Menzies’ songs are populated with famously Kiwiana things like our national rugby team, sausage rolls, inter-island ferry crossings and mashed potatoes. Attracting parallels with the Kiwi-conscious likes of The Front Lawn, The Mutton Birds and Ha The Unclear, the Wellington four-piece entertainingly explore the national psyche with a clear Kiwi pitch, while challenging with oddball lyrics, unsettled song structures and raw personal insight. Band leader Chris Brown (vocals, guitar and keys), talked with Richard Thorne about their mouthful debut album, ‘Holding My Cold Hand, Even Though Yours Is Warm’. 

Alternative pop/rock act Menzies came together in Te Whanganui-a-Tara just three years ago, with a band kaupapa that holds fun at its centre.

“It’s all about us enjoying this as much as possible,” explains founder, songwriter and lead singer Chris Brown. “That’s the only reason we’re going to keep showing up and doing it. We want to enjoy it because we’re investing our time into it. And if other people enjoy it along the way, then awesome, that’s a great bonus. But really, it’s all for us!” 

Taking Brown’s middle name, the Menzies ‘us’ includes drummer Nikita Piper, Samuel Scully sharing guitar duties, and Doug Kelly on bass synths and percussion – all three adding backing vocals. 

“I guess also we’ve created a space where we don’t feel confined by rules or expectations of what a song or performance should or could be, allowing ourselves to lean into whatever oddities or weird ideas we might have, and run with them.”

And oddities there certainly are among the tracks on their “part concept-album, part Aotearoa-coming-of-age” album debut ‘Holding My Cold Hand, Even Though Yours Is Warm’. Brown describes the sound as crooked alt-country-rock, laughing readily when challenged about the ‘country’ quota of that characterisation among the new album’s 10 songs / 15 tracks. 

“I guess to me just ‘crooked alt-rock’ feels too rocky, so it’s trying to kind of broach that reasonably broad gap we can have sometimes between getting pretty loud and gnarly, while having a song like All Black in the mix.”

Rhyming fantasy innuendo with numerous famous players’ names, All Black is both poem and song, a spoken/sung track that boldly describes an unlikely romantic obsession towards the national team. ‘I always wanted to be tackled by an All Black…’ 

“I’ve had the words for some time, and they came pretty fully formed! I kept a voice memo recently of the initial version of it, and it’s pretty much bang on,” Brown smiles.

He’d tried putting piano and guitar beneath the poetry, but didn’t quite know what to do until he tried it a capella in a show, and it went down well.

“I guess it is a poem, but it’s a song in that it’s melodic and it’s spoken, as opposed to read. I love performing it, that’s maybe one of my favourite moments of set.”

Brown, Piper and Menzies’ original bass player Miles Sutton (Welcomer) were all previously in Wellington band Friendlies, and Brown says many of his song ideas originated over that period.

He learnt piano as a youngster then guitar, played in high school bands but took a break from music through his early 20s. He had also got into magic in his intermediate school years, picking it up from a new friend who’d come over from the US. 

“I just kind of went all at it. So moved into doing kids birthday parties and the odd work party. I loved it, and then I just thought it was a bit lame and stepped away from it. Often thought at some point I’ll maybe go back and do it as a job… and I haven’t. 

“But since leading the band I’ve really enjoyed re-threading magic through our live shows. I’ve still got all the gear, and I haven’t forgotten too much of it. So it’s nice to bring some surprise to our performance, just to keep people on their toes a bit more than they normally might!”

There’s a playful sense of Kiwiana magic within ‘Holding My Cold Hand, Even Though Yours Is Warm’, which plays out as an inter-island ferry crossing, peppered throughout with those overhead intercom announcements that will be familiar to most adult Kiwi listeners.

One gig saw him performing as Spider–Man on the ferry between Wellington and Picton, then again on the return crossing that same magically calm Cook Strait day. 

“So first of all, performing as Spider-Man!” he beams. “I had a cabin and took my guitar with me because I was working on songs for the album. The show was about 45 minutes or an hour of hanging out with the kids, and then I just got to chill out the rest of time.

“Those overhead intercom announcements were just so NZ, and so beautiful, that I couldn’t help but record all of them! And you never know when they were going to come, so I was at the ready the whole time.”

His Spider-Man role is mentioned among the several ferry announcements that punctate the album, taking listeners from the welcome-on-board message to the captain’s farewell. Superman features too, though Superman Pose is more a highly personal tale of uncertainty, written when Brown was applying for a job and coincidentally pondering the end of a relationship. 

Kiwi kids’ super hero Suzy Cato gets her own alt pop single, and the impact of Don McGlashan on his music is referenced in various ways.

“What an asset to this country that man is, in what he has done and continues to do… his humility just blows me away.” 

‘New Zealand hasn’t had a band like this since The Front Lawn or The Mutton Birds,’ the Menzies’ press proclaims, a reference to both acts’ innate Kiwi sensibilities, as well as the theatricality, the storytelling, disguised psycho drama and more.

“This is maybe a little bit more so in our EP [2024’s ‘Spaghetti Land’] than the album, but the throwing away the rules of the sort of songbook, or songwriting. I think The Front Lawn did that more so, it’s kind of like the doors are open as to what a song might be, so long as it feels good. They were big performers as well, the theatrics of them I admire.”

Composition credits are shared among Menzies, but the lyrics fall squarely to Brown.

“It tends to be that I bring the core song idea, normally, a chord patter, with a melody over the top to the band, and then we flesh it out as a team from there. I’ll cobble words over the top somewhere along the process.”

Their debut album was recorded and mixed by James Goldsmith at The Surgery, in Wellington, the bulk captured over three days in August last year.

“We tracked almost all the songs live, kind of splitting out into different rooms as we needed to. There are a couple where we had to break things up, but 95% of it was done at the same time. And then the overdubs were added over the next couple months. We did those ourselves in rehearsal rooms and bedrooms and lounges, and those were the strings, trombones, feedback guitar stuff, backing vocals, power drills…”

Having spent years learning how to distract people Chris Brown sees this as completely opposite. 

“Magic is all about consensual deceit, whereas this this album, and the songs, really felt like… intentional magnification perhaps. Particularly from a lyrical sense, not hiding away from it at all. Putting things under the spotlight and not trying to hide things away. Touching the really sensitive, sore bit, and I guess having the courage to leave that out there.”