Since lighting up in 2019 NO CIGAR have been captivating audiences on both sides of the Tasman with their infectious guitar-rich, semi-rock sound and compelling lyrical storytelling. Featuring among the top 10 songs of The Rock 2000 Countdown for 2024 was a game changer, putting their single Concubine ahead of Shihad, and in the same fan-voted frame as Blindspott, Nirvana, Metallica, Korn and RATM. Richard Thorne caught up with drummer Ned Gow and guitarist Arthur Gillies ahead of the release of third album ‘Under The Surface’ and a mid-year European tour, that together may provide the fuel to set NO CIGAR on fire.

Facing repeated requests to describe their sound in the band’s early days, No Cigar coined the term ‘pychediscofunkilicious’, which does a pretty good job of conveying a broad musical palette, without putting No Cigar in no, umm, Spanish cedar box.

“Still hits it on the head!” drummer Ned Gow smiles. “If you listen to the album, it just goes across so many different genres really; from rock to indie, to more melancholic… I still, wouldn’t really know what to answer.”

Their Spotify artist description includes the quote, ‘Kings of Leon for vegans’, which brings a burst of laughter from Gow, and rhythm guitarist Arthur Gillies, when asked for an explanation.

“I think it was Concubine, at Big Sound in Australia last year. Someone posted a phone video on YouTube of the whole song, and then one of the comments was from that guy saying, ‘Oh, it’s like Kings of Leon for vegans’. I thought that was hilarious!” Gillies offers. “And that sort of links in with the self-deprecating name of No Cigar as well!”

Gow acknowledges there always have been some symmetries with Kings of Leon.
“To have that there sort of perfectly resonates with our self-deprecation, you know? And it aligns with the music as well, Kings of Leon are idols to all of us, for sure.”

Gillies more helpfully proffers the term ‘semi-rock’.
“It’s not too hard. It’s almost rocky enough for The Rock. I mean, Concubine from ‘The Great Escape’ album did really well on radio and somehow got #10 on The Rock 2000 last year, which was really epic. That’s listener voted, and against all rock songs of all time, so that was unreal!”

Missing from our discussion are No Cigar’s vocalist/lyricist and rhythm guitarist Willy Ferrier, who’s travelling in Thailand they think. Sam Benson, who plays bass and keyboards is currently living in London, while lead guitarist Josh Morrice was married just a few weeks earlier, so gets a pass.

All now breaking into their 30s, relationships within the five-piece go back as far as primary school. Long time best mates, Ferrier and Gow had a band called Kaleidoscopes throughout their Auckland Grammar high school years, and subsequently at Auckland University.

Since their first single Tickets To Space in 2019, No Cigar have boxed up the 2020 ‘Radical Road’ EP, their 2022 debut album ‘Bienvenido’, and a second titled ‘The Great Escape’ released in 2023. We’re in their Auckland commercial building garage rehearsal space to talk about album number three, ‘Under The Surface’.

This is a band that doesn’t much like sitting still, and typically has components of their next recording project on the band room whiteboard before the current one has been released and toured. Even their EP/album names suggest movement in one direction or another.

“‘The Great Escape’ album title came from the track Great Escape,” says Gillies. “The song talks to the pursuit of escapism – whether that’s in love, travel and life. Kiwis are always looking further afield, with so many friends and family leaving these shores for pastures green like London, New York, Berlin etc. For us there was this pressure to go, but a keen-ness to stay for the music. Music is our greatest form of escapism, and now it gives us the chance to travel and see the world in a different way. Glad we stayed!”

By pure coincidence, during NZ Music Month this year No Cigar are debuting at The Great Escape music industry festival in Brighton, England. They’ll play two or three festival concerts, and have packaged a 10-gig UK/Euro tour around Scotland, France, Germany, with the Netherlands a possible add on. No doubt there will be plans to record or write in one or more studios while there – it’s not their first such rodeo.

Due for release in late July 2025, half the songs on ‘Under The Surface’ had their genesis in the rustic French town of Chantilly, more specifically an Airbnb located in a 300-year old building that’s being restored by the young couple who now own it. The band plus friends were there in October 2023 for a combo of rehearsing and writing, coinciding with the final of the Rugby World Cup.

Sam Benson has been based in London for the past few years (working at the London Borough Council according to his bandmates), so it was convenient to combine a tour promoting ‘The Great Escape’ with a few weeks focus on writing for their next album, as Gillies explains.

