After an explosive beginning, Paekākāriki band The New Things go live in their founding village September 24 and Wellington October 7. Here’s Mark Amery with the words and radio interview, Kirsten Drysdale with the camera.
Band The New Things are, as their label tells you, a new thing on the Aotearoa music scene, coming to national attention as the country comes out woozily from Covid into public spaces in 2022. They’re about to emerge live with gigs in home base Paekākāriki at St Peters Hall on 24 September, with another new thing The Interlopers, and at Wellington’s Pyramid Club with Terror of the Deep on October 7.
The band have already launched publicly with quite a splash in late April 2022 with a self released EP called Pink Chocolate – available at Bandcamp.com. And there was indeed actually a launch, and more on that in our embedded interview.
Pink Chocolate features four diverse ever quirky angular, jangly and/or smoky indie pop songs recorded by the lead songwriting duo Tina McIvor and Jason Tamihana-Bryce in their good sounding living room. With lots of adventurous guitar and wordplay – they even say themselves their musings are weird – is, they say, a taster for their first album, which they hope to record this summer.
And the response to the EP was affirming: they went to to number one on Auckland radio station 95BFM’s Top Ten with their song ‘Vintage Nerd’ – usually a sure barometer of alternative musicland approval. RNZ music reviewer, Grant Smithies, called the The New Things “ace rickety guitar pop like The Raincoats” with an “endearing spindliness”. They assure Mr Smithies in our interview they lose none of that spindliness live.
Since then they’ve been joined by a rhythm section: Dave Morgan on drums and Scott Viner on bass.
The New Things emerged from another Paekākāriki band The Travesties with Sarah Roberts and Miles Thompson. After becoming literally a garage band in the village – even playing a local garage tour – Tina and Jason toured Japan as a duo in 2019, and returned, as they say “to glory” in a farm shed at the Foxton Fizztival early in 2020. They like small towns, as one of their songs makes clear.
Now they get to prove their mettle as a four piece with more songs in the quiver, taking their Paekākāriki living room aesthetic to the next stage.
See them in Paekākāriki here or Wellington here. It’s clear its going to be quite a while before The New Things are The Old Things.
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