Music Industry News

Ha the Unclear have announced their first new material since 2024, ‘Cumberland St (Astigmatic)‘. It’s the first single from the group’s forthcoming EP, Astigmatic! – due out 16 October.

Listen to the single here.

Of the track, vocalist Michael Cathro says:
“The song came from living in Dunedin after being away for a long time – Cumberland Street is this stretch of State Highway 1 going through the city, past the hospital and the university with heaps of traffic lights. The way the phasing is set up, you can get all greens but your timing has to be very particular.

So, it started off being about these small joys. And I wanted to pair this with 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 – which became the chorus.”

Recorded with producer Tom Healy at his Auckland studio, the song takes Ha the Unclear’s melodic indie guitar-pop side and shines it through a prism, channelling Vampire Weekend’s Only God Was Above Us.

‘Cumberland St (Astigmatic)’ is the band’s first new material since they released their amalgam album A Kingdom in a Cul-de-Sac in 2024 on Think Zik!/Virgin. This resulted in the band playing their debut European headline show, which saw them warmly received by French press and radio, including FIP – which described the record as “a kaleidoscopic and surreal pop journey.”

Since forming in the late-2000s, Ha the Unclear have built a loyal following internationally and in Aotearoa, broken into the Top 10 on the NZ Albums Chart, been longlisted twice for the APRA Silver Scroll, and have supported The Shins and toured with Courtney Barnett and The Dandy Warhols.

After showcasing at MaMA Festival and signing to a Paris-based imprint, the band made their European debut in 2024 with a headline Paris show at Supersonic, plus dates supporting Lime Garden (Paris) and Feldup (Nantes). A Kingdom in a Cul-de-Sac was praised by Le Figaro, Libération, Télérama, Rock & Folk and Rolling Stone France, with rotation on France Inter, FIP and Europe 2.

The Astigmatic! EP will be followed by a full LP in 2027.

Astigmatic! is available to pre-order via Bandcamp.

Astigmatic! Tour
6 November – Crown Hotel – Ōtepoti / Dunedin
13 November – Whammy – Tāmaki Makaurau / Auckland
14 November – Space Academy – Ōtautahi / Christchurch
4 December – Meow – Pōneke / Wellington

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Photo credit: Jenna Todd

Ha the Unclear 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 80s 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.