Borderline are arriving at their debut album with the momentum of a band who have grown up in public but never lost the spark that made them start out in the first place.
Formed in Auckland, the four-piece — Ben Glanfield, Jackson Boswell, Matthew McFadden, and Max Harries — have been friends since childhood, first releasing music together while still in high school. Their debut single “Spinning”, released in 2022 when the band members were just 16, quickly landed on the Hot 40 Singles chart and Radioscope Most Added charts, setting the tone for a rise that has only accelerated since.
After closing out 2025 with two singles landing in the top 10 New Zealand songs on radio, Borderline returned home from a 14-date tour across the US and Canada and stepped straight into a major new chapter.
Their self-titled debut album arrives June 26th via EMPIRE, featuring recent singles “Terrify”, “Tainted”, “Watching It Burn”, and latest release “That Girl”.
The album is “the sum of every single corner of musical inspiration from all four of us,” according to the band, shaped through home studio sessions, late nights, and time spent in Roundhead’s Brick Room experimenting with vintage synths and guitars.
“That Girl” captured that sense of maximalist fun. Leaning into their love of over-the-top ’80s-indebted instrumentation, the song is loaded with live vintage synths, big pop textures, and Michael Jackson / Prince-inspired vocals, with the band calling it “the result of four musicians not shying away from self-indulgence.”
That confidence is coming through beyond the studio too. Borderline are nominated for Breakthrough Artist of the Year and Best Pop Artist at the 2026 Aotearoa Music Awards, the latter placing them alongside global pop superstars Lorde and BENEE. They will also take their debut album on the road across Aotearoa and Australia in July, with shows in Auckland, Hamilton, Christchurch, Tauranga, Rotorua, Brisbane, Sydney, and Melbourne.
For a band still only at the beginning of their first album cycle, Borderline already sound like they are thinking bigger, with sharper songs, bolder production, and the kind of live ambition that makes the next step feel inevitable. —Jade Kennedy