Festival Review: Great Sounds Great Part 1 @ Cuba Street Precinct, Wellington – 5/09/2026

Some festivals flex with giant stages and fly-in acts. Great Sounds Great (GSG) runs on tougher fuel: community. For one Saturday night, Te Aro once again became a live circuit board – crowds ricocheting between new favourites, old loyalties and forty acts powered by grit, graft and glorious noise.

Five years in, Eyegum Music Collective has pulled off the improbable again: Great Sounds Great is alive, loud and kicking. As bigger street festivals such as The Others Way are ghosted by local and central government, and beloved annual events meet the cost-of-living steamroller, survival itself feels punk. Remarkable? Absolutely. Welcome? Just ask all the happy ringing ears.

I’ve been at every GSG since day one, watching Eyegum Wednesday hopefuls share the bill with heavyweight drawcards such as Nadia Reid, Goodshirt, Tiny Ruins, Trinity Roots, Julia Deans and Fur Patrol. Over that time, the Cuba Quarter has become Wellington’s musical rabbit warren; this time, its tentacles stretched from a couple of bars to St Peter’s on Willis and, for the first time, Meow Nui on Vivian, packing ten venues with forty artists spanning indie rock, hip hop, metal, dream pop and experimental noise. It’s also grown too big for one night, adding a completely new pre-party in Newtown the night before and further expanding the choice of must-see gigs across the weekend. Finding something great was easy; choosing what to miss was damn near heartbreaking.

Another commitment split my GSG Saturday into two this year, but I had the bonus of discovering a cache of cool in Newtown the night before. Still, like every other year, FOMO got the better of practicality as I tore through the wider Cuba Quarter, chasing down as many sets as I could.

It was a welcome sight, given the continued devastation caused by the bumbling buzz-hards in the Beehive and the downstream impact of today’s chaotic global cluster-f***ks. By contrast, Welly’s streets were humming joyfully. Despite the damp, chilly spring night, they were full of energy, with queues forming before each event, punters trading tips, snaps and TikToks between venues, then sprinting towards the next rumour. I think this gig has successfully maintained its kaupapa: less a corporate festival, more a giant, noisy whānau reunion for Aotearoa’s awesome indie music scene. I know it’s still my happy place.

My GSG started softly on the floor of Flying Nun, chilling to a mostly solo set of tunes from Vera Ellen. Accompanied by Bella Guarrera, she delivered a number of highlights from her new album. Fresh from UK and European dates supporting Aldous Harding, she’d returned carrying the cool assurance of an artist whose orbit keeps widening. Those shows followed another busy year behind the acclaimed album Heaven Knows What Time, further proof of her gift for emotional honesty without the scented-candle fog.

But tonight wasn’t to be the promised victory lap. “My mum just had a heart attack; we’re very worried.” So were we. I’ve met her mum – the sweetest lady – and I really hope she’ll be OK. Vera was understandably not on her game because of it, but she tried, kicking off with a cover of Janis Joplin’s Oh Lord, Won’t You Buy Me A Mercedes Benz. Later came a bittersweet duet from the new disc, originally recorded with Hemi Hemingway but tonight featuring Ben Lemi, called When It’s Over (Ben told me he’s in rehearsals with the WOW team). It was a good delivery, but given her current state, it was understandable that her heart was not entirely in it. We’re thinking of her and her whānau and sending them our very best. Aroha!

GSG officially opened at St Peter’s on Willis Street, with Eyegum’s Ben Jones, Wellington Central MP Tamatha Paul (and guest DJ), and His Worship the Honourable Andrew Little all making quick speeches. Paul, of course, found some words to honour Welly’s great but struggling music community. Ben lamented the loss of The Others Way in Auckland and credited its format with inspiring GSG’s programme.

Kane Strang (Office Dog) looked slightly nervous introducing More Blue Noise, his new solo vehicle, alone on guitar. The first couple of songs leaned grungy before New Myths opened into a fabulous folky tune with a 60’s pastoral glow; a pair of noodly ballads followed, then A Certain Kind of Heat landed with the same promise. Debut EP Normalcy lets Knock, Pillars, Blaring Out and Paid in Words breathe before sending them around blind corners, and both new songs have the bones to become monsters once drummer Mitchell Innes and percussionist Jonty O’Connor join him. At St Peter’s, in one of the project’s rare early live outings, restraint hit harder than bluster. Side project? Not for long.

