Release Roundup: Mercury Fèng, Pickle Darling, TL Stamp, The Phoenix Foundation, Miles Calder + More

The silly season has arrived. While we gear up for our jumbo-stacked UTR end of year features (tune in next week), revisit out interviews with Aotearoa alt-rockers Erase Everything, Australian songwriting star Julia Jacklin (visiting our shores this week this Phantastic Ferniture) and EDM superstar Ninajirachi, listen up to the debut solo album from Ōtautahi avant-folk songwriter Martin Sagadin, and peruse a crop of new / recent local highlights from Mercury Fèng, Pickle Darling, TL Stamp, The Phoenix Foundation, Miles Calder, What Kind of Human Have I Become, Planet Hunter, and Salad Boys.

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 divisive topic in recent months, opening up discussion around the idea of ethical art consumption.

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

Te Whanganui-a-Tara electronic innovator Lucy Beeler returns reborn as Mercury Fèng, setting the internet aflame with a new video for 'Heaving', a slo-mo standout from this year's archive for humble stones (originally credited as Fèng). Mercury Fèng transcends office drone ambiance with stylish karaoke vision-scapes co-directed with Ted Black and Hemi Hemingway — if this is the shape of Aotearoa musical entertainment in 2026, then bring on the new year.

crumple zones is a new EP complimenting Ōtautahi bedroom pop artist Pickle Darling's exceptional latest album Bots — featuring alternate takes on 'human bean' and 'massive everything', plus a beautifully fragile, gracefully looping duet with US songwriter Anna McClellan.

Aotearoa's closest equivalent to John Peel, when Tony Stamp isn't a necessary bastion of musical adventurousness on RNZ's airwaves (scooping up the Outstanding Music Journalism Award along the way), he's hunkering down crafting tunes as TL Stamp. Stamp's 'Dersu Uzala' is a soundtrack-worthy whirlpool of time-warping guitar strum, percussive clatter and contemplative, Tangerine Dream-adjacent synths. I can image this tune slotting in well amidst the (currently on hiatus?) flaw-free Strangelove Music catalogue. "Dersu Uzala is a character from an Akira Kurosawa film. You can hear him singing midway through the track."

A headline-gazing Samuel Flynn Scott declares "Better get out the guillotine," as billionaires whittle down all other options (with a helping hand from our current lot in the Beehive) in The Phoenix Foundation's new rock single 'Vampire Class'. I can hear a touch of chugging Superette ominousness in the Te Whanganui-a-Tara collective's protest anthem, twisted into cinematic melodrama via the directorial vision of Callum Devlin and Annabel Kean aka Sports Team.

Also featuring Samuel Flynn Scott on backing vocals, Te Whanganui-a-Tara songwriter Miles Calder is back with some friendly advice in song, 'Go Slow'. Calder braved the waves to create coastal visuals for his tranquil psych-pop ballad, leisurely bopping above and below the crashing surf. "Even the making of this tune was slow and ponderous. It started with just an acoustic guitar in my bedroom, a simple meditation on choosing your pace in life."

What Kind of Human Have I Become are the noise-pop team-o supreme-o of Matthew Plunkett (Cuticles, The Trendees), Stefan Neville (Pumice, O/PUS) and Ben Holmes (Oxsun Ox), so you already know the first four tunes revealed online from their debut album Memory Gut are the bees knees. Preorder the limited cassette from Soft Abuse, look forward to the album's full release on 6th February and ponder the notion that sonic kings stroll amongst us.

Doom metal and sizzling summer days. Crawling back out from our capital's subterranean underbelly, Planet Hunter's cranking 'One Thousand Years From Now' is the mega-riff-fuelled lead track from their upcoming album Soothsayer. Filmed by Cormac Ferris and Joseph James, the accompanying vid disrupts the peace in garage band style, sporting sparklers, silly string, an exercycle (?) plus the necessary component: beers.

Playing the Ride On Super Sound Ruins Christmas fundraiser this Saturday at Space Academy in Ōtautahi, Salad Boys make a mighty surprise return with Reconstruction Of The Fables, "Three covers from R.E.M.'s mid-80s classic Fables Of The Reconstruction, in celebration of its 40th anniversary"!