New From NZ: Trust Punks, Hamish Kilgour, Team Ugly, Lttle Phnx

Brattiness and prettiness collide in our latest roundup of NZ offerings.

– We’ve been following Trust Punks for a while, from their first Aussie tour last October to Everett True praising their “fuckable guitar sound”. Now the Auckland five-piece have become the latest in a long line of Kiwi bands signed to Sydney’s Spunk Records. The debut LP Discipline is due out November 14, with a second Aussie visit planned for sometime this summer. The record includes previous single ‘Prone Hold’ (hear a new mix of it below) as well as new single ‘Gordian Knot’. While the former boasted a shimmering guitar prettiness to its prickly post-punk (think Oxford Collapse), ‘Gordian Knot’ tips the balance slightly towards the band’s more erratic side, with alternate math-y and serrated guitar as well as bratty vocal harmonies. But it’s still real melodic and plenty catchy.

– It’s hard to believe that, after all his years spent in both The Clean and The Mad Scene (among other beloved Flying Nun bands), Hamish Kilgour is only now releasing his first solo album. Judging from the below tune ‘Crazy Radiance’, All of It and Nothing is more in the direction of The Mad Scene’s unravelled pop ditties than The Clean’s more noisy and droning tangents. Recorded in Brooklyn with The Ladybug Transistor’s Gary Olson, who accompanied Kilgour at times and co-wrote some of the songs, the album is out now on CD and vinyl through the excellent US label Ba Da Bing.

– Team Ugly spend a fair bit of time living up to their name, from the grotesque NSFW video for ‘You Are What You Eat’ to the above cover image for their new EP Meat Prize. (Although, to be fair, that was part of a performance art piece.) But the ugliness doesn’t stop there: the EP’s four songs are about sexual failure (‘Why Won’t Anybody Have Sex With Me’), excessive boozing (‘No More Dry Nights’), dismal dead-end jobs (‘Working For Mr. Right’) and “sucking” (‘Conserve and Destroy’). The Auckland quartet are still obnoxious in a fun way, with shouty guy/girl vocals maximising their worn-on-sleeve anxieties. Out on tape via Christchurch’s unstoppable Melted Ice Cream collective or as an any-price download via the link above, the EP follows last year’s likeminded Screaming in Tongues EP. Keep on keeping it ugly, guys.

– Lttle Phnx is another high-gloss nugget from Kiwi goldmine Crystal Magic. The work of Wellington “producer, dancer and fantasist” Lucy Beeler, the project takes synth-pop to far deeper realms than usual. Following on from last year’s debut album, the new four-song EP Pyrexia overlaps Beeler’s vocals on the opening title track and breaks out a disembodied kind of cosmic funk all over. Like most releases on the label, it’s available as an any-price download or on limited CD with enhanced digital content. Fans of Bachelorette and Scraps should especially find a lot to love here.

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To nominate new music for this column, email us at news@messandnoise.com.