Since her first release in 2017, Rotorua-born singer-songwriter Alayna Powley (alayna) has consistently developed a portfolio of singles, album and EP releases that’ve earned her more than 85 million streams globally, and the opportunity to collaborate with a number of international songwriting heavyweights. The 29 year-old singer of smooth, soulful pop tunes released her sophomore album, a gently uplifting exploration and celebration of love titled ‘Set Her Free’, in February. Nur Peach talked with her. 

Just days before the release of ‘Set Her Free,’ Alayna Powley is bubbling with excitement. It’s been three years since her reflective debut album, ‘Self Portrait of a Woman Unravelling,’ and she’s been working on this new batch of songs for some time.

“I pretty much had a month or two break after my first album was released, and then I just went straight into writing the next one. It took me about six months till I figured out the direction that I wanted to go in.”

Taking part in a variety of co-writing sessions helped to set alayna free.

“I’d hit a kind of creative ceiling. I’d turn up to the piano and write, but I felt like I needed to get back in the student seat. I started getting into some amazing writing rooms, just through friends, and getting invited to some really awesome spaces. I was able to settle in more and understand my place as an artist and as a songwriter and how the song is the centre of the room. I was able to witness it more and realise, ‘Okay, I’m getting in the way of the process right now,’ or ‘Okay, I’m following the thread right this time.’”

The conceptual framework to ‘Set Her Free’ came to her in the shower – while on a songwriting retreat in Bali.

“That retreat was honestly some of the most incredible memories of my life. I got to be in these rooms with heavyweights of the industry who had written thousands of songs, and it was so inspiring to see people at the top of the game who’d been doing it for decades, and they still had this love and respect for the music and so much joy and so much excitement, and it just revived me.

“On that particular day, before the session, I just felt the concept really materialise in my head. I was having my morning shower. And I was like, ‘Oh, that’s it.’ It’s about how the love I was always searching for in romantic partnerships was actually always there in the relationships with the woman in my life, I just hadn’t seen that perspective. We went into the room that day and we [Powley, songwriter Emma Rosen and producer Warren ‘Oak’ Felder] wrote Softly in the space of a few hours, and it just felt so beautiful.”

Tiny Spaces, another of the 13 tracks on her album, was also written at that retreat. Powley wrote that with Grammy award-winning songwriter Coleridge Tillman, aka Sebastian Kole (Alicia Keys, John Legend), and producer Serban Cazan (Rita Ora, Fatboy Slim).

“Sebastian has written for years in the industry, some incredible songs. Witnessing him work and seeing songwriting done at the level that he’d done it was incredible. I asked how many songs he’d written and he said, ‘Oh, over 5000,’ and I couldn’t compute! Serban has written thousands of songs as well, and produced thousands more.

“I remember turning to Sebastian, and I was like, ‘I need to write about how big love is.’ I had this image of lightning in the sky. When lightning flashes, it takes up our whole sky, but then that very same pattern is in the veins in our eyelids. It’s so vast, but it’s so small, and it fits in all these small places. Sebastian left the room, almost like he was going to pick something up, and he came back in with the whole first verse. And I was like, ‘How did you do that?!’”

Her introspective first album was mostly composed with friend and long-time collaborator Noema Te Hau. Now signed with Nettwerk Music Group, Powley cast her net more widely this time around. She returned to work with Rosen, Tillman and others from that Bali retreat, but wrote and recorded the majority of the album with Kiwi producer Ben Malone.

“I met Ben through Parachute Studios. I spent a lot of time at Parachute, they’ve been really supportive and I’d seen Ben over the years. We’d have little conversations, and would always say, ‘Oh, we need to work together one day!’ And finally, we booked in a session at the end of 2024, and the very first song we made is the last song on the album, Set Her Free. As soon as I got the bounce from him of that song, I was like, ‘Yep, he’s the right person.’”

Set Her Free gave the album its title and remains a personal favourite track for Powley.

“I write the best I can from me, but the point is that it must connect with the other person to do my job. I see it as this underground reservoir. I feel like if you go to that deep part of yourself, that’s where you connect with everyone else, almost like this mycelium network or something.

“Set Her Free, for me, felt like I was singing something that I didn’t really understand, and I still don’t. I was saying ‘what if I set her free,’ and I was just repeating it over and over. The day we recorded it I was like, ‘I don’t know what that means, but I love it!’

“I ended up calling the album ‘Set Her Free’ because it felt like the answer to every question or every statement I’d made throughout the track list. So Love of My Life… set her free, Mother’s Mother… set her free. Animal… set her free. All of these parts of ourselves. Because I think what love really is, is a sense of freedom.”

Malone and Powley proceeded to collaborate on several more songs for the album.

“It was so fun in the studio. We spent three months making way too many songs! We were just getting excited and essentially making a double album, and then we had to cut it all down. I had a budget to stick to.”

The result is a varied and soulful pop album, which doesn’t shy away from deep, personal subject matter and is best described as a love letter to love in all its forms.

“‘Self Portrait of a Woman Unravelling’ was all about digging inwards, and this kind of self-excavation to try and understand who I am as a person. I realised that I will never truly know, because I’m forever unravelling. But I felt like I’d gone as deep as I could to that understanding at this stage in my life, so for this project I needed to turn outwards from that same place.

“The resounding message, or thing that was so clear for me, was how much love there was woven throughout my life. My friendships, the people I grew up with, my mum and the long line of women who I came from, as well as the self love journey I had to go on. And then also romantic love, and realising that putting so much emphasis or expectation on romantic love is actually quite unfair to the person you’re in love with. I think the foundation we stand on is love.  It’s the very fabric and tapestry of the life that I’ve lived and what I will live.”

The album received a $55,000 boost with NZ On Air New Music Project funding in mid-2025, and is accompanied by sleekly cinematic visuals for several of the tracks directed by her longtime friends, husband-wife filmmaking duo Marlan Prabahar and Laila Ben-Brahim (Westall Road).

“I gave them what the songs meant to me, and they presented a whole content pitch of what they saw from the album. Laila and I are so close that she really sees and understands me, so I feel so safe working with her. Over the space of maybe three months we filmed six videos, and it was so much fun.

“Having my mum on set for Mother’s Mother was a real dream come true, because I’m blessed with the most incredible parents who supported me for so long. It was nice to give my mum her moment and celebrate her in a way I haven’t been able to before.

“I had some of my friends in the Softly shoot and we just laughed the whole day. And I can’t not mention Animal, because that was a beast of a video, no pun intended! I had my friend Chloe dance, and it was such a joy to work with my friends and celebrate them too.”

Asked to name a favourite among the videos, Powley settles on the simple yet theatrical visual for Hold Me.

“It was at the end of a really long day – we’d done two videos prior. It was just the core crew left and I feel like we did a really good job of conveying the visual emotion of the song. I created the silver dress that I wear in the video with two pieces of fabric wrapped around myself. We used a projector screen of water, ripples, oceans and endless skies to show the magnitude of this feeling I’m wanting to convey, and this type of powerful humanness. It’s a simple concept of a video, but with a massive amount of emotion behind it.”

A fitting summary for alayna’s cinematic sophomore album; songs of love in its myriad form that feel both personal and universal.