Ha the Unclear

Ha the Unclear (an anagram for Nuclear Heath) are an Auckland-based indie-rock, existential-pop group from Dunedin. Singer and songwriter Michael Cathro began the whole shebang with a string of solo bedroom EPs released under the pseudonym Baraka and the Finish Hims. After deciding to develop it into a live project, Cathro’s brother Paul joined on bass along with Ben Sargeant on drums, performing together under the name Brown. With guitarist Theodore Francis soon joining the fold, the project took shape when the band eventually moved to Auckland, becoming Ha the Unclear – an awkward name that rings out like a sardonic burst of laughter, inspired by reading the existentialists while working a call centre job: “I’d find myself laughing out loud when confronted with existential questions and the breakdown of meaning, and then pulling myself together to help someone lodge an insurance claim”. Right. The songs, for their part, become crystal-clear as the band unpins them like grenades on stage, opening for indie legends like The Shins, Courtney Barnett, The Dandy Warhols or The Wombats – the latest batch of tunes penned mostly from a room on the Dunedin wharf “among the songs of seabirds” where Cathro inhabited a shared creative space before returning to Auckland.

In 2024, the band released their amalgam album A Kingdom in a Cul-de-Sac (Think Zik!/Virgin). This resulted in the band playing their debut European headline show – current drummer Stu Harwood behind the kit – where they were received warmly by French press and radio, described fittingly by FIP as “a kaleidoscopic and surreal pop journey”. On their new EP Astigmatic!, the first release since, the band showcases their combination of post-punk nonchalance and emotional sensitivity across 5 new songs. The lead single Cumberland Street (Astigmatic) extols the joy of hitting a run of green lights on the titular Dunedin street. The cry of Astigmatic! – for which the EP is named – serves as a central optical metaphor; the line “staring at the stars, no? They were streetlights leaking in a row” comes, Cathro says, from “a very early memory of pointing out stars to my parents on a Dunedin evening, not realising they were just streetlights on the opposite hill”. While The Good Times Always End in Tears is a nostalgia-tinged goodbye-for-now to the old hometown, levity abounds in songs like Earth Grazer, a jittery pop number where a missed encounter devolves into a reflection on existential brevity. In 80’s Kiwi pub-rock throwback The Cold, the creative process is akin to gold panning in what must certainly be Gabriel’s Gully or a braided Central Otago river, while a meta backing vocal refrain exclaims “the story that I tell myself / the wood with which I build my house”. Whatever that story is, Astigmatic! is a house with lives lived in it.