L.A.B And Stan Walker Announce Summer Tour With Special Guests
Presented by Loop, the first show will take place on Saturday December 27, 2025 at Wharepai Domain in Tauranga followed by Saturday January 3, 2026 at Broadwater Parklands, Gold Coast. The final show will take place on Saturday January 31, 2026 at Auckland's Trusts Arena Outer Fields.
These three special shows will see massive line-ups including:
L.A.B, Stan Walker, Aaradhna & Te Wehi (All Shows).
Corrella (Tauranga only).
Tiki Taane (Gold Coast only).
Nesian Mystik (Auckland only, first show in Tāmaki Makaurau in over 15 years).
Tickets for all three shows go on sale Thursday, July 31 at 12pm from loop.co.nz, with Afterpay available for all shows. Sign up for pre-sale access for all shows from loop.co.nz/join.
These three outdoor shows will be the perfect summer day out, with a collection of acts who represent Aotearoa summertime all in one place. As a special treat, each show will see a different artist added to the line-up, giving each city a unique line-up not seen anywhere else.
Tauranga will see Corrella on the line-up, bringing with them their high-energy brand of reggae/soul. Auckland will see the legendary Nesian Mystik performing their first show in Auckland in over 15 years. Gold Coast gets the ultimate party-starter Tiki Taane, bringing his epic One Man Band set up on the road back to the GC.
These shows will be L.A.B's first headline shows since winning the Te Manu Mātārae Award at the 2025 Aotearoa Music Awards, an award acknowledging an artist's impact on the music landscape. Their most recent album L.A.B VI included the hits 'Take It Away' and 'Casanova', and 2025 has seen them already touring across the globe. This will be their only headline shows in NZ and Australia this coming summer, so expect three massive days out. Tauranga will be a return home for L.A.B for the first time in over two years, while their Auckland performance will be the first in Tāmaki Makaurau in over four years.
Stan Walker is an artist who continues to go from strength to strength. Taking home the Best Māori Artist and Mana Reo awards at the 2025 Aotearoa Music Awards, Stan's captivating live show sees him combine with his longtime band, The Levites, creating a powerful experience with every performance. Fresh off of multiple visits to the United States through 2025, and with new music on the way, Stan will bring his ever-expanding catalogue of hits to the stage at these shows.
All three shows will see L.A.B and Stan Walker joined by Aaradhna and Te Wehi. One of the most stunning voices in Aotearoa, Aaradhna announced her return with her acclaimed 2024 album SWEET SURRENDER. The album saw her take home Best Soul/RnB Artist at the Aotearoa Music Awards, with select live performances over the past 12 months reminding audiences why she is a true legend of the scene.
Each show will be opened up by the fast-rising Te Wehi. The Bay Of Plenty native has quickly become one of the most sought-after artists in the country, already boasting three #1's on the Aotearoa Hot Singles Chart. His unique blend of country-tinged reggae will be the perfect stage setter for a massive day of live music.
These three shows see a line-up of the finest Māori/Pasifika artists in Aotearoa combine for a series of summer shows that aren't to be missed. Be sure to secure tickets for L.A.B's NZ summer tour. Presented by Loop, thanks to Kirin Hyoketsu, Corona, Mānuka Phuel & Mai FM.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Spinoff
4 hours ago
- The Spinoff
‘Staggered it made that list': a conversation with Booker Prize shortlisted Charlotte Wood
Australian writer Charlotte Wood, the author of Booker Prize shortlisted novel Stone Yard Devotional, is one of the guests at WORD Christchurch this August. Books editor Claire Mabey caught up with her to talk the inspiration behind the book, and why she's so astonished by its success. Charlotte Wood is in her Sydney studio. The walls behind her are white and blank – the bookshelves too are empty. Wood is in the centre of the screen wearing thick-rimmed glasses, red lipstick and short, grey hair swept to one side. Her environment is suitably stripped bare – her latest novel, Stone Yard Devotional, is spacious, with no superfluous detail, only what is needed. Throughout our conversation Wood will look over her shoulder at the books that aren't there – laughing at how odd it is to be in an echoey place without those memory prompts while the room she's worked in for 23 years awaits a fresh coat of white paint. Wood looks exactly as she's appeared on my screen these last months. One Wednesday lunchtime a month for five months, I, along with many others, joined a Zoom masterclass with Wood and New Zealand writer Emily Perkins to listen to them discuss elements of fiction. Together they discussed the topics of voice, texture, time, people and tension. The two writers share an ability to delve into those tools that on the surface appear explicable, even simple, but soon become malleable ideas that shift depending on how they are applied and by who. I was drawn to the course for two main reasons: the bond between Wood and Perkins satisfies a niggle I've long held about the distance between Aotearoa and Australia's literary cultures. Wood agrees: she finds it absurd that we don't have a close creative relationship with each other in the literary world. Very few New Zealand writers become household names over the ditch and vice versa. Seeing Wood and Perkins in deep conversation together, sharing ideas and experiences, was a welcome bridge between us. The other draw was the calibre of the writers themselves. Perkins is one of those household names here in Aotearoa – known most recently for her Ockham-Award winning novel, Lioness. Wood is the author of 11 books including the explosively feminist The Natural Way of Things (2015) and her highly praised book The Luminous Solution, a collection of her writing over 20 years about the creative process. But it was Stone Yard Devotional that propelled Wood's visibility when it was shortlisted for The Booker Prize in 2024, an honour that mystified Wood. Stone Yard Devotional is an intensely introspective novel. It's told in a diary format and is about a middle-aged woman who has suffered great loss (loss of parents, friends; loss of a marriage, loss in her work in conservation) and who returns to the place where she grew up to stay in a monastery. Tension and expansion is created through the narrator's fluid swings between reflections on the present and reflections on the deeper past; and as changes in the environment (including a biblical mouse plague – a real-life, climate-change induced catastrophe that Wood transposed onto her setting) and personnel of the monastery unsettles the steady nature of the community. For Wood, the novel came from a very specific moment. She wrote it as she and her two sisters were diagnosed with breast cancer – what she describes as 'a personal existential calamity' – and were receiving treatment at the same time; and during the Covid lockdowns which followed the 2019 bush fires – the worst Australia had seen. 