So So Modern - Light Years EP

Pōneke post-punks return with their first new material in 13 years – the Light Years EP. Out on October 9th, the EP will have an exclusive vinyl release courtesy of a recent ongoing collaboration between Flying Nun Records and Holiday Records — each with their own exclusive colour variant, limited to 150 copies of each.

Light Years is So So Modern’s latest offering. A collection of songs written in the decade since their last release, the twenty-something-year-old post-punk band have for years defied convention for how a group should operate or sound. Today the band resembles less the four young, unknowing friends who started this journey in the mid-2000s but more an extended family, bound through intersecting lives and close-knit community.

So So Modern emerged from Te Whanganui-a-Tara as one of the country's most adventurous and internationally acclaimed bands of the late 2000s. Fusing the urgency of post-punk, the precision of math rock, and the pulse of electronic music, the band built a formidable reputation from early A Low Hum shows through to relentless international touring, sharing stages with artists such as Foals, CSS, Deerhoof, and Dirty Projectors, performing more than 150 shows a year across Europe, the UK, and North America at their peak.

Their explosive live performances and boundary-pushing sound drew widespread critical acclaim. NME praised the band for creating music that "weld[s] together successfully the disruptive qualities of post-punk with the discipline of math-rock," while The Guardian memorably described them as sounding "like Klaxons and Kraftwerk together."

Now shaping their optimistic, apocalyptic, apocamystic future, SSM returns as the original line up of Daniel, Aidan, Grayson and Mark - a testimony to their long-lasting musical friendship.

Light Years represents time, distance and the entanglement of life, although it is unclear if this is in relation to a distant past or the horizon of the future.  The limited 12” vinyl release by Flying Nun Records and Holiday Records is accompanied by the illuminating artwork of Lily Paris West.