Release Roundup & Playlist: Danse Macabre, CCTV, Huia, Theia, Void Waves, Goodbye Starlet, Mel Parsons, Sam Cullen x Brody Leigh

Revisit our past week's coverage of Beastwars, Tom Scott, birdlings flat and O/PUS, read our interview with Swedish punk veterans No Fun At All (playing in Auckland next month), then scroll downwards for more new / recent Aotearoa release highlights from Danse Macabre, CCTV, Huia, Theia, Void Waves, Goodbye Starlet, Mel Parsons, and Sam Cullen x Brody Leigh.

Scope out the UTR Roundup Playlist below, a rolling weekly playlist keeping you in the loop with every new release we've featured on the site over the past month. Only including tracks available on streaming services of course, which has been an increasingly hot topic this year.

Are you an Aotearoa artist / imprint releasing something new soon? Let us know — send your info including links to editor@undertheradar.co.nz.

Volume 1 is the debut collection from Te Whanganui-a-Tara's Danse Macabre (no relation to the Aotearoa post-punks with the same name), an intersection of cavernous trip-hop / downbeat electronica and haunted dream-pop, echoing to these ears the noirish textures of such fellow travellers as a.s.o. and Georgia Knight. If these ensorcelling post-Lynch tunes doesn't go down a treat with SRN listeners I'll eat my hat, perhaps chased with an industrial strength black coffee or three.

Soon letting rip at Grrunk festival in Galatea on 6th December (nab tickets HERE), Tāmaki Makaurau punkers CCTV go one step further than Iggy Pop himself, baring their fangs and fully becoming animalised on new single 'Dog'.

Embodying the transformative, burgeoning movement of Hiko – named by Lady Shaka to describe te reo Māori electronica — Huia's bass bin-rattling new album Kawakawa "delves deep into themes encapsulated by the Kawakawa plant, an important Māori rongoā (medicine) with healing and restorative properties like the music we make, which is woven into the album's core kaupapa (theme). Every waiata / song on the album has a visual world wrapped around with translations, which can be experienced on the KAWAKAWA portal — HERE." 

Aotearoa electronic-pop maverick Theia's new single is an unexpected but very welcome swerve into time-warping avant-folk, collaborating with US songwriter Jolie Holland on My 'Sister’s Hands In Mine' — to be featured on Theia's forthcoming debut album GIRL, IN A SAVAGE WORLD. "I had the idea and melody for the song floating around in my head and Jolie was the first person who came to mind when I started to think of someone I’d want to collaborate with. I’m a big fan of Jolie’s music and all that she stands for."

No stranger to a shadowy tone, Tāmaki Makaurau's Void Waves' deeply reverberated new single 'Thru My Head' "is a goth-wave ode to the grey of winter and the longing for brighter days" — backed with mutant club instrumental 'I feel more like I do now'. 

Goodbye Starlet were recent special guests for Aotearoa's globe-trotting Hans Pucket, a pairing that feels inspired upon listening to the Ōtautahi foursome's emotive, power-pop hook-packed 'Wonder of Science / Lily in the Afternoon'.

Ōtautahi icon Mel Parsons' newest single 'Don't Leave the Light On' is an eminently catchy, yet resolutely unsentimental, unpacking her own experiences of emotional manipulation and relationship abuse. "Anyone listening closely to the lyrics in my songs would have picked up that this is not a new subject matter for me. But this is the first time I’ve spoken so explicitly about being in an abusive relationship - not of physical violence, but of insidiously controlling, belittling, gaslighting and pervasively negative behaviour. I don’t usually discuss publicly what specific songs are about, but now it feels like enough time has passed that I am able to. Honestly, I’d rather just sing my songs, but I am speaking up in case my story reaches someone who sees themselves in me and who needs to hear it."

Not in fact a cover of Cate Le Bon's very lovely song with the same title, 'Home To You' is a stratospheric, heart-bursting collaboration between Aotearoa rock-pop voyager Sam Cullen and Tāmaki-based Brody Leigh, launched with a springtime visual mini-tour of the super city directed by Hugo Wallace.