There’s a cosmic array of surrealism ever present in the lyrics and music of Ha the Unclear, alongside the unabashed Kiwi conversational vernacular that almost mysteriously holds fascination for audiences on the other side of the world, France in particular. After a quiet few years the Tāmaki Makaurau-based, indie rock four-piece have turned up with a smart new EP, crackling with trademark existential pop energy, philosophy and wit. Songwriter and lead singer Michael Cathro talked about going underground and international with Richard Thorne.

Michael Cathro was a newly minted father when NZM last talked with him on the back of Ha the Unclear’s 2018 second album ‘Invisible Lines’. What’s followed since has been a circuitous journey shaped in large measure by having a growing family, in part by the vicissitudes of rock’n’roll timing, and in part by global events – namely the Covid pandemic.

The upshot is that in October 2026 the band has released a curiously good EP that in some ways is the follow up to that record – as well as an advertiser for the next album, already scheduled for release mid-next year.

“Part of the idea of this EP is getting the wheels in motion, you know, like greasing the parts,” he explains. “It’s been two years since the last album [‘Kingdom In A Cul-De-Sac’] was released, and in NZ people knew half the songs on that. The record before that was 2018, so really it was coming up to eight years since we’d released a new entity in NZ.

“The logic really was to not just throw a whole album out at NZ, but to start here with a small number of songs while we finish the record, and to be able to go out and tour. The EP is sort of a way of reaching back out to NZ.”

‘Astigmatic!’ is the name of their typically kaleidoscopic five-song EP, a rollicking adventure that sounds like joyous homely freedom in Cumberland Street (Astigmatic), moody nostalgia in The Good Times Always End In Tears, psychedelic hurt in Earth Grazer… and generally like no one else but Ha the Unclear.

The journeying since 2018 stems from that very uniqueness. Cathro is smiling when he says he’s still yet to work out quite why the opportunity to sign to the Paris-based independent record label Think Zik! arose around that time.

“I received an email one day and… you know, you get a few of these things. I couldn’t tell if it was legitimate or not. I sent the email over to Theo saying, ‘Scam?!’ kind of thing.

“Anyway, I remember being at work when the label owner rang me. He said, ‘We really love your music, and we’d love to meet you. Would you come to France and meet for a few days? We’ll pay for your flights, and if you don’t like us you can just leave and forget about it.’

“So, well, you can’t turn that down!” he laughs.

Cathro and lead guitarist Theo Francis were soon on a flight to Paris for four days.

“They put us up and gave us tickets to a Parquet Courts show, and laid out a strategy about how they thought us and our music would fit in France. And yeah, all very good!

“So we left quite feeling quite positive about, and probably spent the next year working out the guts of the deal, and then signed, I think in 2019.”

Soon after the band debuted in Paris, performing at a music festival (MaMA) and doing a bunch of press. The deal was for a couple of albums, supported with promotional trips by Ha the Unclear to France and beyond. Then Covid crashed their party.

“They were taking a huge punt on us, really. It’s very much a French act label, we were their only kind of import, and they couldn’t bring us over for about two years. So the strategy they had in place kind of went to bits.”

Unwilling to have the band release an album without being able to tour, the label compromised by putting out a couple of EPs during the Covid period. Cathro says their 2024 album, ‘A Kingdom In A Cul-De-Sac’, was weird for the band because it was a mix of prior releases with some new, a means for both sides to honour the original contract – but they did get to tour.

It’s easy to imagine that album-supporting French excursion being a career highlight for the four musicians, by then into their late 30s.

“Yeah, it was,” Cathro grins, adding he was very cognitive of enjoying it. “We basically had three weeks in Paris, just to do promotion and shows, and I just made sure that I wasn’t worrying about anything else while I was there.

“I was very present for it, and those shows were definitely peak! We headlined at Supersonic which is this great wee venue. We played some support shows as well, and we found the audiences really responsive. In a lot of the interviews that I did they were so interested in the Dunedin sound stuff still. And we were from Dunedin, so we couldn’t get away from it!

“We got some good pick up, they’re still playing a couple of the songs on radio actually. As a band we really enjoyed it. We saw a lot of the city, spent a lot of time on the Metro…”

Anticipating (prior to Covid) that the label signing would mean blocks of time overseas, Cathro had returned to Ōtepoti where his partner and their two boys could enjoy the support of family. It was there that the songs on the new ‘Astigmatic!’ EP were written.

