Back in a puff of smoke _{by Madelaine Empson}

After years of slow-burning genius, punctuated by sporadic yet unforgettable live performances and cult-cherished releases, Auckland indie-rockers Voom are back with their long-awaited new album. By long, we mean a good two decades!

The aptly titled Something Good Is Happening is a lovingly stitched together patchwork of songs collected, demoed, shelved, and reshaped over the years. Continuing Voom’s tradition of making heartfelt, raw, and authentic music, this time with even more polish and depth, it is the intersection of youthful optimism and late-night melancholy, where skewed pop melodies meet powerful ballads, fuzzy guitars meet emotional clarity.

To celebrate the new record, the band’s current lineup – frontman Buzz Moller, Murray Fisher (Goodshirt), Nick Buckton (aka SideKickNick), and drummer Josh Sorenson – will bundle their latest songs in with some beloved classics, pop it all in the car, and vroom around the motu, wrapping up their four-date New Zealand tour at San Fran on Saturday the 31^st of May.  We got the buzz from Moller about the winding road to Something Good Is Happening.

Congrats on the release of Something Good Is Happening on the 16^th of May! How are you feeling, what’s the energy like in the room?

Thanks, it feels like it’s about time. Everyone’s being complimentary to us for finishing the record. We are getting brownie points for doing something good, whereas I think because we have kept our poor fans hanging for 19 years, they should be snubbing us like my cats do when I come back from a holiday.

What chapter of your story would you say the album captures?

A long chapter called ‘the return from the return to normal life’. When you’re young and in a band, you feel like you’ve got a special exemption card from normal life, but then it ends when the card runs out and it’s time to return. You participate in the joy of things like settling down, buying a house, holding a job, and raising kids. That’s some of what we have been doing in the last 20 years, but the exemption card hadn’t quite run out, so we kept meeting up in secret and recording new songs and playing the odd gig. A cool record label called Flying Nun arrived and after a heated bidding war with themselves managed to sign us. Then to everyone’s amazement, a fully formed album suddenly appeared in a puff of smoke.

What do you hope your listeners might feel or take away from it?

Probably disbelief or suspicion that it is a proper album and isn’t just a joke, then anger that if we could do it why did we make them wait so long, then acceptance and forgiveness, taking us back into their hearts as they get hypnotised by our reassuringly simple chords and lyrics.