Album Review: Holding My Cold Hand, Even Though Yours Is Warm

Menzies have released their debut alt-country, part-concept album Holding My Cold Hand, Even Though Yours Is Warm. Lead singer Chris Brown’s story-led songwriting pulls from deeply New Zealand experiences: Suzy Cato, romantic feelings towards All Blacks, tūī bird-song, trays of sausage rolls, Don McGlashan.

It’s always a win hearing a New Zealand band lean into their own accent. Authenticity hits harder than polish ever could, though hearing the word “backpack” land as “bick pick” is hard to ignore, and somehow makes it more endearing.

Chris Brown’s storytelling vocals on ‘Appy, delivered by an ex-working magician, is rough in the best way, it’s gritty, immediate, and unmistakably Kiwi. There’s a performative edge to it that feels half-spoken, half-lived, sitting somewhere between Dry Cleaning’s deadpan minimalism and the chaotic sprawl of Tropical Fuck Storm. Across the record, you can also hear echoes of Cocteau Twins, Mogwai, and Pavement, but nothing feels imitative. It’s all been digested and reshaped into something distinctly its own.

What really lands is the writing. This is everyday New Zealand life, refracted through frustration, restlessness, and a kind of quiet, simmering aggression. Appy captures that tension perfectly, pushing against the monotony of normality. These songs don’t just feel relatable, they feel located. Menzies in particular drops you into Wellington (where Menzies are based) and lets it unfold in full, the dull, the tender, the sentimental, and everything in between, without ever romanticising it.

Suzy Cato is a perfect local touchstone. If you grew up in New Zealand, it hits instantly, if not, like myself, it still works as a nostalgic, almost childlike lens into a very specific cultural memory. Crouching channels early Pavement energy, it’s loose, scrappy, but intentional, while the spoken-word All Black delivers one of the record’s sharpest lines: “I always wanted to be pummelled by an All Black.”

“I’m Screeching About You,” from Triptych, is the album’s standout track for me. It feels like the entire record condensed into one sharp, unraveling moment.

Holding My Cold Hand, Even Though Yours Is Warm, closes things out perfectly, funny, bleak, ambitious, and quietly devastating all at once, sitting somewhere between intimacy and collapse.

The album was recorded and mixed by James Goldsmith (known for DARTZ and Mermaidens) at The Surgery and mastered by Vivek Gabriel (Avondale Bowling Club, ONONO).