“With Sam living in the UK we first of all booked the London show, and then off the back of that selling out so quick we got interest elsewhere as well. We knew we had an audience in Amsterdam so we booked this four-show tour around that, and ended up getting a Paris show the night before the RWC final – which we were counting on the All Blacks making! So we figured, being our first gig in Paris, we should stay somewhere nearby for some days. Chantilly is just like a half-hour speed train journey north.”

The new album’s super catchy first single is fittingly titled Chantilly, although it’s less a brag about the bucolic environs and much more about the creative block they collectively suffered when it came time to write new songs there. ‘I guess we’ll see, if this ends in Chantilly…’, Ferrier sings, the reality of future uncertainty reflected in his voice.

“We had the gig and then this massive night of partying after the World Cup final, and thought we deserved a day off writing the day after that, but then we just couldn’t come up with much. We were just feeling quite uninspired, and after three or four hours we all started to get a little bit anxious, like, ‘Maybe we’ve come over here and done all of this for nothing?’” Gow recalls. “But we thought, ‘Let’s just decompress for a little bit, we’ll go for a walk.”

It was on the way back from a decompressing woods and riverside ramble that Ferrier took in the stack of empty Kronenberg bottles at the back door, “…like 400 of them at least.”

“During the walk I’d had this beat in mind, and we just immediately got this rhythm going, you know? And Willy, you could just see he was ruminating on an idea. Suddenly it just like explodes, and he starts to talk about the anxiety that we’re all feeling, and the 400 bottles. ‘We’re trying to solve it, but maybe we’re not going about it the right way? You know, 400, 600, 1000 bottles – however many is it gonna take?’ It just came out. We could feel the energy between all of us and it just released! We would have worked on that song for like, three or four hours and Chantilly was born, and it ended up being the first single, after multiple locations of writing.”

“Once we got that song under the belt it was like we had an afternoon when we absolutely smashed out these ideas,” Gillies takes over. “We were travelling with our producer, Connor Jaine, CJ, and he was sort of recording everything. At the end of the day he would chuck everything up onto a Samply link, and the next morning we’d listen back over those ideas.”

Jaine is the former Mako Road bassist, now Ashburton studio owner. He says he travelled with just as much as equipment as he could, a few suitcases, including enough microphones to ensure he could mic the drums up properly, plus 20 channels of audio interfaces.

“We bought a cheap drum kit over there, hired some mic stands and used amp sims for the guitars. I tried to make it sound as good as I could in that space for them. It makes jamming easier and more fun, and good sounding demos are handy. Gotta have talkback mics for everyone too!”

“I think the second single from the album, Problem, came out of that as well,” Gow continues. “So, yeah, quite a lot of the album just kicked off from that Chantilly valve release. It was just bang! We would have come up with like 30 or 40, ideas over the couple weeks that we were there.”

Problem is one of the album’s quieter tracks, led out by a simple rhythm guitar/bass sequence and snare drum. There’s good reason for that he explains.

“There are a couple distinct tones to the album, at least for the Chantilly songs. Pierre, the owner of this old stables that we were living in, had a family right next door. He was happy for us to play music, but after 9pm we just had to go really quiet.

“So that changed the whole dynamic of how we approached some tunes. Oh Behave and Problem were tunes that we had to put a blanket over the snare, and put an oven mitt over the beater of the kick as well, then really, like hone in on a much more disciplined, more delicate sound. So that created a whole different dynamic every night at 9pm, when we had to quiet down. But it was quite a nice, gentle sound that we got, very much a product of the environment.”

Back in London at the end of that 2023 tour they spent a few days at Battery Studios, where Jaine mainly recorded drum tracks. The band then returned to NZ for a very successful ‘The Great Escape’ album release home tour, around which they fitted in another Airbnb writing stint in Tawa, Hutt Valley.

“That room in Tawa sounded epic for loud drums, so it naturally leant a bit more rocky influence which has led to a diverse sounding album,” says Jaine, who also played bass on that No Cigar tour. “Russian Roulette and Under the Surface were a couple from there. Ned’s drums were mostly done at Roundhead, and a couple of songs at mine too later on. Willy’s vocals were recorded over in Thailand not long after that. It can have its challenges recording in different spaces, mainly around the sound of each room and external noise (Thailand has some ruthless cicadas!), but it’s good fun!”

With three guitarists in the band there’s no escaping that No Cigar is a guitar band, when they want to be, and with Jaine’s input their recordings specialise in spatial and tonal variety. Gillies joining in 2020 has allowed Ferrier to focus more on his vocals, with the occasional addition of his rhythm guitar a bonus in live performances.

