For the first and last time, Henry Oliver gives his definitive account of The Spinoff’s best New Zealand music of 2018. Read it and get angry. Here it is, my ten best albums and ten best songs, all from Aoteroa, all released in 2018. The one rule: appearance on one list disqualifies that artist from … Read more
David Farrier finds out why some men are paying Auckland musician Princess Chelsea hundreds of dollars for one song. Princess Chelsea is one of my favourite New Zealand musicians. Some of her songs are massive and big, like this one which has 40 million views on YouTube. Others are a bit smaller, like ‘Yulia‘ (only … Read more
Jonathan Bree travels back in time to Soviet Russia for this exclusive interview. Anastasia Doniants, part of the ‘Inside the Iron Curtain’ creative team, writes: Why should we expect our artists to have something to say, to become experts on subjects they don’t really care about? They’ve done their work, why not preserve the mystique … Read more
Yesterday, on Facebook and Twitter, Chelsea Nikkel, known to many as Princess Chelsea, accused St Vincent of plagiarising her labelmate Jonathan Bree at Coachella. Today for The Spinoff, she expands on her argument. Ok, so I did an angry ranty Facebook post including some words in ALL CAPS claiming that St Vincent ripped-off Jonathan Bree’s … Read more
The Spinoff presents the video premiere of Jonathan Bree’s ‘Valentine’, just in time for a heart-broken Valentine’s Day! ‘Valentine’ director of photography Kermath says: I’m so sick of love songs; they’re so absolutely done. People draw on this falsified world of love through music, trying to make their relationships work as though the instructions are set out … Read more
The Spinoff presents the video premiere of ‘You’re So Cool’ by Jonathan Bree, and the video’s director of photography, Benjamin Zambo, explains how it was made. Jonathan pitched ‘You’re So Cool’ to me as a performance-based music video in the style of a mod era TV broadcast. We were both big fans of the 1960s and … Read more