for meaning and hope. Listening to lyrics on the new album, the band haven’t quite managed to leave these concerns behind? 
 
If anything, I think we’ve become more anxious! We finished 'Repeat, Repeat' in early 2020, just as the pandemic was kicking off (most of it was recorded in 2019), but the majority of songs were written back in 2018. At the time we were still finding our voice and still learning who we were as a band and as songwriters. I think this album is an evolution of a lot of the ideas on the first record. Obviously the pandemic has had (and continues to have) a major impact on us (as with everyone else in the world). While a lot of the things we feel are the same, we’re a bit more confident now in the way we write songs about those feelings. There’s a different type of anger. It feels like we’re on the other side of a monumental era (despite the pandemic not actually being over). Unfamiliar, less stable and with no anchor point. Frustratingly, a lot of the issues in the wider world (as well as our own sense of dread) have continued to get worse. Some sort of Sisyphean nightmare at the ‘end of history’. 
 
I know I have different worries from what I had two years ago. Are there new themes on this album that are different from those from 'Repeat, Repeat'? 
 
We’re quite different as people than we were in 2020. While a lot of our underlying anxieties remain (and the effects of late-stage capitalism and the oversized influence of dangerous and disingenuous bigots in the political arena get worse), our personal situations have changed a lot. We play a lot less shows now than we used to, meaning that especially for Nic (bass) and I we focussed more on the studio side than the live arena (having access to the Vault and the help of Ciara and Will helped with that!). James (drums) and Fe bought a house and moved out of Auckland (as well as adding Peaches to the family), Nic changed career, and I finally found the impetus to dye my hair, paint my nails and quit my corporate job to go study audio engineering. That change in where we are on our journeys has likely influenced some of the writing, or at least some of the change of perspective from the last record.

​When I think of disappointing sequels, I think of movies like ‘Jaws: The Revenge’ and ‘Grease 2’. What do you think are the most disappointing sequels?
 
On the subject of disappointing (and unnecessary) sequels, Andrew Falkous has some eloquent thoughts on the matter that are perhaps worth sharing: 
​
Future of the Left -- Robocop 4 - Fuck off Robocop
 
More than a decade ago I was playing in a band called ‘god bows to math’ (yes, I know, it’s the American spelling - blame the Minutemen) and the drummer’s flatmate somehow came into possession of a box containing about 50 copies of the greatest disappointing sequel of all time – ‘Highlander II: The Quickening’. So everyone in our friends circle was treated to a DVD copy of this masterpiece. It gets terrible reviews but there’s something beautiful about how much it leans into ruining the original movie. Although the soundtrack is nowhere near as epic as the first film. 
 
Honourable mention has to go to the palpable disappointment generated by any sequel that fails to retain Keanu (looking at you Speed 2!). 
 
The name ‘Disappointing Sequel’, taken from a lyric in your song ‘Time Travel’, hints at a sophomore slump. Listening through the album, this definitely isn’t the case. Arising from our egalitarian roots, our New Zealand humour has tended to be fairly self-deprecating. Is this how you see the album title? As a bit of self-deprecation, but you realise this thing you’ve created is actually pretty amazing?
 
I started calling the album that as a working title very much in the self-deprecating joke vein, but after a while it felt right. We all deal with imposter syndrome to varying degrees and I know that I definitely felt a lot of pressure to make a second album. Looking at the cliched trajectory of sophomore offerings there’s a tendency to view them as more mature, and less invigorating than debut records. I prefer the idea that a second album should double the righteous anger and energy levels. 
 
The line in the song ‘Time Travel’ is a reference to one of the overarching themes of the album - this weird feeling that a lot of the same mistakes keep being made. In the case of that song I was referring mostly to watching the same neo-conservative, disproven, and ultimately cruel ideas about trickle down economics, privatisation, and deregulation continue to echo through the corridors of the Beehive (just to note the song is mainly about how I love my wife, no matter what happens). 
 
We’re all pretty stoked with the record. I think any time we manage to finish a piece of work it generates a sense of pride. There was definitely a lot of work put in over the last two years!

 
Track 4 is called “Math Grenades”. I had to look up what a ‘math grenade’ was; it’s an early mechanical pocket calculator, which resembled a hand grenade. What led you to naming one of your songs this, and being in New Zealand, should we in fact be calling them “Maths Grenades”?
 
It’s another reference to one of my favourite authors - William Gibson. I actually discovered Gibson’s work through a Sonic Youth song (Pattern Recognition on Sonic Nurse), and I’ve always loved that idea of discovery when combing through liner notes and parsing lyrics. The Curta [a.k.a., the mechanical calculator] features prominently in the novel Pattern Recognition (probably my favourite book of all time), and it fascinated me in the same way that Ada Lovelace’s ideas for the analytical engine did. There’s something really fantastical about seeing computation in a physical, analogue form, especially after growing up watching the computing world shift into big tech monopolies and shady behind the scenes algorithms dressed up in a flashy digital UI. The other reference on the album is the track Map, Territory which comes from Zero History (a follow up work to Pattern Recognition). ​

I really, REALLY, wanted to get these reviews out before the official Taite Music Prize shortlist was announced, but this morning I was scooped. To offer a slight spoiler, let me just say we are three-quarters of the way through an epic journey and have yet to encounter half the finalists.

The first three parts (alayna - Erny Belle, Eyeliner - Mice on Stilts, and Miriam Clancy - Serebii) all opened with a bit about the Taite Music Prize. Not this one though. Enough facts. Instead, we’ll end with some pretty tasty opinions, including my own personal Taite Music Prize shortlist.

If I’d been listening to all 68 of these albums just for fun, there would have been quite a few skipped tracks by now. But every single one of these reviews is based on a complete playback, no cheating. I don’t think I’ve ever listened to so much unfamiliar music for so many days in a row before. It’s been tiring, and fun, and eye-opening, and I am already thinking that I might do it again another year.

But let’s get through the last quarter of 2024’s nominations first. We start in the Ss, and soon learn that the official list of nominations has filed The Fuzzies and The Veils under T, for "The". To all the librarians reading this: I'm sorry, I didn't realise until it was too late. Anyway, let’s knock these 17 bastards off and then force me to play judge and jury. 

52. Ala Mai, by Shepherds Reign