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Sombr Announces Debut Headline AU & NZ Dates As Part Of His Late Nights & Young Romance World Tour

Sombr Announces Debut Headline AU & NZ Dates As Part Of His Late Nights & Young Romance World Tour

Scoop18-05-2025

Frontier Touring is hyped to announce 19-year-old, alternative-pop artist sombr will make his Australia and New Zealand headline debut this December.
Also in the country for shows at Spilt Milk festival, sombr will perform unmissable headline shows at Auckland Town Hall, Melbourne's Festival Hall, Sydney's Hordern Pavilion and Brisbane's The Fortitude Music Hall.
Frontier Members can access the presale which begins Wednesday 21 May from 3pm local time, before tickets go on sale Thursday 22 May from 4pm local time. Tickets and tour information via frontiertouring.com/sombr.
Shane Boose became sombr via a make-shift recording studio in his bedroom. The 19-year-old Lower East Side native honed his talents at New York's performing arts school, LaGuardia High, spending his days studying classical music and late nights dabbling in young romance, skateboarding, and generally getting into trouble.
When COVID hit, his own music became an escape for the young artist from the physical and social isolation brought on by the pandemic. sombr taught himself music production and immersed himself in obsessively recording emotional indie-rock tracks.
His song 'Caroline' (released in 2022) became a sad girl anthem, taking the internet by storm. The track was self-produced, self-written and self-released when sombr was just 16, it has since been streamed on Spotify over 45 million times.
Continuing to drop EPs and singles ever since, sombr now has over 28 million monthly listeners. His songs 'would've been you', 'do I ever cross your mind', 'back to friends' and latest single 'undressed' have become indie-rock hits, with the latter two certified Gold in Australia and currently in the top 10 of the ARIA singles chart. sombr also teamed up with Rachel Chinouriri (2025 Britt Nominee and support for Sabrina Carpenter's tour) to release a remix / collab of Rachel's hit 'All I Ever Asked'.
It's the kind of trajectory that feels once in a generation. Between his remarkable aural instincts and an insatiability for experimenting with new sounds, sombr exudes staying power. This became more evident during his headline 2024 North American tour. Concert Chronicles stated, 'sombr did not disappoint, delivering a performance that was both mesmerizing and electrifying' of his live show, with My Life In Sound adding, 'If you have the chance to see sombr live, seize the opportunity – his performance is not to be missed.'
Earlier this year sombr toured North America and will soon support Nessa Barrett in the UK and Europe, before embarking on his very own world tour. Australia and New Zealand don't miss sombr's first visit to our shores, grab your tickets when they go on sale this Thursday

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Jacinda, glossed over
Jacinda, glossed over

