Album Review: Te Ngahere

I just thought of a great headline – Te Ngahere: Niccolo Piccolo Takes the Kids Bush – and spares the parents! If you’ve ever attempted a road trip with a pre-schooler, you know the family playlist is not a democracy. It’s a tiny, sticky-fingered junta. Bluey runs Treasury. The Wiggles control transport (so long as its red!). Dad may slip one adult song past the checkpoint (why is it always Dire Straits!). But that’s only until a little voice from the back seat demands “the bird one” with the calm authority of a nightclub bouncer and the threat of a force 10 hurricane tantrum (if things shouldn’t go their way). Yeah. You know the drill.

Into this rolling hostage situation steps Niccolo Piccolo, the tamariki-music character created by award-winning Aotearoa country-folk artist Nicola Mitchell (Ngāti Maniapoto), armed with a mandolin, a flock of native birds and a near-revolutionary proposition: educational children’s music does not have to make adults fantasise about driving off the nearest cliff due to terminal repetitive earworm gestation syndrome!

Her debut album, Te Ngahere, has just dropped, just in time for the start of Te Wiki o te Reo Māori and during Te Marama Pūoru Waiata Māori. It’s a fantastic 13-track bilingual tramp through te taiao: waka, manu, forest life, identity, movement and language itself. The timing is impeccable, but this is no commemorative worksheet in a cowboy hat. Mitchell’s country-folk instincts give the waiata a loose acoustic swing – mandolin, double bass, harmonies, yodelling and rhythms that know when to get out of the way – while te reo Māori and English share the front seat without squabbling. It is warm without getting woolly, educational without smelling of whiteboard marker, and vastly less sinister than discovering your child can recite a three-minute toothpaste ad word for word.

That country swing is no borrowed pair of boots. Mitchell and her twin sister Maegan released the EP Find a River as The Mitchell Twins in 2023, after appearing on older sister Jenny Mitchell’s live EP The Grainstore Sessions in 2020 and touring with her numerous times. If you’ve ever heard the twins singing, it’s goosebumps all the way, such is their delicious harmonising. For the family-country primer, cue up the APRA Best Country Song-nominated Find a River, then Reasons, Alone Again and Margaret’s Song; Mitchell also co-wrote the 2025 MLT Songwriting Award winner Wā/Time with Byllie-jean and THEIA.

The album, Te Ngahere (The Forest), is deliberately framed as a journey. Tukua Rā, a karakia whakatūwhera, opens the door with care and makes the house rules clear: this is shared space, not another sugar-powered novelty record engineered in a laboratory beneath a soft-play centre. Leave your empty fruit salad bowls elsewhere, please! Guest voices Quack Pirihi, Jazmin Tainui Mihi and Māwhero Kenny give the communal pieces breadth and warmth.

Then Mauri Ora kicks the pulse upward, celebrating wellbeing, vitality and the sheer voltage of being alive. It’s a bright number but doesn’t go berserk on the positivity. You don’t want cerebral tooth decay from over indulging on the candy coatings. Nah. This ain’t that.

Reinventing the classic awa paddling ode, Row My Waka understands a foundational law of children’s music: bolt words to an action and you are halfway to a hit. Rowing becomes rhythm, cooperation sneaks in disguised as play, and repetition gets everybody moving without turning the lounge into a compulsory team-building retreat. Tama te Tūī follows with a character sketch of one of Aotearoa’s great, feathered divas (well the ones in my kowhai tree certainly are!). Mitchell gives it a nimble country-folk setting, then wisely leaves enough room for the bird, the words and a child’s imagination to do the headline act.

Movement returns in Hurihuri, whose title cues turning and spinning. Sung in te reo Māori, it makes language physical: meaning comes through the knees and elbows before the dictionary gets a vote. This is one of Te Ngahere’s slyest moves. Repetition is not a blunt object wielded until parental surrender; it is an open invitation – hear it, move with it, have another go.

Kody the Kiwi introduces the nation’s famously flightless night-shifter without embalming him in educational solemnity. Kody is a character, not a fact sheet with a beak. Parents may recognise the type: awake at criminal hours, operating close to the floor and wholly uninterested in how the other birds behave.

