MNZ Interview: A.R.T.

It’s shaping up to be a seriously sparkling year for Anastasia Surila, Rosetta Lopa and Tiresa Siatiu Fomai – AKA T‑R3X. The Porirua vocal trio, better known as A.R.T. head into the 2026 Pacific Music Awards with five nominations, which is not so much a gentle pat on the back as a full confetti cannon. Sitting alongside Sam V as one of this year’s most-nominated acts, A.R.T. are finalists for FLAVA Best Pacific Group for Nana’s Garage and Blank Canvas, the Pacific Media Network Best Pacific Language, Best Pacific Soul/RnB Artist, NZ On Air Best Pacific Music Video for Over Now, directed by Michael Hunt, and Recorded Music NZ Te Tino Pukaemi Moana Nui a Kiwa o te Tau | Best Pacific Music Album for Blank Canvas. The winners will be announced on Wednesday 12 August at the Due Drop Events Centre in Manukau, as the Pacific Music Awards celebrate 22 years of Pacific music across Aotearoa and the wider Moana region.

Last Wednesday, during a lunch break, Tim Gruar dialled up these tamaitai ofoofogia (fabulous women) to congratulate them and find out a bit more about the group. They were crammed into a car in downtown Pōneke, laughing, joking, and generally sounding like the best kind of chaos on four wheels. There was plenty of fiafia energy, for certain! Their positivity was so infectious it should probably come with a public health warning.

For all three, the scale of the recognition still feels slightly unreal. Asked how it felt to lead the nominations, one member laughed at the improbability of it all: “We still really can’t believe it… one nomination, or even just being in it, but five – that’s insane.” Insane, yes – but also deserved. For A.R.T., whose name comes from the first initials of Anastasia, Rosetta and T-R3X, the nominations recognise more than a decade of singing together, from Brandon Intermediate in Porirua to major stages, supporting Hawaiian superstar Josh Tatofi, viral moments and award-night outfit dilemmas.

From bedroom covers to an international tour with Hawai’i-born Tongan musician Josh Tatofi, Porirua trio A.R.T. – Anastasia, Rosetta and Tiresa – have spent more than a decade blending R&B, gospel and island reggae through live shows and viral YouTube covers, later joining forces with IKON Music and award-winning producer EDYONTHEBEAT; their collaboration with Myshaan on the Sāmoan-language version of Carry My Heart/Lo’u Loto E Pulea has reached 11 million YouTube music plays, and in 2026 they have launched an ambitious plan to release a new track on the first Thursday of every month.

Their origin story is pleasingly low-tech and very Pacific: school, lunchtime, local gigs, bedroom harmonies, and the sort of friendship that quietly turns into family before anyone remembers to make it official. “We met at intermediate,” they recall. “Anastasia and Rosetta… I happened to audition for it, and so we started doing a lot of gigs together, local gigs. Lunchtimes we were hanging out, just jamming. And yeah, been together ever since.” From there came viral covers, TVNZ’s Popstars, a partnership with IKON Music, and a sound that happily invites R&B, gospel, island soul, “Poly-reggae” and pop to the same potluck.

That sound is inseparable from who they are. Rosetta is of Tokelauan descent, T-R3X is Samoan, and Anastasia is of Samoan and Tokelauan heritage. Asked what makes their music Pacific, the answer came quickly and confidently: “We never want to be boxed in, but what makes music Pacific is our lineage – who we are and the blood that runs through us. We come from the islands of Tokelau, Samoa… anything we do, whether it be Polynesian or whatever – who knows, we might do a rock song one day – but it’s just who we are.” A.R.T. doing a rock song? “Honestly, at this point, why not?” The amps are waiting.

The village details matter too, and the trio were delighted that the question was even asked. When the conversation turned to villages and whakapapa, one member responded warmly, “I love that you’re mentioning it.” Anastasia Surila says her heritage, her gafa looks to Lauli’i, Samoa and Fakaofo, Tokelau; Rosetta is Fakaofo, Tokelau; and T‑R3X traces her roots to Gataivai and Asau, Savai’i, Samoa. It was a lovely little moment – no grand speech, no drum roll, just the clear sense that where they come from is not an optional footnote. It is part of the music’s wiring. Personally, I think it’s really important to talk about who you are and where you’re from, and A.R.T. were very much on board with that.

That rootedness also helps explain why the trio have not packed a van, waved goodbye to Porirua and rushed north to chase the bright lights of Tāmaki Makaurau. Asked if they had ever been tempted to move, the answer came back with the speed of someone swatting away a bad idea (with plenty of giggling to go with it): “Absolutely not.” Porirua is not just where A.R.T. started; it is part of their flavour. In a music world that loves a tidy rebrand, A.R.T. are gloriously themselves – three Pacific women from Porirua, carrying family, church, island roots and enough harmony to make a room behave.

Nana’s Garage (2025), one of the releases behind their nominations, makes that family world sing. It was spawned from a need to get music out after recent touring. The EP also grew out of songs they had grown up with, reimagined through the A.R.T. filter – which, judging by the results, comes with extra warmth, extra harmony and possibly a plate of something delicious at the door. “For Nana’s Garage, we wanted to reimagine music that we had grown up around,” one member explains. “All of the songs on that EP are covers of beautiful songs we grew up with, just put our own A.R.T. flavour on it. They’ve just become new versions of our memories.”

And yes, before anyone starts reaching for an artsy interpretation, the garage was real. Not just in a metaphorical sense, with moody lighting and a press release, but an actual building. “Nana’s Garage is mattresses, couches, everything,” they say. “That was our comfort zone growing up. Where I found the love for music. Where we’d hang out.” When asked if it was an actual garage, the reply was wonderfully blunt: “Yes, an actual garage.” Case closed. Someone pass the Milo.