Opening track Cumberland Street (Astigmatic) extols the joy of hitting a run of green lights on that central Dunedin main drag, the cry of “Astigmatic!” providing a central metaphor (‘astigmatism’ essentially means faulty vision). Musically there’s a punchy, youthful energy throughout.

“I think these songs do feel more youthful because they were more like me letting out some frustration, maybe about the creative process, and being a bit carefree about writing. I think that my mentality at the time was to not get bogged down, letting the song be what it is, just finishing it and leaving it.”

The EP was recorded with producer Tom Healy, who was also responsible for 2018’s ‘Invisible Lines’. Not long after the band’s French fling Cathro and family moved back to Tāmaki Makaurau, where Healy has his studio.

“Being up in Auckland it made sense to come back to Tom. He’s always worked really well with guitars for us. I’m very sprawling with my writing, I’m quite ratty I think. Tom’s able to like, reel in my horses a bit, and sort of mold the ideas into a cohesive whole.

“He’s really good at clarifying the ideas, and I think he’s really key for bringing some of the hooks forward in the songs – whereas I’d probably have buried them! He sort of sees things that the rest of us don’t.”

Cathro points out his own guitar role is mainly rhythm, leaving the lead lines and effects to Francis.  

“Mostly because we have so many lyrics in the songs, I don’t leave a lot of space for delicate guitar lines. Theo’s very good at effect-driven stuff.

“I don’t know, there’s something about the sound of the guitar that I am not too fussed about! I need it to sound okay, but I guess I don’t focus on the sound. I often need other people to dial in my tone for me! Vocals the same, I find it very hard to be objective about my vocal. You know, it’s hard to listen to yourself.

“And the other thing I suppose is I’ll change lyrics and change a melody because I get bored of it. So I do rely on others to kind of say, ‘No that’s good, leave that,’ or ‘there’s no problem with that vocal it’s fine.’ I rely on others a lot for feedback on things like that.”

Stu Harwood, another Dunedin musician, replaced the band’s original drummer Ben Sargeant in 2023. Cathro says they’d all known him for years and Harwood was a natural fit

“There’s a real scene down there where you’re all at each other’s shows all the time, and Stu was part of that. Stu was in a band called The Tweeks who we played a few shows with, he’s played across quite a few bands.

“He drummed for us in patches across the years when Ben was unavailable, so he was across the songs already and it didn’t take him long to get up speed.”

Regular rehearsals aren’t a thing for Ha the Unclear. Cathro says he would love that but getting together has proven one of the more challenging things about living in Auckland. When living back in Ōtepoti he was writing in a shared a musicians’ space near the wharf that included a rehearsal room.

“In Dunedin you can get anywhere in five minutes, you know. Auckland’s more difficult to find that kind of regular rhythm, everybody’s very busy. So we tend to wait until it’s important before we kind of crash course it!”

His bass playing brother Paul Cathro has his own project, Francis is also part of Dictaphone Blues, and Harwood is, he says, in a bunch of bands.

“So yeah, you know, everyone’s headed in different ways.”

That said, ‘Astigmatic!’ is a pre-cursor to a full album of new tracks planned for release via their own Woollen Records label mid-2027. Ha the Unclear are evidently back on a creative roll, perhaps now freed of any lingering rock’n’roll dreams.

“Honestly, I don’t think anyone’s doing it with this grand kind of finish line in mind. I think everyone does it maybe for the same reasons that I do – it brings some aspect of fun or joy to life. Playing shows and going on tour together is really fun.

“I feel like there’s a really important wellbeing aspect of being in a group of people making music. We’re social beings. I think we’re obviously overly-individualised at the moment, but I don’t think it’s our natural way of being.”

Just a few years ago Cathro completed a Master’s degree in health psychology, writing his thesis on wellbeing and music making. There’s an evident tie to the way he approaches Ha the Unclear in terms of where it fits in his life, something he’s reflected on both as songwriter and academic.

“Our identity is constructed over time, it’s made up of these things that we do, the way we see ourselves, the way we think other people see us probably. Music allows me to be part of a community, and there’s songwriting processes that I think are really good for wellbeing.

“What I love about songwriting is that you can blow up small things that seem not that meaningful. You can just really amplify them, and you can see them more clearly. Writing music helps me to process stuff. It’s really a reflective time.

“I find that playing with other people really has this other impact on wellbeing, in which you’re interacting with people on like a pre-verbal basis. We’re not complicating a relationship with dialogue! It’s like you’re communicating in a different way, on a more primal level, which isn’t cluttered by dialogue maybe. I think it’s something I will always do, because it brings me all these things that positively impact on my being.”