Almost everything in this hour is younger than the month. In The Mix rounds up the new music highlights, and we open on the two records currently sitting in the New Zealand top thirty — KATSEYE‘s “Animal”, written for them by Ed Sheeran after he heard one of their songs on holiday and asked if he could have a go, and STELLA LEFTY‘s “Boston”, a song she wrote alone at a piano because her co-writers were running late and which has spent six months quietly climbing the charts of four countries. Carly Rae Jepsen follows with a track she set out to write as her own ABBA song, and then it’s over to Dublin for three: Kodaline, saying goodbye after fourteen years with the first taste of their final album; The Script, three days into a new record; and Jazzy, who was stacking shelves in a Dublin Tesco not long ago and spent this summer on stage with Calvin Harris, with a song about missing home while the touring never stops.
The back half goes looking for guitars. Nothing But Thieves have gone back to the studio where they cut their first album, Brooke Combe is working with James Skelly of The Coral in Liverpool, and The Rubens have written a song about being young and flown to New York by American record labels who took them to the ice hockey. Then three you almost certainly haven’t heard: The Crooks, a Chesterfield five-piece who quietly stopped in 2021 and came back three years later to sold-out rooms; Crawlers, down to a trio and out on a new label, with a song their singer sums up as “in every dark moment we’ve ever been in, the one thing that we have in common is being alive at the same time”; and Mark Ambor, who took “Belong Together” to the top twenty in this country and wrote his new one on a walk. We finish with Dasha, Jungle and James Blunt, whose first new music in three years is a summer song landing in the middle of a New Zealand winter. Two threads you’ll notice by the end: seven of these fifteen records came out on the same Friday — 14 August — and between the five biggest names here there are dozens of tour dates announced for the next eighteen months, not one of them in New Zealand.
Tracklist
- KATSEYE — Animal
- STELLA LEFTY — Boston
- Carly Rae Jepsen — Don’t Leave Me on the Dance Floor
- Kodaline — Back to Me
- The Script — Grow Old with Grace — The User's Guide to Being Human
- Jazzy — My People
- Nothing But Thieves — Baby Kool (Evelyn)
- Brooke Combe — Love Was Made of Stone
- The Rubens — Love Me America
- The Crooks — Always
- Crawlers — ALL WE HAVE IS US — TURN OFF THE TV
- Mark Ambor — The Proof
- Dasha — Memo
- Jungle — Sunshine
- James Blunt — Tastes Like Summer
