Gig Review: So So Modern @ Newtown Community Centre, Wellington – 7/11/2026

Thirteen years is a long time to keep a room waiting. It’s long enough for an entire sub-genre to die, a toddler to become a cynical teenager, and a premier avant-pop band to accidentally fall into comfortable middle management. On Saturday night, Wellington’s post-punk, synth-bolted agitators So So Modern finally settled their outstanding tab.

The occasion? Launching their new EP, Light Years, at the Newtown Community Centre. Not only is it their first collection of new material since 2013’s Transpacific Express, but it also marks their first-ever venture into vinyl, courtesy of Flying Nun Records and Holiday Records.

To mark the resurrection, the band pull a double-header: an evening gig for the seasoned degenerates and a 3:00 PM all-ages matinee for the people who used to stay up past midnight but now have mortgages. Guitarist Mark Leong insisted the afternoon slot was actually the one to be at. He wasn’t totally wrong. It featured a bake sale, a button-making station, and an army of toddlers and Primary types running amok while parents desperately tried to remember what it felt like to have their eardrums blown out by decent music that’s not candy-coated pre-school pop on high rotation. It was a wholesome, whānau-friendly bridging of the capital’s underground past and domesticated present.

For the uninitiated, So So Modern were once a one-band argument for the absolute, chaotic necessity of live music. Emerging from Wellington’s fertile mid-2000’s DIY and hardcore trenches, the lineup – Grayson Gilmour, Aidan Leong, Mark Leong, and Dan Nagels (the two Leongs are unrelated, despite sharing a surname and a penchant for angular riffs) – spent years grafting punk, metal, electronic sequencing, and fractured math-rock rhythms onto collective gang vocals. At their peak, they were a nomadic force of nature, playing 150-plus shows a year across Europe and North America alongside the likes of Foals, CSS, and Deerhoof. When their debut album Crude Futures dropped via UK tastemakers Transgressive in 2010, the British press went wild; NME fawned over their math-rock discipline, while The Guardian famously described them as “Klaxons and Kraftwerk together.”

Then, they vanished. Not into rehab or creative warfare, but into the far more terrifying void of adulthood and (for most of them) parenthood.

After Transpacific Express, the band quietly went on ice – save for a brief, teasing reunion in 2016 – while careers and domesticity took over. The tracks on Light Years were actually written piecemeal over the last decade, a slow-burn re-emergence that culminated in sporadic festival appearances and the August drop of lead single, Peace Talks. These days, they view themselves less as a volatile garage unit and more as an extended family bound by decades of shared geography.

Nobody utilized the thirteen-year intermission quite as intensely as frontman Grayson Gilmour, who essentially engineered a parallel universe as an academic powerhouse. Gilmour didn’t just step away from the mic; he picked up a Master of Musical Arts with Distinction from Victoria University, snagged a Silver Scroll for scoring Consent: The Louise Nicholas Story, won Best Score at the NZ Film Awards for The Most Fun You Can Have Dying, and handled music supervision for Apple TV’s Mr. Corman. When he wasn’t scoring Sundance darlings or coordinating the Music Practice Major as a Senior Lecturer at Massey University, he was releasing sprawling solo albums like Otherness and 2023’s Holding Patterns (featuring Kimbra). As Gilmour tells it, tip-toeing around sleeping babies during pandemic lockdowns sparked a very specific kind of existential crisis: “What I really wanted to do was be loud!”

Mission accomplished.

Saturday night’s bill offers a fascinating, multi-generational diagnostic of where Wellington’s musical subconscious sits in 2026. Opening both the matinee and the evening show were Welcomer, a brilliant five-piece marshalled by songwriter Miles Sutton. Their self-styled brand of “wilted-pop” trades in hyper-literate, intricate melodies that possess a distinctly local, rain-soaked vulnerability. Performing cuts from their acclaimed debut album Calendars, they radiate a fragile warmth. Highlights include the gorgeous, cinematic Magazine Clippings and the wry, self-aware irony of A Steely Band Covers Band – the latter prompting Sutton to leap off the stage to hug friends in the crowd like an indie-pop messiah.

