RIIKI REID

RIIKI REID grew up in Wellington with one eye on the stage and the other on the dancefloor. Before the Warner deal, before the Lorde tour support, she was Raquel Abolins-Reid from Churton Park, entering mall talent comps and Smokefreerockquest with her high school band, figuring out how to hold a crowd. That mix of performance instinct and graft has carried straight into the project she runs now.

She is Māori (Ngāti Porou), Samoan, Latvian and Scottish, and you can feel that layered background in how she treats the project like a full-world build. Vocals, production, choreography, visual direction, all sit under her name. The official bio talks about her going from school shows to Rockquest, to LA writing trips, to sold-out stadiums around Aotearoa. That arc feels right. She has moved from bedroom files to proper alt-pop scale without losing the home-city fingerprints.

The records show the same climb. Early tracks like One Day and Good Times got her onto charts at home, then 2022’s Newer Oxygen and Crash & Collide cemented the lane: sharp, dance-leaning alt-pop built for big rooms but anchored in personal detail. In 2024 she closed out a trilogy of EPs with Skin, then spent the year on stages across Australasia, including sets with Fly My Pretties and a slot at Homegrown. Somewhere in the middle of all that she and Fazerdaze joined Lorde on the Solar Power tour around New Zealand, a cosign that put her in front of arenas instead of club backrooms.

The City is her local-hero moment. Written as a love letter to Wellington and nights at Club 121, the track flips her dance background into a proper dance-pop rush: synths stacked high, electronic drums, distorted vocal textures, big euphoric breaks that feel like lights coming up at 3 a.m. It is about being out in town with your closest people and not wanting the night to fold. That one song pulled together her history as a dancer, her crew, and her city into three clean minutes.

Drive hits from another angle. It arrived as the lead single for Crash & Collide, pushed as the first taste of a new three-track run. On paper it sits in the alt-indie rock lane, but it plays like motion more than genre: guitars and drums pushing forward while the lyrics nudge you toward looking at where you are actually heading. Press around the release talked about the track as an invitation to self-reflect, which matches how it feels, like a late-night drive where the windows are down and the questions are loud.

Put it together and you get a picture that feels bigger than a streaming bio. RIIKI REID is part dream-pop, part dance kid, part songwriter who understands that a chorus hits harder when you can see the room it belongs in. From Club 121 to support slots for Six60, L.A.B and Lorde, she has been quietly building her own corner of the Aotearoa pop map, one hook and one city-lit night at a time.