Festival Review: Great Sounds Great: The Night Before @ Newtown Village, Wellington – 4/09/2026

Before Great Sounds Great takes over Te Aro on Saturday for the ‘proper’ festival, organisers Eyegum Music Collective wrangled together a mini festival up in Newtown: The Night Before – an R18, hyper-local warm‑up featuring twelve emerging acts, keeping with their original kaupapa. The concept was deliberately chaotic: acid house, neo‑soul, shoegaze, noise rock, dream pop, folk‑noir, EDM, bilingual hip-hop and wiry indie songwriting all crammed into a single night. It was fast, loud, and over before you could fully process it – a snapshot of the underground stretching its limbs ahead of the main festival. It was also a welcome blessing to the tumbleweed quiet of Friday‑night Newtown, I was told by more than one bar owner grateful for the extra patronage and energy. Eyegum bands and fans do tend to be pretty young and fresh to the music scene. So, it’s always an absolute pleasure to be amongst this new talent and I’m always blown away by what’s right on my own doorstep. That’s what GSG is all about.

My night began at Moon Bar with ‘all-girl’ Boyband (pictured above), whose blend of indie pop, alt‑pop, neo‑soul, funk and R&B came with an unexpected pre‑set rendition of the National Anthem. Ellen Lucas on drums, Siena McKenzie‑Smith and Evie White on guitars, Grace Gillanders (also of Homing and Pinja) on bass, and Millie Aislabie on vocals delivered a melodic, energetic set.

According to Instagram, the group formed over vegetarian food at Cuba Street’s Aunty Mena’s and a well‑timed Hotel Bristol group chat – typical of Eyegum’s interconnected ecosystem. Their GSG Instagram interview emphasises their commitment to choosing their own musical direction, which here leaned toward bright, pop‑funk textures. They didn’t announce song titles, but I caught shades of mid‑century pop and soul, plus Aislabie’s strong voice on a quick cover of Bic Runga’s Something Good. Thirty minutes felt waaaaay too short; hopefully they surface again soon.

Bug Michigan (Sib, Fi, Jade, Olivia) followed at the Newtown Community and Cultural Centre. Formed from the remnants of Maiden Name and Elizabeth Sanctuary Welding School for Girls (awesome name, should’ve kept it!), they describe themselves as a four‑piece “noise rock/lesbian shoegaze” band – dreamy distortion, art‑damaged guitar noise, and a mission statement dedicated to women, cats, and small creatures with too many legs. They delivered exactly that.

The lead guitarist, shoeless and thrashing, tore through the set with grunge‑driven intensity. It was a dense, disorienting half hour. Again the songs needed no introduction (well, they did) but I’m fairly sure they played Trap Mode Aesthetics. They closed with Wing and Shell, an art‑alt piece shifting between gentle drift and full‑scale sonic assault. Bug Michigan are genuine riot grrrrls – fiery, funny, and unfiltered.

Upstairs at the Office Bar – barely larger than a living room – Felix Bird played under two dim bulbs, offering wiry, avant‑alternative guitar music built around jangling hooks and poetic fragments. Their songs sit somewhere between indie rock, art pop, and scribbles left beside an overdriven amp. Garden, Tie the Tie, and Won’t You Ask? remain the clearest windows into their bright, nervous guitar language. And the four-piece clearly won a few hearts over, judging by the gushing devotions displayed by the front row.

I caught part of Dale Kerrigan’s set next. The Ōtepoti group arrived armed with noise‑rock detonations delivered at full force. Josh Nicholls hammered industrial beats while Connor Blackie’s bass locked in beneath them. Shlee Nicholls screamed across the room, and Joel Field’s guitar work veered between chaos and control. It was like he was wrestling a slithering serpent as he thrashed about the stage in a state of high anxiety. Their songs rely on repetition, abrasion, and the constant threat of collapse. They tore through Noise Bitch, Ripgirl 101, My Room, and a bunch of others at breakneck speed before the final car crash collision of their 29-minute collection. For further proof of their approach, I need to revisit The Water, Bad Grades, and Fascia, which I spied on their set list.

Back at Moon Bar, Nameless and Brainless fused high‑energy hip-hop and soul with a tight live rhythm section. Riva Cowan’s rhymes – delivered in English and te reo Māori – leaned into conscious, relevant themes, shaped originally by his Master’s‑level music work. The project has since expanded into a five‑piece band of trained or highly experienced players. Their public tracks – It Goes, On and On, and Racist – are direct, groove‑heavy, and uninterested in playing small rooms. A horn section wouldn’t go amiss. Cowan, dressed like a freezing worker on smoko, carried himself with understated swagger, reminiscent at moments of our old mate Aaron Tokona. With attitude and talent like this he’ll go far as an MC if he sticks to it, I reckon.

Back at the Community Centre, Elly Mae (Lawson) offered a gentle, atmospheric set moving between folk‑noir, dream pop, indie folk, shoegaze and country‑tinged guitar music. She played I Miss Custard, Wore Off, and Inertia by the Water among her set – all demos available on Bandcamp. Go check ’em. I recommend.

