MNZ Interview: Ones To Watch: Heidi Simpson

Live Nation’s Ones To Watch lands at Auckland’s Tuning Fork on Wednesday 23 September, pairing Heidi Simpson’s widescreen dream pop with the jazz-house pulse of Ethan Jupe’s Dawson and Jessica Bailey’s intimate indie-folk project Fables. Following a standout Wellington showcase at San Fran, the gig continues the programme’s knack for putting emerging Aotearoa artists on stages built for their next leap; ahead of the show, Tim Gruar spoke with all three performers about their beginnings, creative partnerships and the new music they are ready to bring into the room—starting with Heidi Simpson.

There is a useful contradiction at the centre of Simpson’s music: it sounds airy, but it is not vague. The synths may arrive in soft-focus waves and the guitars may glow around the edges, yet the songs themselves are sharply observed—little emotional weather reports from the point where a relationship, a friendship or a former version of yourself starts changing shape.

That distinction matters when Simpson is filed under “dream-pop”, a label now loose enough to cover almost anything with chorus pedals and a cloudy vocal. She knows the lineage—yes, Cocteau Twins, she says — but her map extends well beyond it, into the gleaming urgency of The Naked and Famous, electronic pop, grungier guitar music and whatever else happens to produce the right feeling. “When I’m making stuff, I don’t usually try and make it a specific sound,” she says. “It’s quite instinctive.”

Simpson began writing at nine or ten, then more regularly as a teenager. Her father taught her guitar by teaching her songs rather than exercises; the first she remembers was Brooke Fraser’s Deciphering Me. “It was learning how to play songs and learning the chords and singing with him,” she says. Primary-school bands followed, giving her an early sense that songs were not simply things you heard—they were things you could inhabit, rearrange and eventually write yourself.

Simpson did not come through music school. Her education has been messier and perhaps more useful: family, school bands, Laiika, sessions that led somewhere, sessions that did not, friends whose music she admires and an Auckland scene small enough for paths to keep crossing. “I’ve been really lucky with the people I’ve met throughout the years,” she says. “I have friends who I really love and respect, and love their music, who actually want to help me and believe in me.”

In high school she met Grace Moller through their parents. They became an official duo at 16, forming Laiika and beginning the kind of apprenticeship no classroom can quite reproduce: writing together, testing material, touring Aotearoa, releasing an EP and reaching stages including Rhythm & Vines. “Collaborating in general in that time was super helpful for finding my voice and how I wrote songs,” Simpson says. “Having someone to bounce off” taught her how to interrogate an idea without squeezing the life out of it.

The pair also wrote with Moller’s father (Voom’s Buzz Moller), who taught songwriting at MAINZ. They sometimes sat in on his lectures, absorbing the craft beneath the sparkle. Laiika gave Simpson “a really good base” in structure, storytelling and collaboration, but it also gave her something equally useful: a point of departure.

When Laiika ended, Simpson did not sprint toward a rebrand. She took roughly two years before releasing solo music, using the gap to write, listen and grow into the person who would have to stand behind the songs alone. “I tapped into more of what felt super authentic to me,” she says. “Honestly, I think just becoming more myself was super helpful for my songwriting.”

That solo catalogue began with the bright, slightly bruised “What’s on TV?” in 2023, then widened through Vampire, icy girl, best kept secret, heart in danger, Messy and the nine-track late to the party. The EP collected songs made between 2021 and 2024—less a single clean statement than a scrapbook of several Heidi’s learnings in public. Its palette moves from reverb-drenched pop to sharper guitars and electronic lift, but the centre holds: a soft-spoken melodic instinct and writing alert to anxiety, identity and the weird administrative burden of your early twenties.

“It was cool to take everything I learned and then try and really figure out what was actually me,” she says. That has meant allowing songs to look different without treating variety as a branding crisis. “If it’s true and authentic, and is an expression of something that I’m feeling, then I hope that it’ll fit together.”