Ko Wai Ahau asks the big question: who am I? Here, identity flows naturally from reo to self, whānau and place. Mitchell treats fluency opens the door, welcoming whānau “no matter where they’re at on their reo haerenga.” The warm, singable arrangement makes good on that promise.

Ka Kakakaka is the record’s arero whīwhiwhi – tongue twister – and its finest bit of verbal slapstick. Children get the thrill of sounds ricocheting around the room; adults get the character-building experience of being linguistically smoked by somebody who still wears gumboots on the wrong feet. Pirihi, Tainui Mihi and Kenny help turn practice into a lively group exchange. Crucially, the joke is never on te reo Māori. The fun lies in the attempt: listen, stumble, laugh, reload.

The title track, Te Ngahere, is the album’s green, beating heart. Inspired by the forest’s beauty and abundance, it gathers the record’s ideas – difference, interdependence, reo and the natural world – into one clean image: “Te rahinga o te ngahere te ātaahua o te ngahere,” or “The abundance of the forest is what makes it beautiful.”

That line could easily have arrived laminated, backlit and accompanied by the ominous swell of an Important Message. Instead, Mitchell keeps mud on its boots. A ngahere is beautiful because it teems with distinct life; community works the same way. The wisdom lands quietly, without hiring a string section to tell us when to feel improved.

I Te Ao I Te Pō widens the lens to day and night, giving the final stretch a gentle cosmic sweep. The Bellbirds and its reo Māori counterpart Ngā Korimako bring us back to birdsong, joining listening with naming. The paired perspectives dodge the dead-eyed trudge of a vocabulary test; young ears are simply invited to notice sound, pattern and connection. By now the album has built its own compact ecosystem. Waka glide through it, manu call across it, children whirl inside it – and nowhere does a cartoon excavator demand a seventh consecutive spin while its dead-eyed theme tune liquidates the last of your personality.

The players keep this miniature ecosystem on its feet. Michael Muggeridge’s mandolin flashes and skips; Michael Story’s double bass gives the songs an amiable, boot-wearing stride; Maegan Mitchell brings in some Topp Twins-type yodelling. Tom Broome’s mix and Troy Kelly’s engineering and mastering keep the vocals crisp – vital when the words are doing real work – while avoiding the antiseptic candy-shine that makes some kids’ records sound focus-grouped by a committee of grape flavoured juice boxes. Sickly sweet.

The contributions of mātanga reo Kommi Tamati-Elliffe and THEIA (Em-Haley Kukutai-Walker), alongside Mitchell’s APRA Aotearoa mentorship with Byllie-jean, are not prestige stickers slapped on the bonnet. They point to an album built through guidance, collaboration and care.

The formula has limits: its consistency can blur the middle stretch, and the optimism occasionally feels over-neat. But just remember who the primary audience are. Anyone after a six-minute guitar solo or an anthem on climate change radicalisation should probably reset their expectations meter. Built to be answered, copied and danced to, these restrained arrangements keep the melodies memorable, the language clear and the kaupapa firmly centre stage.

Tuia Te Iwi, the karakia whakakapi, closes the circle. After the spinning, paddling, birds and tongue tangles, it creates a moment of connection and release. That careful landing is what separates Te Ngahere from a tote bag of unrelated singles. Mitchell has sequenced it like a proper visit: an acknowledgement at the door, a spirited roam through the place, then a closing that returns everybody to the day. It is thoughtful without standing to attention, culturally grounded without acting as though every listener arrived carrying the same map.

That spirit follows Mitchell – now fully in her Niccolo Piccolo guise – onto the stage. “Come along on the adventure and meet Katie the Kea, Tama the Tūī and Kody the Kiwi!” she promises. Dancing, singing and joining in turn this bilingual show into a living ecosystem, with tamariki at its heart.

That is the real trick. Te Ngahere respects tamariki and parents alike, trusting both with wit, musicianship and the joy of learning together. Its hooks won’t buy property behind your frontal lobe and renovate at 3 a.m.; instead, they deepen with each kupu, bird and chorus. The kids get an album to adore, the adults keep their nerve endings, and everyone knows a little more when the waka finally reaches the whare and the wee heads drift off into snore-land.