Her songs dwell on growth, nostalgia, and time’s quiet rearrangements, shifting from lullaby to enveloping soundscape without feeling contrived. Sacha (?) supported on drums, and Ryan Connaghan (First Reserve), who recently played on Will Swinton’s multi‑date US tour, including Lollapalooza, contributed on bass from the corner.

For me, the night ended back at the Office Bar with Bone Chapel – Dr. Def and Toad Luffa – whose noisy, sci‑fi acid house resembles a malfunctioning spacecraft stumbling into a warehouse rave. They favour propulsion, abrasive detail, and a performance style that treats restraint as a software glitch. For newcomers, Black Hole Forge, Transmission Gully Outpost (best name ever!), and Feldspar: Rendezvous from 2026’s A‑Disk Navigator chart their orbit from industrial throb to cosmic mischief.

But I wasn’t the only one from Muzic.NZ on duty. Scott Burnett was also on board taking photos. He saw the funk band Yawner. This multi-piece jazz outfit was formed in the Capital back in late ’24 around Eden Brown’s expressive lead vocals and Jamin Forlong’s guitar, and drummer Ryder Smith (who’s now headed off to London). Scott reported that despite that tiny ‘cupboard’ space up in the Office Bar they were still on form. I can attest that having heard the bleed-out all the way up the road as I passed the venue on the way to my gig. They were totally on form, he reckoned, with their alternative R&B folds jazz and indie influences into smooth and heavy grooves – super tight.

He also caught Dillon Jo (a proud dad of one of the band members) who played to a packed Moon and had the crowd going. They played Windmills and a “new rocking single” released that very day called Vertigo, alongside recent singles Good Person, Bite the Bullet and another newbie (never aired publicly before), A Stranger. Heads up fans, Dillon Jo have a debut album coming out next month. So watch out for that.

Another band he saw, he told me, was The Muscle (formerly American Muscle) who were “by turns whimsical and aggressive”, playing songs that hold many moments of beauty and technicality, accompanied with screaming distorted sections. Sounds like I missed something special – Darn it! Despite this, Scott said, they held it lightly and were obviously enjoying themselves. “I appreciated hearing their gorgeous single Andrea live.” They are on the up, currently, having just gigged in Tāmaki Makaurau with Half/Angel.

Re:Ruby rounded out the bands for Scott’s night, bookending a female band starting the night and another mostly female band ending the night for him. Pronounced “Regarding Ruby”, this is the solo recording project of Ruby Hawthorne, now based in Pōneke but steeped in Ōtepoti’s DIY bloodstream. Hawthorne pairs intricate indie-folk songwriting with lo-fi and experimental production, notably recording 2023’s Unearthed & Obsolete: Recordings from the Akai GX-4000DB on a repaired late-1970’s reel-to-reel machine. Sadly that didn’t make an appearance tonight (I caught some of their act, too). I wasn’t familiar with her material but I’m very much warming to Bunny. Tonight’s efforts were pretty much a girls-and-guitars (x4) affair, melodic, a little grungy and infectious – it got the room at Moon Bar moving, for sure.

Taken together, tonight’s line-up wasn’t a tidy genre survey but a working diagram of Pōneke’s underground: musicians drifting between projects, student networks feeding DIY scenes, and folk writers, rappers, noise bands and electronic experimenters sharing audiences without waiting for a demographic to be invented.

The pleasure of the night was in following one thread only to watch it mutate into something stranger. That sense of constant shift – of scenes folding into each other, of genres dissolving and reforming – was exactly what made The Night Before such an effective prelude to Saturday’s 40‑artist Great Sounds Great programme. It didn’t just warm up the weekend; it demonstrated why arriving early matters. Emerging artists weren’t treated as filler – they were the event, the engine, the reason the rooms were full.

And while our politicians continue to ignore youth – lost in arguments about tax, culture‑war posturing and climate‑change denial – young people are already building the future they’re supposedly waiting for. They’re not sitting around hoping someone will hand them a platform. They’re forming bands, organising shows, running collectives, and creating spaces where their voices don’t need permission. They’re doing it themselves, and they’re doing it with conviction. Watching them, you get the sense that when they finally take over the world, it will be loud, inventive, and gloriously theirs. I was blown away by what I saw at GSG:TNB, as I am at every Eyegum event. Tonight was only a taster – a compressed glimpse of the depth and imagination running through Pōneke’s underground. As Great Sounds Great continues to grow, I hope it always keeps room for these upcoming artists. They’re the grassroots of music in Aotearoa – and right now, those roots are thriving – despite the odds.

Finally, I want to shout out to the enthusiastic and vibrant volunteers who made the night such a joy. Everyone was there for the fun of it, as all music festivals should be, and it really showed. The crew were all helpful and sweet to me – and I’m totally grateful for that.

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