Music Industry News

Today, Aotearoa Music Award and Taite Prize winning artist Vera Ellen announces her return with new single ‘Gayfever’, from her upcoming album Heaven Knows What Time – out May 1st via Flying Nun Records.

Three years on from her last full-length project, Ideal Home Noise; which was awarded the prestigious Taite Music Prize for 2023, Vera Ellen has found herself in a whirlwind of unconventionality – learning to embrace the chaos that comes with being a self sustained artist in today’s constantly driving culture, and finding meaning and joy in community – all themes that inform her new body of work, Heaven Knows What Time.

Stepping away from the heavy inner-world of Ideal Home Noise, Heaven Knows What Time is less about thinking and more about just being — embracing the masks we wear, but also allowing ourselves to take them off and bare it all; the exhausted, the messy, the fear, the adventure, and all of the joy too.

The first single ‘Gayfever’ (out now) is an anthem of that joy – dedicated to a person so infatuating they were deserving of their own sing-a-long. The song is accompanied by a video from Vera’s dear friend and former band mate Jerry Ramirez, and stars Zipporah Norton, whose performance is utterly magnetising and brings a softness and depth to the video’s absurdity.

“Heaven Knows What Time”;

The words came to Vera Ellen as she lay on the top bunk of the house truck in Buenos Aires. Nearly two years after writing the record, almost a year after finishing the mix, and following multiple name changes, the album title arrived with clarity and force. It felt less like a decision and more like a moment of arrival — a reminder that creativity cannot be demanded. It can be nurtured, given the right conditions, but ultimately it does not adhere to industry timelines. Like a baby, it arrives when it is ready. Receiving the album’s name became a lesson in that truth.

Heaven Knows What Time is both a question and an answer — an expression of frustration and a surrender to what was never within her control.

Vera wrote the album during a two-week songwriting residency in Greytown, awarded through the NZ Pacific Studio Artist Residency Programme. The residency concluded with a performance at Studio 73 for fellow residents and members of the local community who had hosted her. The experience provided two essential elements.

The first was space and solitude. At the time, Vera was immersed in a self-sustained cycle of work, touring, and performance. Writing had become difficult to access. In Greytown, largely alone in the cottage, she found room to slow down — taking long walks, observing the landscape, and reconnecting with her thoughts, her body, and the natural world. This period allowed her to reflect, to make sense of fragments, and to write with renewed presence.

The second was accountability. With a final performance marking the end of the residency, Vera felt a responsibility to honour the opportunity by creating something tangible. It also served as a commitment to herself — a reaffirmation of her identity as a songwriter, and a test of what could emerge when time and intention were aligned. In her residency application, she wrote: “After the heaviness of Ideal Home Noise, I feel it is pressing that I now create an uplifting record that has a guiding message of hope, but from a matured perspective.”

In some ways, that intention is reflected in the finished album. Heaven Knows What Time is lighter in tone, carrying themes of love, joy, and a growing sense of self-assurance. Yet it resists any obligation to resolve or repair everything. Rather than responding to expectation or guilt, the writing moves toward introspection — embracing contradiction, humour, moodiness, and heartbreak, and positioning Vera less as a participant and more as an observer of her inner and outer worlds.

‘Heaven Knows What Time’ is out May 1st via Flying Nun Records.

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