'I'm really staggered that it got on [the Booker Prize] list because of the kind of book it is,' Wood explains. Stone Yard Devotional is what is called a 'quiet novel' – meaning that it doesn't lean on plot so much as it follows the twists and turns of the inquiring, idiosyncratic mind wrestling with grief, despair, and an intense draw to solipsism, reflection and steady daily ritual (cooking, cleaning, gardening as much as the steady marking of time that the nuns' devotionals offer). The writing is strikingly bare while also alive – even ornate – with the detail of the narrator's cinematic memories and attention to the peculiar qualities of them. 'My instinct was to put nothing trivial in the book, nothing inessential,' says Wood. 'I didn't want to explain anything that I didn't have to explain. I wanted to give the reader credit for being smarter than me and allow them space to have their own life come up to their consciousness as they were reading. I wanted to give a lot of space.' The experience of reading Stone Yard Devotional is to retreat – to attempt, with the narrator, some kind of quest for peace in a world that is overwhelmed with rolling catastrophes and political denial. The fantastic tension in the novel is anchored to the question of whether retreat is avoidance, or whether such a quiet, private existence is doing more work than most. Wood draws out this tension through the character of Helen Parry – an activist nun – a charismatic, intrusive character but a markedly unlikeable one. 'Helen Perry embodies this problem of being in the world versus being out of the world,' says Wood. She wanted to reflect what she calls 'a kind of wild rogue nun' that she's noticed over the years. 'They do cool things – political work and activist work – and they seem to be sole operators.' Wood's conversation and obvious talent for craft, introspection and process is all the more striking in this moment of the juggernaut of AI. Ironically another 'unprecedented' moment among so many long-predicted by scientists and science fiction writers (floods, fires, plagues and pandemics being other such 'unprecedented' yet increasingly common phenomena). Wood, like so many creatives, is grappling with the implications of AI and cites a Guardian article that quotes filmmaker Justine Bateman: 'They're trying to convince people they can't do the things they've been doing easily for years … We will get to the point … that you will essentially become just a skin bag of organs and bones, nothing else. You won't know anything and you will be told repeatedly that you can't do it, which is the opposite of what life has to offer.' Wood will never use generative AI but doesn't believe in throwing up hands against new technologies either. She's played with Claude AI but found it feeble – often incorrect, unoriginal. She has concluded that she's not worried about AI writing novels: 'I don't give a shit about that. Who is going to read it?' Wood is more concerned about the loss of process: 'I think it's obscene to pretend that all we want is result, and it'll be a shit result. When we read a book, we want a human connection with another person, and we want that book to be an outcome of all of that writer's life and thinking and experience and observation and serendipity, and the weather – all of this stuff goes into making something deeply, deeply human.' It's this deeply human experience that makes Stone Yard Devotional so relatable: on the surface it is hard to imagine a book about a woman who goes off to live in a monastery connecting with so many readers to such a heightened degree as it has. But Wood's attention to instinct, to the strange ways of the mind and what she calls 'distorted memory' (after an Elizabeth Hardwick quote that is the epigraph of the novel) is so specific that it becomes universal. It's New Zealand painter Jude Rae who Wood credits with finding the form of her novel. Rae is known for her still life paintings which fascinate Wood because of what she describes as an 'energy in the paint' – a liveliness to the otherwise static arrangement of the work. Rae told Wood that she achieves the effect by breaking up the surface – literally creating gaps where layers of paint show through. 'I tucked that away,' said Wood, 'and that's where the diary form came to me.' Stone Yard Devotional is told in three parts and within each of those parts are fragments – some larger chunks, pages; others short, sometimes just one sentence. Wood said that this novel taught her to trust her unconscious mind – to place information where she felt it needed to go rather than thinking about traditional, rational ideas of where information should fit. A moving life. Wood is joining Perkins live at WORD Christchurch next month where they will be running a live version of their online masterclasses. She's looking forward to being in Aotearoa – particularly in relation to the oddity that is the gulf between Australian and New Zealand literary communities. My parting question is to ask Wood for recommendations – Australian writers she admires. We discuss Fiona McFarlane, Joan London, Helen Garner, Gail Jones, Alexis Wright and Ellen van Neervan. Wood then turns to glance at her empty bookshelves to consult for more and momentarily despairs at their absence, 'so weird when they're not there! I feel out of my head.' Charlotte Wood will appear in multiple events at WORD Christchurch this August including an event on Stone Yard Devotional, an Elements of Fiction masterclass, live with Emily Perkins.
