Music Industry News

Welcomer are beyond pleased to make a triple announcement: of a debut album Calendars, a national tour this coming winter, and a single available from today, Magazine Clippings (feat. Lontalius).

Calendars is an album that immerses you in a world, in that familiar struggle of being in a blurry middle between failure and growth. Produced in collaboration with producer Jesse Austin-Stewart, this debut album brings a fresh lushness of sound and vividness of narrative to Welcomer that allows the intricacies of the songwriting to shine.

Across 10 tracks, Welcomer dissect the pieces of a life and put them back together as a record that is intentional, ornate and affecting. Gladly, while Miles spent the intervening years since the group’s self-titled EP honing his songwriting, the raw vulnerability has not been lost in the process. In many ways it is a Saturn return album, a coming of age to where you feel things slipping away and the need to start catching them. Miles’ songs are brought to life by his band and collaborators; Eddie Crawshaw (Lake South), Ox Lennon, and Shannen Georgia Petersen (Sports Dreams). Calendars is out June 12th, digitally and on vinyl, with preorders available now.

‘Magazine Clippings’, like many of the songs in the world of Calendars, is a story set at the brink, with characters working hard to hold it together. The instrumentation is all warmth; Rhodes, strings and pedalled organ are layered carefully over steady drums. Over the lilting instrumentation, lead songwriter Miles details candidly friendships in disrepair. Humour, as always with Welcomer, is present when you know where to look, with wry descriptions of a New Zealand that young people inhabit outside of the centres: “you went to like four festivals in a town without festivals/ whatever it’s flexible/ the definition is flexible”.

Lontalius contributes a voice for the friend, completing the conversation with a verse that lifts the song up for air. Lyricist Miles says, “I’ve had people interpret the narrative differently and I like that. I never felt that details weigh a song down.” While the song alludes to the heavy, it really centres on faith in community. Miles sums it up as, “a heavy but hopeful exchange and I think Eddie’s [Lontalius] verse completes that conversation.”

Pre-orders for Calendars are available now through Bandcamp, Magazine Clippings (feat. Lontalius) is available now digitally, and album release tour tickets go on sale through Undertheradar.co.nz at 3pm today.

WELCOMER – CALENDARS ALBUM RELEASE TOUR

FRI 12 JUNE – PALMERSTON NORTH – SNAILS (AA)
SAT 13 JUNE – WHANGANUI – PORRIDGE WATSON
SAT 20 JUNE – CHRISTCHURCH – SPACE ACADEMY
SUN 21 JUNE – DUNEDIN – HOUSE SHOW (AA)
SAT 27 JUNE – AUCKLAND – NICEGOBLINS (AA)
SAT 3 JULY – WELLINGTON – VALHALLA

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Photo Credit: Christopher Menzies Brown