Exciting news! New music from Ōtepoti, Dunedin band HA THE UNCLEAR is here.
The band will release ‘A Kingdom in a Cul-de-sac’, an album featuring exciting new releases alongside highlight tracks from the back catalogue in January 2024.
The band hopes this new collection of work will give listeners “The need to move themselves a little bit, click fingers, clap hands, then sit in a comfortable chair. An attunement to the links between silly and serious.”
The first new single ‘Fish’ releases today, October 20. “Fish is a song about feeling powerless, an exploration of agency” say the band. “The intro/outro jangle riff came first and the rest of the song was built around that. I wanted to keep the melody really simple like springsteen or something and for some reason kept hearing The Magic Numbers in the bass hook. Andy the producer had his classroom sing BVs on it which elevated it and added a whole new dimension. “
Ha the Unclear, who formed in Dunedin, but later migrated northward to Auckland have recently signed with Paris-based label Think Zik !. The band has been warmly embraced by French audiences with playlisting on significant national radio including Europe 2, FIP, RTL 2, and France Inter and a milieu of college radio taste harbingers. 2023’s Handprint Negatives EP was recently released in the EU to critical acclaim with French press describing it as “a sweet madness” (Rolling Stone), “a real triumph…maybe confirmation of a major band” (Benzine) and a “spontaneous enthusiasm with a feeling of freshness” (Revue Pop Moderne).
Early singles ‘Growing Mould’ and ‘Secret Lives of Furniture’ saw the band played extensively on student radio, more success followed with ‘Invisible Lines’ reaching #9 on the NZ Album Charts and 2020 elevator anthem ‘Strangers’ hitting #1 on the Radioscope Alternative Airplay Charts. Accompanying this, the band released a series of mind-bending music videos featuring a room full of furniture meddling in the life of their owner (‘Secret Lives of Furniture’), an astronaut crash landing on a foreign planet (‘Kosmonavt’), and the emergency delivery of a baby puppet in a broken elevator (‘Strangers’). The latter track was later released on the ‘Threads’ EP alongside the Sylvia Massy co-produced 'Julius Caesar’ and time travel lament ‘Supermarket Queues.’
Fish is out now, October 20, 2023.