“Goodspace make music from their goodspace to take you to your goodspace,” starts the Auckland three-piece’s bio. Goodspace are Jeff Chen on vocals, guitar and keys, Lloyd Thomason on vocals / bass, and Nick Annear behind the drum kit, and they definitely have the sort of vibe that makes that statement ring true. When they asked NZM to premiere the video for their latest, brit pop-influenced single Braces, we were glad to oblige! And for your enhanced viewing pleasure, Jeff was good enough to talk us all through the track.

‘Now you gotta put on a smile that feels like braces.’

That’s definitely my favourite line and the reason why the track is called Braces.

It’s a song centred around social anxiety and some sense of belonging – kinda like a monologue that resolves itself.

To be true, it was one of those songs that just wrote itself, no pushing and hardly any re-writing. Just all out, lyrics and music, in one go which is always nice – and fucking mysterious!

It was only when I brought the song to Goodspace and into the studio that the small but significant details were refined. For example, serving the song is always extremely important to us and in this case, after much discussion and some invaluable advice from Greg Haver, we realised that the song didn’t need drums in the first half, so we scrapped them. It’s a hugely satisfying feeling when you make a song better by simply getting rid of something. Really refreshing to put any ego aside too.

Our producer, Michael Coller aka Leone also put a string section in the song, and when we first heard it, we were all like ‘whooaa’. It just lifted everything up a notch and got us really chuffed about the song again. Braces is definitely a song where we’re completely satisfied with the songwriting and production combined.

For the music video, we teamed up with Fallow Street, who have been our dear creative companions from the beginning, and went to Karekare beach with our cars loaded with objects that held some sentimental value. Our girlfriends/ wives were there and they carried all the heavy things like the couch and tables etc over the giant sand dunes. It was a great time.

The whole experience was just really wholesome. We had prepared a dope picnic, the beach was mostly empty by the evening, there was a fucking rainbow and it didn’t even rain, and we were surrounded by people we love while making art. It was just a goodspace, man.