Otago Daily Times
5 hours ago
- Otago Daily Times
Fun but needs (armour) polish
I was recently given the opportunity to have a quick look at an alpha-build of a new game called Renown, alongside a small play session with Australian developers RDBK Studios. Renown is an open world crafting and base-building game, which seem like a dime a dozen nowadays. It manages to separate itself though with its main draw of combat, which is aligned more with medieval arena fighters. It also shuns some other basic survival mechanics like food and thirst. This is a pretty neat concept and I was interested by that alone. As with other games of this type, there is no story — just a world in which you and other players can forge your own path, which has never personally interested me, but as we can see in the popularity of games like Rust, certainly has fans. Those who have played games like MORDHAU or the Chivalry series will be right at home with the combat. You can swing your weapon from left, right, overhead, and make stabs. There's parries, feints and morphs, and for the more technically knowledgeable out there, they also have accels and drags and your physical hitbox moves with your mouse, so you can duck under sword blows. For those who want a ranged option, there's plenty of bows and arrows to turn others into human pincushions. Hitboxes did seem a little off, especially against bots. Attacking someone from behind just seemed to fail all the time, and sometimes attacks seemed to phase into opponents or miss. It worked fine when I tried some old-fashioned fisticuffs against other players though, so maybe this is a skill issue on my end or something specific to bots. Crafting is fairly simple. You gather resources from the surroundings using tools or fists, then open the crafting menu and get to it. It's added to a queue so you can walk around doing other things while it all finishes in the background. You can also build workshops, like a forge to smelt those gold coins you find into gold ingots, used in the research tree to unlock more crafting recipes. The play session itself ran rather smoothly as we were shown around some player-built structures, from small huts to towering castles, which the devs say won't take an excessively long time to build. After that there was a small attack vs defence raid which the defence team — which I was on — handily lost. Then there was some building of simple huts and some small player scuffles before the session wrapped up. Altogether, I was rather impressed by what I saw. It wasn't perfect by a long shot but clearly something that passionate people had built. I'm not sure about the game's concept of a maintenance tax, essentially an expanding drain on resources to keep your buildings alive. Basically, this puts a theoretical cap on building size, as eventually you won't be able to support the drain. On the plus side, it keeps large clans from just building a massive base while not locking out smaller clans or solo players from building. In my personal testing, tossing a few stacks of wood in would keep my little shack going for several days. It's an early alpha build so there is clearly a lot to be done. The interactions you can make with the world felt obtuse for no reason. You use Q and R to scroll up and down a list, but R for some reason opens the crafting menu by default! Why not just use the scroll wheel? It was really janky and I never got used to it. You could also rotate items in the inventory using the same R button. It's mad! Of course, no early access game is without a bug or 10 and Renown is no exception. For some reason, items got stuck in my inventory and I was unable to move or drop them, so they just took up space forever. I somehow dislocated my arm in game and was unable to do anything until the kind player I was beating in a fight punched me out of it. My personal opinion is that Renown has a solid foundation but needs a lot of polish before release. So far, its neat concept and fun combat are covered with a layer of strange jank and an unpolished sheen. But clearly, the devs just want players to build big castles and smash armies together and have fun. I can deeply respect that. Renown is slated for early access release on PC in Q3 2025. By Michael Robertson
RNZ News
14 hours ago
- RNZ News
The Panel with Jennie Moreton and Steve McCabe Part 1
Tonight on The Panel, Wallace Chapman is joined by panellists Jennie Moreton and Steve McCabe. Starting off, the Panel hears how FENZ thinks the cost of living may be to blame for a high number of deaths caused by house fires - high prices forcing people to try and heat their home with the gas barbeques. They also discuss the TikTok video made by an Australian living in Wellington who claims it's "cold, dark, gloomy and depressing" and Wellingtonians as "unmotivated" with "no aspiration". To embed this content on your own webpage, cut and paste the following: See terms of use.
