Six years and two EPs on from her first single releases as HINA, Amy Boroevich found inspiration in a period of emotional conflict and contraction to compose and release an album she’s described as arriving like a prophecy. Recorded live with a top notch band as well as a string ensemble, ‘Descending Dreams’ provides a bountiful illustration of her genre-crossing musicality and timeless songwriting, that’s increasingly being recognised. Nur Peach talked with her.  

Back in 2023 Amy Boroevich became an APRA Maioha Award winner along with Mohi Allen, Hēmi Kelly and Noema Te Hau III as co-writer of the winning waiata, Me Pēhea Rā, performed by Mohi.
Earlier this year she reached another milestone step as a Kiwi songwriter, named in the final 20 for the 2026 APRA Silver Scroll award. The song earning her the accolade is Coucou!, a light, playful piece of acoustic pop she (Hina) partly sings in French.
“I was actually at work and the email came through and it was embargoed until the media release,” Boroevich remembers of getting the exciting news.

“So I sort of just sat there just squirming in my chair, unable to even tell anyone! I had to keep it a secret for a couple of weeks. It was so crazy, it was just, like, fizzing inside me, and I was like, I want to tell people, but I can’t. 

“It’s kind of surreal, to be honest. It’s crazy to be nominated up amongst some of the country’s brightest stars.”

Coucou! was accompanied by a suitably playful monochrome video, directed by Sina Leo and featuring a bridal Boroevich in the back seat of a car, surrounded by tulle.

“It was a real beautiful opportunity to work with my friend Sina, and she really brought the idea to life. We got this gorgeous vintage car and all these flowers and all this tulle, and Finn Scholes playing trumpet! Sina’s idea was to use all the tulle and make it both set dress and costume, and also a prop at the same time. It took on a life of its own!”

As the lead single announcing Hina’s debut album ‘Descending Dreams’, Coucou! was followed by similarly playful videos for South Pacific Sun and The Fountain.

‘Descending Dreams’ debuted at number four in the Official Top 20 Aotearoa Albums in the first week of August. It’s a dynamic body of timeless soulful pop/rock, in the mould of assured local singer-songwriter likes of Bic Runga and Brooke Fraser.

Recorded live in Roundhead’s Studio B, it was produced by Navakatoa Tekela-Pule, with input from James Milne (Lawrence Arabia) and mixed by in-house engineer Paddy Hill, it was  Boroevich was backed by a classy seven-piece band including Finn Scholes, Dave Khan, Tiare Kelly, Stenn Francis-Deare, Hamish Morgan and De Stevens, plus a string quartet.

Boroevich reveals this was her first time working with most of the collaborators, who had been chosen with a specific sound in mind. The band had just two days of practice before heading to the studio.

“Playing with a new band at any point is always fun and exciting, let alone playing with a new band and new songs. Recording it was sort of our first gig! So it was all very new, uncharted territory, but it felt organic, felt quite natural. The perks of working with people who you admire, and really trust, is that all of their ideas are pretty great, straight off the bat.

“We just did two days and basically got 80% of the album recorded and done. Then we went back and did a couple of days of strings, and then just various overdubs over the course of the year, with extra percussion and BVs and things.

“It was a bit of a pinch-me moment, to be honest, because I was just thinking about all the albums that have been made in that studio, and all the incredible people who’ve worked there, and I thought, ‘Man, this is a real privilege to be making my album here.’ There’s a real sort of cosy nest feeling.”

Written in her childhood bedroom, ‘Descending Dreams’ traces a period of personal contraction and subsequent recovery for the Tāmaki Makaurau-based songwriter.

She captures the dichotomy well in describing the piano-led third track, River To Mouth, as “sonically triumphant, lyrically disillusioned”.

Richly textured and charmingly buoyant despite the lyrical weight, the album traverses quietly assured indie rock, pop and alt-country, detailed with diverse instrumental backdrops and overlaid motifs. The drum sonics were enhanced by separation, one of engineer Paddy Hill’s suggestions.

“We gave him ‘Rumours’, the Fleetwood Mac album as a sonic reference, and he was like, ‘We gotta isolate the drums, we’ll put Hamish in the booth.’ I was singing in a makeshift booth, because we ended up putting Hamish, our drummer, in the actual vocal booth to get the real crispy, crispy drums.”

Strings feature prominently, the lush string arrangements lending a cinematic sweetness to many of the songs. Seeing as Boroevich got her start in music by playing classical violin, this isn’t surprising. She was both an arranger and part of the string quartet also including Sandy Niu and Olivia Wilding.

“My initial idea for the album was that it was going to be quite minimalist, and then it grew to be very maximalist,” she laughs. “The opportunity for there to be strings on it presented itself, and we started listening through the tracks with the idea in mind to maybe have strings on them.

“The two-fold idea of having strings and being the one to play them felt really engaging! And to have one of my really good friends from school, Sandy, as the other violinist was extra special as well.”

South Pacific Sun has a particularly ear-catching string arrangement. The song’s instrumental break features descending triplets that lend a tropical, sun-soaked flavour.

“The string line was actually originally a guitar part that we passed over to the strings. It was always a song that I wanted to situate in Aotearoa, like, in the South Pacific. That’s why there’s the sample at the beginning of waves at my local beach, and things like that.”

Lyrically, the album is introspective, making extensive use of metaphor to part-reveal the artist’s inner workings. Boroevich says it was mostly composed in her bedroom.

“This album was the exploration of how my world seemed to be getting smaller and smaller at the time. A lot of the songs are actually about dreams as well, and the shrinking of my world, losing myself, and then ultimately also finding myself in the process of making the album.”

House Within A Room was inspired by a particularly fantastical dream, which Boroevich recounts in detail.

“There was this really long corridor with all these rooms coming off it, and inside all the rooms were entire houses. I’d go outside the house and it was all these really claustrophobic hedge lanes, sort of like in the maze in ‘Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire’. It was really hot and heaps of flowers and heaps of bees and birds and people yelling out to me, and it was quite feverish.

“So I woke up, and I was like, I have to write a song about this!”

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