From MPs behind the decks to other surprising crossover moments over the years, Wellington has seen a few. But while former “DJ” Dame Jacinda Ardern’s musical tastes have mostly lived in anecdotes and playlists, Wellington Central MP Tamatha Paul took the more direct route, stepping up to the DJ booth at Meow and owning it. Swallowed by a thick haze of red light, dry ice and rolling fog, Paul eased into a set packed with deep cuts from the 1990’s and beyond, though not before a few technical gremlins made the opening minutes more suspenseful than intended. Assisted on the decks by Tony Douglas, she soon found her rhythm, weaving together left-field favourites and contemporary selections, including a track by Irish rap provocateurs Kneecap, who are due to tour New Zealand next year. Giving the trio a shout-out, Paul told the crowd, “They get this Indigenous struggle and reo shit,” referring to the Hip-Hop crew’s support of her viral Bastard Language comments on NZ First’s bill to make English an official language. The crowd lapped it up. Equally impressive was Meow’s revamped layout, with the new bar opening the room beautifully and a canopy of striking ceiling lights adding extra atmosphere to an already immersive space. Next up for Paul is Ōro Ata, a fundraiser scheduled for next week featuring Mara TK and promising another intersection of music, community and politics.

After a bit of a break to catch the Mel Parsons show down at the Opera House (see separate review), I headed up to San Fran to force my way into the sweatbox maelstrom created by So So Modern. Clearly, they provided the night’s purest voltage spike. The New Plymouth-born art-punk outfit returned chaotic, thrilling and gloriously allergic to straight lines. The last time I caught them was at Newtown Festival, where they reminded everyone why they became one of the country’s most influential underground bands. At GSG, the reminder came with sharper teeth.

After 12 years away, frontman, guitarist and synth-wrangler Grayson Gilmour grinned like he’d found the old circuit still live. He spent the gap making solo records; unfinished songs and unfinished business pulled the original four back – not for a heritage lap, but to make the machine twitch again.

Mark Leong provided a barrage of angular riffs, while Aidan Leong mugged the dance rhythms through the violent alchemy of his keyboards and Dan Nagels beat the living daylights out of his skins. Gilmour strangled his fretboard until every note lay panting, spent, on the floor. And speaking of the floor, there was barely room to breathe, let alone dance. “Who are these guys?” asked the bar manager. “They are so awesome!” The gig was nothing short of a moving pile-up. So So Modern might have found their resurrection legs, but this was no trip down memory lane. It was a live reminder that contemporary New Zealand guitar music still owes a debt to bands willing to make convention look cowardly.

“Let’s Paaaaaarty!” Savage revved up the room. When he took the DJ controls, the room’s temperature changed. Few New Zealand artists own a catalogue capable of triggering instant muscle memory across generations; his reach is global, but the local connection still lands without translation.

The set treated nostalgia as rocket fuel rather than museum glass, pulling hot tunes from decades of regular airplay – Phil Collins, Sia, P-Money and Scribe, et al. – all with his own distinct flava. Several generations moved as one – GSG’s broad church briefly converted into a single, sweaty congregation. The crew at Meow Nui were amazed. This was their first festival. “Normally, we are used to having a different crowd six days a week, but not a different one every hour.” Nonetheless, they loved it.

My night finished with the old gods of war: Beastwars at San Fran. Every strong festival needs a hard left turn. Beastwars supplied the crater. The Wellington sludge-metal veterans arrived with nearly two decades of pressure behind them: loud, joyless in the best way and utterly gripping.

Even newcomers got dragged inside the blast radius. Beastwars make extreme music accessible not by sanding it down, but by believing every riff as if it were a last statement.

Frontman Matthew Hyde’s return still carries extra weight: diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 2017, he underwent chemotherapy before helping haul Beastwars out of hiatus. At GSG, his roar sounded fully re-armed, tearing through a set of deeply cathartic, dark energy. I’m no expert, but I’m guessing material from 2025’s The Ship // The Sea – Levitate, The Storm, Guardian of Fire, Rust and The Devil – was likely on the list.

As the dust settled and my ears slowly reconstructed themselves, I had time to contemplate the whole experience. What lingered most after Great Sounds Great wasn’t any single performance. It was the feeling of connection. All night, I was among friends – people I knew, retailers I bought from, and bands I saw, wrote about, photographed and hung out with. In an era when many music festivals chase scale, Great Sounds Great succeeds because it embraces intimacy. It trusts audiences to explore. It trusts artists to experiment. And it trusts Wellington’s music community to support one another. The result is a festival that feels genuinely rooted in the city that hosts it.

Whether discovering More Blue Noise for the first time, seeing Vera Ellen push through a difficult night, losing yourself in So So Modern’s glorious chaos, feeling the weight of Beastwars, dancing to Savage or engaging with Tamatha Paul’s unexpected DJ selection, there was a sense throughout the evening that these performances belonged together.

That is Great Sounds Great’s greatest achievement. For one night, Wellington became a city-sized venue, and every street corner seemed to lead towards another unforgettable musical experience. By the time the final notes faded, the festival had once again proved why it remains one of the most important celebrations of independent music in Aotearoa. Judging by the smiles, sore feet, ringing ears and animated conversations continuing long after the last encore, nobody seemed ready for it to end.

Huge thanks to all the security teams at the venues for keeping us safe, to the tireless volunteers (I hope they had as much fun as I did), and to Ben and the crew for everything. The bands appreciate it more than you know. And so do I. Aroha!

Gallery 1 – Photo Credit: Tim Gruar
Gallery 2 – Photo Credit: Scott Burnett