Simpson’s music may carry the pearlescent drift of 80’s dream pop, but nostalgia is only one pigment. On Letting Love Die, that haze sharpens into a widescreen rush: glassy synths, a pulsing electronic undercurrent and a chorus built to turn private heartbreak into something almost euphoric. “I wanted to make a song that was sort of inspired by that (2010’s electro-pop) sound, like what Naked and Famous did” she says.

For Simpson, production is less a matter of decorating a demo than discovering the shape already hiding inside it. “It always kind of feels like solving an imaginary puzzle,” she says. “I can feel what the whole song should feel like, and then it’s slowly figuring out where the pieces go.” That explains the scale of her best work: a bedroom thought can suddenly bloom into something that feels built for headlights, festival fields and the exact moment your confidence returns.

Josh Naley has become the central creative partner. He produced several tracks on the EP and almost the entire forthcoming album, bringing speed, fluency and a refusal to over-direct. Sometimes she arrives with a completed song; sometimes with a self-produced demo; sometimes Naley starts a track and she writes into its atmosphere. “There’s a nice balance of each other’s ideas. It always happens very naturally.”

Eddie Johnston, better known as Lontalius, is mixing the album and joins Simpson and Naley in the live band. These are not hired hands standing outside the work; they are friends who already know the songs from the inside. “I’m good friends with both of them,” Simpson says. “It’s really fun.” As an independent artist, she acknowledges how it can be difficult to balance being an artist, working and life. “I’m just grateful that I have friends to help me out with creating the music.”

The timing is good. The song, Letting Love Die, has passed 120,000 streams, while the first run of solo singles earned editorial-playlist support. Simpson is wary of mistaking metrics for meaning, but momentum is momentum: the audience has begun to catch up with the person she spent those quieter years becoming.

The forthcoming 11-track debut album is now recorded, with final masters and rollout details being completed. Saying Goodnight, released in September, became its fourth single, following songs including Letting Love Die, Sunday Sad and Back to the Fever. Simpson says another single, Fool of Me will be coming out at the end of the month, so we’ll be looking out for that.

If late to the party was a set of snapshots made by “many different versions” of Simpson, the album promises a more deliberate frame: largely one producer, one emerging live unit and a songwriter less interested in proving range than following feeling wherever it leads. Early reception has centred on the scale and immediacy of the singles, especially Letting Love Die; the track’s streaming response suggests that the combination of private detail and festival-sized lift is connecting.

What has changed most is Simpson’s confidence in leaving the edges visible. The material can be cinematic without pretending certainty. “The feeling of it is always the most important thing in a song,” she says. “When I’m listening to music, it’s not like I only listen to songs of this genre. It’s always just about whether you resonate with it or not.”

The next test is Live Nation’s Ones To Watch at Auckland’s Tuning Fork on 23 September, where Simpson will appear with Dawson and Fables. It will be the first time she performs these new songs with Naley and Johnston in her band. They had rehearsed immediately before our conversation. “It sounded good,” she says. “I’m really excited to play the new songs because I haven’t actually played them yet.”

She has not played live for around a year, but the gap has created anticipation rather than rust. “I feel confident in my artist project,” she says. “I’ve worked really hard at these songs, and I’m just excited to actually be able to get up and play them.” The plan after that is a first headline show, more regular performances and, if the calendars align, a Pōneke date before year’s end.

There is no need to oversell the trajectory. Simpson has already done the precocious-duo chapter, the patient reset, the exploratory EP and the useful work of finding collaborators who know when to add something and when to get out of the way. “If I was generally describing my sound, I would say I’m an alternative pop artist with influences of dream pop, indietronica and shoegaze,” Simpson says “I just try and focus on the feeling.”

It sounds simple, almost suspiciously so. But that may be the mature move: not pinning the song to a genre before it has learned how to breathe, and not confusing polish with personality. Her sound will not float away. It remembers where it came from, then finds a bigger room.

Live Nation’s Ones To Watch, featuring Heidi Simpson, Dawson and Fables, arrives at Auckland’s Tuning Fork on Wednesday 23 September 2026.