NO CIGAR pull up to Mood on the Roof with two cuts off their third album Under the Surface: “Merci Merci” and “Russian Roulette.”
There’s a bit of France baked into this record. Parts of it were written around Chantilly, north of Paris, and the band have talked about the album coming together off the back of time spent out in rural France. You can hear it in “Merci Merci” too, with the French lines landing like postcards you didn’t ask for but kept anyway.
And yeah, this session went down in the pouring down rain.
The Auckland, New Zealand indie rock band who are made for the sweaty packed out rooms, formed in 2019, they broke through early with “Tickets To Space” before rolling out projects that pushed them from local favourite to a band with genuine reach, including Bienvenido (2022), The Great Escape (2023) and Under The Surface (2025). The sound has always been hard to file neatly, partly because they don’t care to file it. Early on they joked about being “pychediscofunkilicious” and later started calling it “semi-rock”. Guitars up front, groove underneath, and plenty of psych sheen.
Their first album Bienvenido dropped in September 2022 and followed by a whole run of headline acts across the country. Album three Under The Surface landed 30 July 2025 and features both Merci Merci and Russian Roulette they’ve performed on the roof.
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