Choice Kiwi Cuts 2020: Dead Little Penny - Honeycomb

Every year, around this time, as we hurtle towards the mayhem that is the December/New Year festive period, it is tradition for the blog to start taking stock of all of the musical bits and bobs that helped to define your blogger’s year. To reflect, to rate, to rank, and to celebrate. 

I’ll have a “best of 2020” (albums, EPs, gigs etc) blogpost for you sometime next month, but for the past couple of years I’ve always kicked the year-end process off by posting a series of clips from local (Aotearoa/New Zealand) artists which made the biggest impression on me throughout the year. Ten of them. See 2018 (here), and 2019 (here). 

To commence EGG’s countdown of this year’s Choice Kiwi Cuts, I’m going to start with a tune which initially surfaced as far back as 2018, but one that appeared on a late 2019 album I couldn’t stop listening to during the March to May lockdown period – Dead Little Penny’s Urge Surfing. Album opener ‘Honeycomb’ set the tone nicely for an album chock full of fuzzy shoegaze treats.

Album Review: Dead Little Penny - Urge Surfing (2019)

Released in November of 2019, Urge Surfing is the debut album from Auckland three-piece Dead Little Penny, and it probably qualifies as my “most listened to” local release across the first six months of 2020.

Repeat plays have ensured the album has now taken on a warm reaffirming glow of familiarity, and its content hits the spot in terms of my own genre preferences, with equal portions dark post-punk, shoegaze, and synthpop ticking many of the boxes I hold near and dear.

Which is always a good start. In fact, you’d probably have to go back to the Fazerdaze debut of 2017, or The Beths release of a year later, to find a local debut album that has made the same sort of instant impact on me. Without fitting into the exact same genre box, of course.

‘Honeycomb’ is a terrific opener and it sets out the band’s stall for what awaits, which is a collection of strong tunes driven by copious amounts of fuzzy guitar, solid rhythms, and (mostly) Hayley Smith’s excellent vocals - frequently layered to good affect, and sometimes cleverly buried deeper within the mix.

They’re mostly songs about the life, love, and loss, plus there’s commentary about mental health, and a few of the more challenging facets of that thing we call the human condition. It can be quite an intense listen. Which suits me fine.

Nine tracks all up, clocking in at just over half an hour. Beyond ‘Honeycomb’ (below), the hidden treasures include ‘Talk Show Goth’, ‘Dead Together’, and the title track which closes out the album.