Singer-songwriter MĀ ‘taking on the elements’ in next chapter
Saturday, 29 March 2025
MĀ, the daughter of NZ arts royalty Hone Kouka and the late Nancy Brunning, is carving out her own space as a creative force. Ahead of the release of her sophomore album and a national tour, she spoke with André Chumko.
What will I leave for my mokos, are there trees for my mokos? Are there bees for my mokos? Are there seeds for my mokos?
Such existential questions are put to the listener in MĀ’s latest single Decay, a deep, soulful and atmospheric track interspersed with reo, and released with and featuring Mato Wayuhi, ahead of the former’s sophomore album Blame It On The Weather being set free into the world on Friday.
“We've just created an entire ecosystem of sound and words,” is how MĀ described her new album to The Post in an interview.
The choice to focus on te taiao (the natural world) is somewhat fitting for MĀ (Tūhoe, Ngāti Porou, Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Raukawa), who’s a biodiversity ranger by day and singer-songwriter by night.
Listeners may recognise the Wellington-based artist for her debut album Breakfast With Hades (2021), or her single TĀUA (2021) that’s racked up 300,000 streams on Spotify. She was named as one of the NZ ones to watch by Rolling Stone Australia in 2023.
The day we speak it’s pouring with rain and she’s still in her work gear, fresh from a shift of trapping, planting and weeding in Pōneke’s sometimes physically challenging hills.
Breakfast With Hades was made amid the Covid-19 pandemic and in the shadow of the 2019 death of accoladed writer, director and actor Nancy Brunning, MĀ’s mother.
“We’re going into a new era now, which is quite exciting. It’s nice to get out of the Breakfast With Hades slump,” the singer says. “I've been riding that wave for quite a wee while now in a music sense. But also emotionally. … It was kind of a necessary thing for me to find some way to release all of that mamae (pain).
“But also to put it into perspective, mum was very staunch on me to not become an actress. She was like, ‘there’s no money in that’. And then I’ve become a musician, which is pretty much worse,” she laughs.
MĀ grew up in Wellington surrounded by culture as the only child of Brunning and writer, producer and director Hone Kouka. She went to Ōtari School.
She remembers watching her parents mobilise cast and crew and resource funding to manifest their art ideas from the dream world into reality. “That was my after school care, pretty much ‒ going to rehearsal spaces.”
Why then did she foray into music, versus some other art form?
“If I look at it romantically, I saw that music was the way my parents could relax after putting on big shows and making heaps of art. They would come home … [and] just plug in their AUX jack and sit by the stereo and lose themselves for a couple of hours late at night trying to ground themselves.
“… So I think I fell in love with what music could do for my parents, and how it helped them release and come back to the world. They were also just massive music nerds. They were always carrying around CDs ‒ the ones you flip through ‒ we had heaps in the car.
“I lived in Paekākāriki when I was in school, so we had about a 40-minute drive back and forth every day. So listening to music was a big thing. But … I always thought I would be a tradie,” she says.
As a young person she played guitar and mucked about on GarageBand on her parents’ laptop. They noticed she was unintentionally making sounds during their rehearsals, and asked her one time to create music alongside another producer for one of their shows called Astroman that played at Christchurch’s Court Theatre.
But it wasn’t till her mother died that MĀ decided to make her own body of art.
The 28-year-old says her mother instilled in her a sense of no half-assing anything. “If you’re gonna do it, then you should just do it … that’s the way we move.”
After Breakfast With Hades’ release and being able to perform the songs live to audiences, MĀ felt a sense of emotional safety that allowed her to continue writing. And so, working as a ranger five days a week, she decided to incorporate her day job into her next big project.
The result is Blame It On The Weather, which the self-described observer says is mostly alternative hip-hop with some electronic trip-hop thrown in. While she sometimes performs with her band the Fly Hunnies, they only feature in some of the new songs ‒ but they are coming on her upcoming tour.
MĀ’s been working on the album for about four years, but over the last year has pulled in assistance from her creative friends including Karnan Saba, Leonardo Coghini, who’s produced a lot of the album, Tony Douglas mixing, and several other artists who feature on tracks including Te Kahureremoa Taumata, Jordyn With a Why, MAJIC, Iris Little, Lila, Romi Wrights, Māia Holman-Wharehoka, Louisa Williamson, Hayden Nickel and Mato Wayuhi among others.
“Breakfast With Hades was me proving that I could make something on my own. But this album is proving that I’m asking for help and trying to put something together within my community that I’m a part of now.
“… What are we gonna do when the whenua (land) decides that it doesn't want to hold us any more, that it can't take care of us any more? It's just my perspective on what I see every day at mahi (work) and how I feel.”
In many ways the climate emergency is too large and urgent to fully explore on any one album.
MĀ, feeling the same, decided to segment the songs by the different work programmes in her job: there’s one about pest plants, one about traps, one about water, one about urban drift. The album’s name is a bit of sarcasm and a lighter touch on a bigger topic, and “because I feel like everyone’s constantly talking about the weather”.
Decay was released as the lead single because it’s like starting at the end, MĀ says. With graves washing up as a result of climate change, where will people be buried? Is that even a good option any more? How do we restore tikanga (traditional Māori values)? And what does this all mean for whakapapa (genealogy)?
Pūhā me te Porohewa comes next, which MĀ describes as a sort of dig at the current Government. “I needed to have at least one song where I’m complaining.”
Her entire album is bilingual with reo woven throughout, MĀ’s natural way of expressing herself. For each heavy track there’s a “breathe” track for balance, as she’s conscious that younger generations spend a lot of their free time advocating for causes, as opposed to just living.
She described the album as like a timestamp for this moment in history.
MĀ’s musical influence is immense and she’s hijacked a bit from her parents ‒ when asked to name a few major inspirations she cites Massive Attack; Moby; Groove Armada; Mos Def; Erykah Badu; André 3000; Jeff Buckley.
She’s trying to get a better balance of splitting time between her art and her other mahi. Being a ranger is ideal ‒ “I’m just a body” ‒ so she can leave everything there when she comes home to do her music. In some ways MĀ wonders if she could ever be a fulltime artist: “I might go crazy.”
She’s doing a national tour next month, playing Auckland, Raglan, Lyttelton, Dunedin and Wellington between April 3 and 26. And she’ll play CubaDupa in Wellington this weekend.
MĀ hopes her new album feels safe for people to listen to.
“I’m just trying to put good intentions in everything that I do,” she says.
“I'm excited, I'm nervous, I'm scared. I'm feeling a lot of love. I'm feeling really alone, I’m feeling isolated and exposed. But I guess that's just the nature of the environment. I guess I’m taking all the elements on.”
– Blame It On The Weather is available to listen now on major streaming platforms; MĀ plays CubaDupa in Wellington this weekend; tickets for her April tour of NZ with the Fly Hunnies: undertheradar.co.nz