But the title also opens into something bigger: those Pacific family spaces where the food is plentiful, the music is constant, someone is laughing too loudly, and there is always at least one cousin asleep somewhere unexpected. “For other people, it could be your nana’s living room or the kitchen, your uncle’s,” they say. Sundays were especially important: “For Pacific Islanders, Sundays were a huge day for us because that’s when we’re all together for the whole day… and music was always a huge part.” The invitation at the heart of the EP is simple and generous: “We just want to invite people to the garage.”

If Nana’s Garage is the warm family room of memory, Blank Canvas is A.R.T. clearing the table and saying, right, what shall we try now? “Blank Canvas was us wanting to start fresh,” they explain. “We don’t have a set genre or a set storyline that we wanted to go. We just wanted to try anything and everything, and just refresh, start new.” That adventurous streak helps explain why their Pacific Music Awards nominations spread across group, language, R&B, video and album categories. They are not simply being recognised for staying in one lane; they are being recognised for indicating left, turning right, reversing, doing a three-point turn and still arriving bang on time.

Their writing process sounds equally communal, instinctive and entertainingly ungovernable. “We all do,” they say when asked who writes the songs. “We don’t really have a set process.” Sometimes that means working with artists and producers including Sammy Johnson and IKON Music’s Avina Kelekolio, Tana Tupa’i and Hennie Tui – names connected with Tomorrow People and the Wellington/Pōneke reggae scene. Other times it is more immediate: sitting together, listening, talking, singing, disagreeing, laughing, and somehow emerging with a song. “We kind of just sit down, have a jam, listen to some music, everyone gets to talking,” they say. “All of the music that we make [is] about private things in our lives… basically from our stories and our own life experience.”

Naturally, the creative process is not always a calm committee meeting with herbal tea and action points. In earlier interviews, the trio have joked about their creative differences, and in this conversation they describe the process with excellent honesty: “Just sit down in a circle and have a fight, and then whoever wins gets the ideas.” Beneath the laughter, though, is a serious musical instinct. The harmonies arrive through feel rather than formula. “You’ll feel it,” one says of knowing when a song is right. Another adds that the first capture is often as simple as a phone recording: “That’s exactly how it goes.” Somewhere, a million-dollar studio just quietly felt insecure.

The jump from garage memories to major stages has been brisk enough to make your aunty ask if you have eaten. A.R.T. have opened for Hawaiian artist Josh Tatofi on a sold-out tour across Australia and New Zealand, an experience that helped create demand for the Nana’s Garage covers. “A lot of Nana’s Garage covers were some on that tour,” they explain. “That was also one of the reasons why it came about, because everyone wanted the covers to be released.” In other words, the people heard the harmonies and politely demanded receipts.

They have also represented Aotearoa on official Prime Ministerial delegations to Tonga and Samoa, performing at private functions and meeting royalty – as one does, casually, between gigs. Even now, they sound slightly stunned by it. “We were just approached via email about the whole thing,” one says. “We thought it was a scam.” Fair enough. Most people would need at least three follow-up emails and a phone call from someone’s cousin before believing they were being invited to sing for royalty. Instead, A.R.T. found themselves travelling for a week, performing at private dinners, boarding official flights and learning unfamiliar languages so they could honour the rooms they were entering. “We had to learn a lot of languages we weren’t familiar with,” they say, “just to give them a taste of what we represented – New Zealand and our beautiful island nations.”

For all the jokes and big laughs, A.R.T. are also very aware of what they represent. They are a female Pacific trio from Porirua, moving through spaces that have not always been built with young Pacific women front and centre. “The biggest thing is that we are female,” they say. “A female trio from Porirua.” The sentence trails into laughter and unfinished thought in the transcript, but the meaning does not need polishing with a highlighter: A.R.T. know their presence matters. They are not waiting politely at the door. They are already inside, harmonising in three parts.

By the time the 2026 Pacific Music Awards roll around, A.R.T. will already have plenty of momentum behind them. They won Best Group and the Radio Airplay Award at the Pacific Music Awards in 2025, and their recent releases – including When He Was Mine, Easy, Nana’s Garage and Blank Canvas – have helped turn a long-running friendship into one of the warmest Pacific music stories of the moment. This year’s nominations feel less like a surprise arrival and more like everyone else finally noticing what the garages, churches, vans, studios and Sunday gatherings already knew: these three can really, really sing.

Of course, awards week still brings the important questions: what are they wearing, are they performing, and can they please reveal the secret thing they absolutely will not reveal? Asked about outfits, the trio admit they have been stressing. Asked whether they will perform at the ceremony, they confirm they will – but when pressed for details, they keep the vault firmly shut: “That’s a secret.” I joke that they can tell me because I’m in an empty room and I won’t share. “No, you’re not,” Rosetta fires back, spotting my postcard-perfect Zoom background from a recent trip. “You’re in Samoa!” Ah, then everyone will know in about five minutes. “Oh, yes! Ha ha!”

What is not secret is what A.R.T. carry with them – and they carry it joyfully, loudly, and probably with someone laughing in the background. They carry Porirua. They carry Samoa and Tokelau. They carry church harmonies, family Sundays, cousins in garages, phone-recorded melodies, hard conversations, huge laughter, and the confidence to let a song become whatever it needs to become. Five nominations may be the headline, but the deeper story is even better: three women who have turned memory into music, friendship into a sound, and Nana’s Garage into one of the warmest invitations in Pacific music right now.