If Welcomer provides the warm hug, then the second evening support act Deathtrippa delivered the absolute assault on the senses. Operating at the intersection of cybergrind, breakcore, digital hardcore, and screamo, they drilled the eardrums producing noise that was an unapologetic, hyperactive middle finger to traditional genre boundaries. Opening the set, frontman Ian Moore storms the stage in a plush rabbit headdress, but the second he opens his mouth, it’s violently clear this is no Bad Bunny pastiche. Backed by hardcore drummer Otis Chamberlain and DJ/turntablist Arekatera (Ethan Carter), the trio unleashes a barrage of sonic flamethrowers that threatens to reduce the community centre to charcoal. Given the lingering, heavy anxiety of the election night hanging over the country, it feels like exactly the kind of cathartic, scorched-earth exorcism everyone needed.

But the real magic of Light Years is that when So So Modern finally take the stage, they don’t sound like a museum piece pulling a nostalgia grift. They sound like a band with unfinished business.

The super-tight, telepathic synergy noted by local bibles like UnderTheRadar is fully intact, only the old-school operational chaos has been lean-burned into 19 minutes of pure, razor-sharp clarity and restraint. It’s a direct nod to the minimalist hardcore and pop that initially weaponized them as teenagers. The single Peace Talks is definitely worthy of a playlist repeater and is an immediate retrofit back to pre-kid days, grungy flats, pot noodles and mad-length school gig tours that built the band’s original legacy.

In a venue like the Newtown Community Centre, where the barrier between the stage and the floor is purely psychological, these short, sharp shocks of adrenaline fit perfectly. Dressed up with new merch featuring Toby Morris’s iconic ‘chopped fingers’ design, the band blasts out of the gate with an immediate tri-factor of new material: Apocalypse Wow, Peace Talks, and For Life.

Then come the deep cuts. They unearth Miyagi from the Transpacific Express era before pivoting into the beautifully angular Dendrons and the jagged doom of The Worse Is Yet To Come. By the time they hit Berlin, a standout highlight from Crude Futures, the room is unglued. Live, it remains a staggering piece of machinery – essentially Kraftwerk on a bad acid trip, terrifyingly intense yet impossibly vibrant.

They loop back to the present with the danceable jangle-pop of Eat You Alive, the infectious grooves of Endless Mirrored Skyward, and a blistering, high-octane rendition of Go Higher. Ever conscious of strict community hall curfews, they skip the encore theatrics and plough straight into a final triptych of vintage avant-pop from their 2008 compilation Friends and Fires: Skeleton Dance, Upgrade Your Chassis, and a triumphant, breathless At/One Fell Swoop.

The sheer communal warmth in the room was so thick it did something genuinely miraculous: it made everyone completely forget that a general election was happening outside. Nobody was checking their phones. Nobody was sighing in defeat, smiling in celebration. Nobody was doom-scrolling. For the sake of everyone’s collective mental health, sweaty post-punk proved to be a far superior alternative to the grim analysis of television pundits.

Before rounding this off, I have to give props to the band and their friends for making me feel so welcome. Paul Boyle provided great chat and some stunning colour washes from the balcony lighting booth, while Zoë Bell filled the huge screen behind the stage with video imagery that perfectly matched the band’s vibe. And on sound: was that the famous Craig Black previously from The Stomach in Palmerston North?

If there is a connective tissue linking Saturday’s eclectic bill, it’s a relentless, stubborn commitment to creativity. Nearly two decades ago, So So Modern helped draft the blueprint for Wellington’s underground identity. With Light Years, they didn’t return as old veterans demanding applause for past glories. Instead, they stepped back into the room as active, vital participants in a scene that is still mutating. It wasn’t just a great party; it was a loud reminder of why they mattered in the first place.

Photo Credit: Tim Gruar for Muzic.NZ
So So Modern Gallery
Welcomer Gallery
Deathtrippa Gallery