Newsroom

timea day ago

  • Newsroom

Jacinda, glossed over

There are gaps, big gaps, in the new memoir by Jacinda Ardern. It is not a book which gives the full political context of her rise and fall, or at least her rise and exit. There's not as much as might be expected on the Covid years. No mention at all of her 2020 election opponent Judith Collins, with very little on other Nats. Bare references to the Covid-era economic borrowing and spending, or of the suite of second-term political quicksands like Three Waters that dragged her government and Ardern personally down. It is a global book, not local. New Zealand politics in the abstract. Yet she opens up in many areas, and avoids the traps of political autobiographies in which the great and good name drop, show off, reinvent history and attack their opponents. There's minimal retailing of conversations with world leaders. She shares observations about Prince William from close quarters, warms to Angela Merkel, reveals her message on the phone to Donald Trump after the mosque terror attacks – for the US (and by implication the President) to show sympathy and love to 'all Muslims' – and recalls Malcolm Turnbull helping her at an Apec security check. No indulgences with Trudeau or Xi or Boris, no Bolger-style 'As I was telling the President'. For someone so studied, prepared and self-aware, it's remarkable how often Ardern just blurted out her most famous lines. 'Let's Do This', the election slogan that helped Labour win power in 2017, was at first a throwaway line on one of her Instagram posts. 'Kindness' came out as the essence of what she wanted her Government to exhibit, in a conversation with John Campbell as she drove to Government House to be sworn in as Prime Minister in 2017. 'They Are Us', the nation's unifying cry after the Christchurch mosque massacres in 2019, was something she said as she downloaded to her friend Grant Robertson in a moment of dread and despair, when about to address the nation. He told her, 'Just say that.' The origins of the phrases are gently revealed among the scores of anecdotes and insights in A Different Kind of Power. In each instance she appears surprised at herself, a 'chronic overthinker' who has realtime discoveries of the mot juste, of the historic. 'Kindness,' she muses after recalling the Campbell conversation. 'It is a child's word, in a way. Simple. And yet it encompassed everything that had left an imprint on me.' The book also peels back the deeper origins of her ability, on the spot, to capture a mood, to distil her purpose and look to inspire – and the origins of her senses of compassion and social justice. It leans heavily on Ardern's personal formation and challenges. It is a different kind of memoir. And that will make it stand out among the reminiscences and revelations of New Zealand political leaders. She writes at some length about growing up in Te Aroha, Murupara and Morrinsville, about her family, and about her life in the Mormon church. The family memories are powerful: The primary school-aged Jacinda coming across her father Ross, the police sergeant in Murupara, surrounded by menacing men 'in leather pants and jackets' outside his station, and being told 'Keep walking Jacinda', unable to help. Her mother Laurel's mental breakdown in the same forestry town. Murupara was tough. Poverty, struggle, gangs, unfairness. Ardern writes that years later, when asked when she first became political, she realised it was there in that central North Island community. 'I became political because I lived in Murupara.' Then in an ordered, chronological way A Different Kind of Power traverses high school, knocking on doors for the church, university, initial political awakenings, OE and the pull of national politics. In every phase there is a building of the picture of a woman who is at once sensitive to a fault, image-conscious, self-conscious, media-conscious and trying to live by her own conscience. Open and closed Ardern can write. No surprises there, with the talent for communicating, messaging and indentifying with her audiences that she showed us over 14 years in politics. She professes herself, in the acknowledgements, to have been a 'speechwriter' since the age of 13, and implies the book benefited hugely from Ali Benjamin who she credits with being 'teacher, editor and coach all rolled into one'. Yet a ghost didn't write this; Ardern's voice is obvious from the opening dedication 'to the criers, worriers and huggers' to the final words. Memoir writing is thinking, lived experience, revelation and anticipation of what the reader might want answered. There was always going to be a mountain of material to sift through. Ardern's answer is to be relentlessly open, personally, and largely subdued and non-controversial politically. In the opening scene as she awaits a pregnancy test result in a friend's bathroom she wonders about the day's coalition talks and her feeling the equivalent of imposter syndrome. 'We were never meant to win. And I was never meant to be leader.' The book's title A Different Kind of Power might betray a hint of a self-help text, a motivational Ted talk or a 'how to win elections and influence history' lecture. It's much more than that. It offers up Jacinda Ardern as a lifelong doubter who through conviction, talent, political accidents and then empathy, rose to international acclaim. What's missing from this book is almost as interesting as what it covers. For example, she doesn't indulge the haters, giving a complete swerve to that daft, ubiquitous, corrosive series of online and social media rumours about her husband Clarke. Her story is not a platform to even scores – not many of them, anyway. The book is clearly for an audience extending beyond these shores, so the detail of domestic politics is relatively sparse. Don Brash, on the other side of politics, is harshly dismissed, and David Cunliffe, on her own, qualifies for the strongest and most detailed dressing down. Ardern plainly has no time for the man who famously declared he was sorry for being a man. There's a tantalising window into Labour's caucus room after Cunliffe's historic defeat in 2014. 'By convention what is said in a caucus room stays in the caucus room, and it's a convention I will always follow,' she writes, nobly but disappointingly limiting herself to describing and paraphrasing tears and anger, fury and despair. 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These brief, fascinating two chapters on the Covid years give a glancing view into a Beehive in the time of crisis. 'It's rare that you can draw a direct line between a politician's decision and whether someone lived or died,' Ardern writes. 'But this seemed to be one of them.' Fitting the minimalist recounting of the Covid days, Sir Ashley Bloomfield rates a one-sentence cameo. Ardern reflects on the later parliamentary protest not so much as a personal or political condemnation as being a systemic lesson: 'Whatever had brought the protesters to Parliament, by the end, it was clear that is was a place and institution they didn't believe in anymore.' Years on, the ex-PM who is now a world away at Harvard, asks herself the yawning question. Does she have regrets about the Covid decisions and years? 'Yes, I think about regret,' she writes, but 'that word regret contains so much certainty. Regret says you know precisely what you would have done differently … We don't get to see the counterfactual, the outcome of the decisions we didn't make. The lives that might have been lost. One thing I am certain of is that I would want things to have been different. I would want a world where we saved lives and we brought everyone with us. Perhaps that is the difference between regret and remorse.' Or the difference between the perfect and the optimal. Resignation and new life If the book's Covid-era brevity seems a little short-changing, it is likely deliberate. After all, A Different Kind of Power is about being able to rise, in spite of your doubts or fears, to the occasion of running the country or handling a crisis – not about the detail of actually running the country or the crisis itself. Its difference is in viewing empathy and kindness, hugs, tears and compassion as political virtues in a world that judges them vices. Ardern is astonished when a social media poster at the time of the Whakaari White island disaster claimed she went to Whakatāne just so she could be photographed hugging people. And that makes her even more determined. 'The post bothered me more than I wanted to admit,' she writes, and then tells of meeting a female ambulance officer who'd helped on the day, the woman hugging her, with the cameras clicking. 'I knew this would only feed my critics, the ones who were cynical about empathy, who thought that everything was somehow a show. That's fine, I thought as I hugged her tight in return. I would rather be criticised than stop being human.' She outlines in the final brief chapters how that criticism, the cynicism, the always-on-alert responsibility of her job, helped convince her to resign. There's the story of a mystery woman sidling up to her at an airport bathroom, pressing in and hissing 'Thank you for ruining the country'. 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That's a fail, maybe resulting from an American editor scrawling 'who, what, who cares?' in the margins and deleting. There's nothing on The Wedding, and just a mention of moving to Boston, with nothing of the new life. More importantly, also absent are all the issues of political (mis)management beyond Covid – Three Waters, ministerial conduct, law and order failures, stubborn child poverty and emergency housing – that rose up inexorably in Ardern's second term. Remember, Labour burned more political capital in that term – from an outright MMP majority to 27 percent and defeat – than probably any government other than the Fourth Labour Government of 1987-90. But A Different Kind of Power doesn't dwell on the negative or even acknowledge it. Right at the end, Ardern summarises her role-model message to any young woman doubting her right to be in a position or place. Embrace your sensitivity and empathy. 'In fact, all of the traits that you believe are your flaws will come to be your strengths.' That might well be true for Ardern, or for an individual. It's not so for a government. A Different Kind of Power: A Memoir by Jacinda Ardern (Penguin, $59.99) is available in bookstores nationwide. ReadingRoom has devoted all week to coverage of the book. Monday: experts in the book trade predict it will fly off the shelves. Tuesday: a review by Steve Braunias. Wednesday: a review by Janet Wilson.

