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Aotearoa Music Award and Taite Prize winning artist Vera Ellen shares ‘When It’s Over’ – the second single from her upcoming album Heaven Knows What Time. Featuring a brooding vocal performance from fellow Wellington musician Hemi Hemingway, Vera Ellen knew the song needed a counterweight the moment the demo was finished — and that voice had to be Mr. Hemi Hemingway. The two had previously torn through a karaoke classic by Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood, and the chemistry was undeniable. In many ways, this collaboration felt inevitable.

Written during a residency in Greytown while she was still in a relationship, ‘When It’s Over’ captures the uneasy space between love and collapse. It’s a song born from intuition — the quiet, creeping awareness that the wheels are coming off. With unflinching honesty, Vera Ellen examines the ugliness on both sides: the ways two people fumble, disappoint, and somehow draw out the very worst in one another. Yet beneath the tension lies something tender.

Haunting, intimate, and charged with the bittersweet electricity of hindsight, When It’s Over is a duet that feels both prophetic and painfully real. The track is brought to life in a music video directed by Daniel Fletcher, Starring Brent Gilbert, Hemi Hemingway and Vera Ellen.

Last month, Vera Ellen announced the forthcoming release of her album Heaven Knows What Time set for release 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”; 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.

Mixed and produced by Vera’s long-time collaborator Ben Lemi, 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.

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