LOVE THY NEIGHBOUR – Surf City

 Surf City have been one of my favourite NZ bands since Matt posted their track ‘Icy Lakes’ back in 2010.  UTR’s Courtney Sanders takes us for a rehash of the NZ fuzzrats for this week’s LOVE THY NEIGHBOUR with their punchy new track ‘It’s a Common Life’. This tune is blowing up on the interwebs at the moment, so get on this quick.

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You’ve probably heard of Surf City before. Hell, you may have even seen them live circa 2008 when they released their critically-acclaimed self-titled debut EP, which contained the jangly, Dunedin-Sound-evoking classics ‘Mount Kill’, ‘Records of a Flagpole Skater’ and ‘Dickshaker’s Union’. Sure, they’ve received their share of criticism for sounding a little too much like their major influence New Zealand lo-fi outfit The Clean, but they have channelled that band’s sound and nonchalant ‘tude better than anyone else in the business. The guys are a household name in this country (relatively speaking) and have earnt spots on line-ups at overseas festivals (I saw them at both SxSW and headlining a solo show in Los Angeles #sosuccessful).

However, they took the laissez-faire approach to their craft a little far when, on the back of all this hype, they didn’t do very much at all for quite some time. They then released a really-quite-good album called Kudos in 2011 which for the most part went under the radar. We have heard little from them since until this week when – totally out of the blue – they announced that they will release a new full-length album in August and provided us with a taste of it, in single ‘It’s a Common Life’.

New Zealand may have a lot of alternative guitar bands who reference our most famous era of music, but I’m sure a lot of them also look toward Surf City’s earlier work for a riff or two. Have a listen to ‘It’s a Common Life’ and please get as excited as me – and more excited than Surf City themselves – about a new era for this significant band.

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