Gin Wigmore packs a lot of life into her raw and vulnerable comeback album

Review by

Graham Reid

Music writer·New Zealand Listener·

20 Jul, 2026 06:00 PM3 mins to read

Graham Reid is an NZ journalist, author, broadcaster and arts educator. His website, Elsewhere, provides features and reports on music, film, travel and other cultural issues.

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Gin Wigmore, part of NZ’s musical furniture, and, left, Lenny Kaye releases his debut solo album at age 79. Photos / Nina Roxburgh / Getty Images

Beautiful Mess

by Gin Wigmore

Eight years after her previous album and fully 16 since her multi-platinum debut Holy Smoke – which picked up 2010’s album of the year, best pop album, breakthrough artist and highest-selling artist – Gin Wigmore returns with this collection of jaded country-pop, reflective ballads
and stadium rockers.

Wigmore – currently running Wigmore Deli in Auckland’s Kingsland – has much to draw on for this fourth studio album: years in the States (at one point running a hotel she and then-husband Jason Butler renovated), two children, divorce, interrupted recording schedules and a return home.

The album foregrounds country-influenced pop in the first “Beautiful” half, with autobiographical narratives threaded through, as on the power ballad Our Street about youthful love, the loss of innocence and finding her way back home.

Here, too, is the weary Hollywood, referencing time in that kingdom of broken dreams dealing with distance and loneliness: “Mama I feel so far away from you … don’t you worry I won’t lose myself.”

A sense of unsettled impermanence, longing and disappointment (the downbeat country of Die on this Porch) colours these songs.

The album gets more expansive in the “Mess” half with the edgy title track: “I’d follow you down to the end of the earth with your valley of lies.”

Along with the shouty banger Rodeo, about being free of a relationship, and the bristling pop of I Like It with “I know you’re a bad boy … I’m good at making babies too … I want you,” these are the guitar rock songs.

And she closes the album with Here Comes the Girls, a slab of noisy New Wave.

Wigmore’s distinctive, weather-battered voice carries the soulful ache at the front end and the rawness later, and she says its revealing vulnerability took courage, “and I’m really proud that I haven’t let courage disappear.”

With the first half cathartic and the second sounding urgent and desperate, it’s another album that demands you be as invested in the artist’s life as they are.

These albums are available digitally, on CD and vinyl. Images / Supplied

Goin’ Local

by Lenny Kaye

Few musicians release an album that changes the rock music landscape, and fewer still an album they don’t appear on.

Lenny Kaye – rock critic, producer and guitarist in Patti Smith’s band – did exactly that with the 1972 double album compilation Nuggets: Original Artyfacts From The First Psychedelic Era 1965-1968, which influenced garage bands and punk rock through songs by American bands the Seeds, Electric Prunes, 13th Floor Elevators, Blues Magoos and others.

The collection also birthed an industry of reissuing obscure rock songs, among them the 2001 Nuggets II four-CD collection – not involving Kaye – that looked to “the British Empire and Beyond 1964-1969”. It included The La De Da’s’ How is the Air Up There? Blue Stars’ Social End Product and Chants R&B’s I’m Your Witchdoctor, all underground Kiwi classics.

Now 79, Kaye has released his debut solo album, Goin’ Local, a quiet, thoughtful, honest and reflective recording with hints of country.

“It’s very personal,” he says, “and I feel it expresses who I am today ‒ whoever I am today.”

And he’s a long way from CBGBs.

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