Jaine is complimentary about the band who all have professions and jobs that require due attention, making their recorded output to date all the more remarkable.  

“As well as writing great songs, they all have a really strong work ethic, with all things relating to the band from writing, recording, gigging etc. but it always feels very natural and fun. They’ve found a good balance with it all.”

There’s a balance on stage too, with most songs allowing each member time in the spotlight. Perhaps still accustomed to being constrained by wearing a guitar, Ferrier isn’t an overt showman, but it’s clear the lyrics he wrote have meaning when he sings, adding to his live performance charisma.

“Yes, he does have a very expressive voice,” Jaine agrees. “It can be aggressive and percussive, and each take can feel quite different. Willy likes to hold the mic as he sings, and likes to do takes of the song right through, to really feel it. I’ve experimented with a fair few different mics with him over the years, a humble beta58 was the winner on most of this record, thanks to a recently acquired Avalon 737 tube pre which really helped smooth things out. A Beesneez BC12a tube mic was used on a couple of the lighter songs too.”

And then there’s the way that, provided a musical idea to work with, Ferrier can evidently conjure up great lyrics on the spot. Extremely unusual in his experience, Jaine continues.
“Often the lyrics are mostly there from the first scat of the song, verse and chorus, right as the band have settled into the jam. And they’re bloody good lyrics, with some pretty out there vocabulary that he manages to fit into the song very naturally! They can come away from a day of jamming with 10+ song ideas, many with fairly complete lyrics, which always amazes me! And there’s a lot of great songs that didn’t make the cut for this album.” 

There have been record label offers, but to date they’ve chosen to grow the band further before committing to anything. They did engage a manager over the previous album, but have since been sharing that workload amongst the band again, happy to take time and make the right decisions.

“Since then, we’ve sort of all been pulling weight as much as we can, and just dividing tasks between us,” says Gilles. “Last year we went to Bigsound in Brisbane, and we organised a heap of meetings with labels and distributors and publishers, and prospective managers as well, over there. From that we learned a whole lot about industry and figured out a release plan for this album, and ended up sort of sticking with what we what we’ve got at the moment, with Gyrostream in Australia distributing our music currently.”

“We all enjoy the management,” adds Gow. “We all have commercial experience in some ways, growing businesses or being really good at marketing, or social media stuff. So there is expertise that we can integrate between all the members. We probably are missing out a bit from having the international connections, which is what you need from management. But we just want to take our time.”

The Great Escape festival booking was landed off the back of Bigsound, and Gillies says they will be looking to see what’s on offer in the UK.
“From that we’ll make a decision I’m sure. Like, we’re at a point now where we do need management in some way. Someone hopefully, who we can trust and can take us out to the next, next level.”

Australia currently provides No Cigar’s biggest listening market (followed by the US), and they’ve done three tours there including one around performing at Bigsound last September. The summer tour before that gives an illustration of how management may, or may not, have helped as Gow explains with laughter.

“We had to follow Taylor Swift! The organising of this tour was really poorly done. We left it to the last minute, and ended up colliding on these two weekends with Taylor Swift. That was awkward cos it was, like, super expensive to get around the country. Accommodation costs were through the roof, and we ended up having to catch 7am flights after getting to sleep at like 3am. Getting two or three hours sleep, three nights in a row was hectic!

They did have to fly to Perth very early in the day, Gillies having to perform later with the pain of jellyfish stings and possibly some sunburn from a day spent body surfing, but otherwise no harm was done. In Melbourne they could hear Tay Tay performing at the MCG from their Corner Hotel gig, where No Cigar played to 450 people, their biggest Australian audience to date. They’ll be back there for another six-show tour in October this year with ‘Under The Surface’.

With Benson back living in Tāmaki Makaurau before then, and a good chunk of their next album written already, No Cigar are looking less a band of employed professionals regularly making great music after hours, and more a working band committed to doing what’s needed to burn it up on the world stage.  

“Shit yeah, right now we all want that, absolutely,” says Gow. “None of us are part of any other bands, this is all the music that we do. We pour all of our heart and soul into it, because we don’t have enough time for anything else. It’s not that we don’t enjoy our jobs, but there’s no way that your professional job is satisfying hundreds or thousands of people every day.”

“There’s something pretty special about writing, releasing and seeing the response that the music gets when you’re on tour,” Gillies agrees. “It’s like nothing else that we’ve ever really had, and kind of quite addictive. And we’re going about it in a sustainable way I think. We’re not getting over overwhelmed by it, and we still enjoy each other’s company which is really important. A really important thing.”