On the Up: Napier influencer Gzilla turns pain into purpose with gospel rap
On the Up: Napier influencer Gzilla turns pain into purpose with gospel rap

NZ Herald

time26-05-2025

  • NZ Herald

On the Up: Napier influencer Gzilla turns pain into purpose with gospel rap

He told Hawke's Bay Today he was always angry and started to become violent. 'Within three years, I got kicked out of six schools.' He got into a cycle of crime, addiction, and gang life in his teens. 'I had all this anger built up in me since a kid, and I just felt like hurting people was the only way to get rid of my pain, so I ended up in prison.' Gzilla was jailed from 2017 to 2018 for violence, including assaulting people. 'When I got out of jail, I had a lot of conflict still to deal with the gangs around here ... in 2019, I ended up getting my house invaded by a whole bunch of my own gang,' he said. 'I got tortured, a ring split my eyebrow, some teeth missing ... dumbbells, machete, I got beaten up, bloody bashed, broken bones, bruised.' The gang demanded $50,000 if he wanted to stay alive. 'They had a bullet with my name carved into it.' Fearing for his life, he turned to a friend – a local pastor – and asked for prayer. 'I thought, 'I'm going to die, I want to make sure I'm right with God. I ask for forgiveness before I die for all the wrongs I've done.'' That moment marked the beginning of a radical shift. The pastor not only prayed with him, but also spoke privately with the gang members. Whatever was said remains a mystery, but Gzilla was then free to go, and decided to restart. On Christmas Eve 2019, he was baptised at Potter's House Church in Napier. During the Covid lockdowns, Gzilla began sharing videos of his diving and fishing missions, something he always loved to do. Now he keeps sharing his new life on social media, and six months ago, he started working fulltime as a gospel rapper under the label Chosen Records. His debut track, centred around kina diving, dropped earlier this month and is the first song of two full albums set to release in the coming weeks. In June, he will kick off a tour, performing in Christchurch, Auckland, Fiji, and Australia. Looking at his past life now, Gzilla says he is grateful he is still alive to live his dreams. 'Life is worth living ... I do a lot of community work, I got to become a father, a husband, and my ultimate dream is to be a pastor one day.' He now has two children, Rico, 8, and Miracle, 1, with a third baby girl on the way, likely to be named Hope. 'I'm able to raise my kids in this safe environment. Now, I'm able to trust that if they follow me, they're going to be okay.' Gzilla says gang members are still in his life, but in a different way now. 'I still talk to them. I pray for them and with them ... Our church is full of them,' he says. 'Nobody's too far gone ... If God can save me, he can save anyone.'

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