Punk noise-makers Lung have been a storied Palmerston North act since the early 1990s, the trio’s leader Dave White a legend in his own right with getting The Stomach up and pumping around the same period. A few years of hard earned northern hemisphere success left the band broken, but White and bassist Phil Williscroft resurrected the formula in 2019, with live gigs and new music recordings sporadically coughed up since. 

2026 saw the release of ‘Fog’, an album guitarist/singer White described as being Lung’s “…most raw, fucked up, brutal, honest work to date.” Student radio embraced ‘Fog’, and the album has won unexpected praise from critics at home and abroad, fans old and new. 

Reviewing the new album by the now Wellington-based veteran punk rock act, USA’s Big Takeover Magazine regular Dave Franklin wrote, “In many ways, ‘Fog’ is the natural evolution of punk… the natural result of 50 years of the same energies, the same outsiderness, the same frustrations, all reacting to a world getting increasingly far worse than it was back then…”

Small wonder that review appeals to Lung frontman Dave White, who would have been 17 a half a century ago. 

“We are really happy with ‘Fog’ because it kind of represents what we heard when we jammed. I mean, basically these days we play music for our own selves. There are actually people out there that like us, but that’s not the focus anymore. It’s basically for our own satisfaction and enjoyment.

“Music’s been my thing my entire life. The only time I ever made money from it and lived off it, as the band Lung, was during the ’90s.”

He still holds evident enthusiasm for that exhilarating three year period when the Palmerston North trio of himself on guitar and vocals, Phil Williscroft on bass and drummer Brent Gemmill, lived and toured in Europe, also undertaking two massive US tours before disbanding in late 1994. 

“We were really pedantic, on a mission,” White says of their music. “We were really fussy about the Lung sound, and we knew what we didn’t like. We were into some quite heavy and industrial bands from the States and Germany, but we wanted to keep a pop edge – like Bailter Space managed to do, where they had a huge wall of sound, but they also had melodies.

“But within that, we were basically just trying not to be the same as every other NZ band. We liked it loud and we liked it heavy. Also we quite often had the melodies in the bass, because my vocals didn’t really conjure up much in the way of melody! 

“So we did have an idea of what we were striving for. I wouldn’t say we necessarily were happy with everything that we did, but we got close at times. And live, we got real close to what we wanted to do, and for us that was the big thing. 

“With those huge, long tours of the States, basically playing every night for four or five months. If you didn’t like what happened on stage, then there was no point in doing it, because the rest of the time you were stuck in a van on the road pretty much!” 

Still very much at the centre of Lung in terms of performance, with ‘Fog’ White was happy to be less driver-more passenger – with his son Zak White on drums, and long-time Lung soundman, now bassist, James Woods (of Beastwars fame) taking some of the control.

“James joined Lung when our original bass player Phil Williscroft died of cancer [2023]. And immediately there was a whole new possibility, because James uses a lot of distortion and a lot of effects – basically making a whole wall of sound himself – which totally frees me up.

“Like I can completely stop playing guitar and just do vocals over what James and Zak are doing. It makes it possible for lots more live improvisation, where we’re actually making stuff up while we’re playing live.” 

White harks back to what Lung were still striving for back when they finished the second breakdown-plagued American tour exhausted and broke, basically realising their rock and roll dream was over. He says they still had things that they wanted to record, but by then it had become too hard, and too expensive to justify. 

“When James joined up and Zak, my son, started regularly jamming with us, songs just fell out of the sky – we’ve probably got enough songs for another two or three albums. It’s quite exciting. 

“To be able to get something down on record that represented what we were hearing inside our heads in the practice room was awesome. So we’re really happy with ‘Fog’ and it’s had outstandingly good reviews all over the place, which is weird! 

“I didn’t people would understand what we’re on about, because we’re like, totally out of fashion with everything that’s happening – and always have been in every respect, from haircuts to the way we operate. But it seems to have struck a chord, especially with the student radio stations, and people seem to understand what we’re trying to get at, which is quite amazing!” 

The album was record at The Surgery in Wellington, performed live at what White laughs was an insane “engineer’s nightmare” volume.

“We basically went in, did the whole thing in one go over a couple hours, and then went in and had a listen. To start with I just thought, ‘Oh no, we’ve fucked it up, everything is too loud and distorted’, because we did the vocals at the same time as well.

“But thank god Lee Prebble, whose studio it is, is extremely talented, and somehow managed to extract enough separation so we could actually do some mixing! 

“So it was a fun play, and an accurate capturing of that fun play.” 

A great talker but determinedly self-deprecating, he describes his guitar contribution not as solos but rather just squeaks and squawks.

“It’s the kind of thing that I do all the time, but the way they’ve come out is just like I hear it on stage! I’ve never had that actually recorded before. 

“We were kind of on a roll, in a spin, and it was like falling down a hole, and we got to the bottom, and it was like, Okay, that’s it. We just mixed it in a couple of hours, and it was all done. And that was, it was like a fresh grab at the air, I suppose. 

“Lee is amazing, he can just go in and, like, fix things. And James Goldsmith, who did the mastering, was really amazing as well. The guys we worked with are just really good at their job. So basically, we just made a hell of a din, and they made it sound beautiful!”