There’s a whakataukī – kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua – to walk backwards into the future. It feels quietly relevant here because what Andrew Spraggon builds on ‘In The Mids’, the 2026 eighth studio album from Sola Rosa, is less reinvention than recalibration.
Arriving after more than two decades of steady electronic music evolution from Spraggon, this album is guided by instinct, repetition, and the discipline of making without judgement.
You can hear it immediately. These tracks don’t push – they settle. The transformation doesn’t announce itself – it unfolds in stages. Title track In The Mids opens like a horizon line; driving percussion, crystalline keys, and that unmistakable sense of forward motion. You half expect Ryan Gosling to drift into frame, all quiet intensity and perfect timing, as if the whole thing has been waiting for its close-up.
Like A Light in the Dark follows as release – hopeful, open, almost disarmingly sincere. The vocal lifts cleanly, harmonies stacking toward something that feels less written than received. It builds, glows, and then – without warning – cuts to silence. Not an ending, exactly. More like waking from a dream you hadn’t realised you were inside.
What You Need, featuring Blush’ko, tightens the focus. The groove sharpens, the bassline carries more intent, and suddenly there’s movement – not frantic, not forced, just inevitable. It plays like a memory of heat and light: dancefloors, late nights, and somewhere in the background, a figure who looks suspiciously like Sonny Crockett keeping watch.
Then Jupiter, featuring Iva Lamkum, opens the space again. Weightless synths settle into a groove that feels less constructed than discovered, anchored by a vocal that balances control with something deeper held just beneath the surface. It doesn’t overwhelm. It aligns.
By the time Losing Time, which features Muroki, arrives, everything has loosened – tempo, space, expectation – nothing dominating, everything breathing. Songs written in the key of Joy tend to do that.
Listening on headphones the morning after a storm, with Lake Taupō stretched out and glistening, all evidence erased, the idea of musica universalis – a shared, inaudible rhythm beneath all things – suddenly feels less abstract. Standing there, with the album threading its way through the morning,
small things begin to fall into step; water nudging the shoreline, wind moving lightly across the surface, tyres whispering over damp asphalt in accidental time.
Even the grounded plane across from McDonald’s Taupō seems, for a moment, to hum along with it. Call it coincidence. Call it projection. Or something closer to what te ao Māori has long understood; the whenua is not separate from rhythm – it carries it. And in that sense, what Sola Rosa builds here isn’t just groove – it’s participation. A system loose enough to move, locked in enough to trust. Like everything is already dancing, whether it knows it or not.
In te ao Māori, mauri describes the life force within a place – something recognised rather than imposed. That idea sits quietly alongside ‘In The Mids’, which similarly feels observational rather than declarative. Spraggon’s production leans into that; layered synths, subtle rhythmic shifts, and carefully placed elements that prioritise space over force. The guest vocals are embedded rather than foregrounded, woven into the texture rather than placed
above it.
It is production as environment. Something you step into, rather than something that arrives. And maybe that is why it lands here, of all places, with such quiet authority. Because this is music that understands timing – not just tempo, but moment. Not the storm itself. But what follows. Some things don’t arrive. They’re already waiting.
