Live at Whammy
27 August 2026
Live Review by Music Journalist: Paul Marshall
Going Global Night One: Aotearoa Turns Up the Volume at Whammy
There are nights in Auckland when you go to a gig to see a band. Then there are nights when you go because you know you might be watching the beginning of something much bigger.
Tonight was the latter.
Kicking off at Whammy on Auckland’s Karangahape Road, the 2026 Going Global Music Summit & Festival turned the interconnected Whammy, Double Whammy and Triple Whammy spaces into a revolving door of Aotearoa talent, with twelve artists each given just 20 minutes to convince a room packed with music industry eyes that they have what it takes to travel beyond these shores.
And that is the beauty and brutality, of the showcase format. Twenty minutes. No excuses. No long introductions. No time to warm up. You get on stage and show the world exactly who you are.
Going Global, presented by Independent Music New Zealand in partnership with the New Zealand Music Commission, exists precisely for this purpose: connecting Aotearoa artists with international A&R, booking agents, festival programmers, labels, publishers, managers and media. Previous artists associated with the showcase include Tami Neilson, Tiny Ruins, Troy Kingi, Alien Weaponry, Fazerdaze and Nadia Reid.
Tonight, the future was already walking through the door.
MAINARD LARKIN
Next up Mainard Larkin, whose current musical incarnation couldn't be much further removed from the artist formerly known as Randa.
Larkin's new direction is alt-country, and the six-piece live band brought a gloriously strange blues-infused country-rock swagger to the room.
This isn't country music by numbers. There's something very crooked about it, a mixture of country storytelling, blues muscle and an almost surreal sense of humour that makes the whole thing feel like it has wandered in from a bar somewhere south of Nashville via K Road.
Then came “Gossip.”
And suddenly the whole room had been transported into a straight-up 12-bar blues workout, with Larkin delivering the song with the kind of stone-cold attitude that wouldn't have looked out of place coming from Austin.
The transformation from Randa's earlier hip-hop work into Rattlesnake Boy is one of the more fascinating reinventions happening in the current New Zealand scene. The album, released in May 2026, was created with producer Shannon Fowler, better known as Tom Lark and takes the loose concept of a professional wrestler at the end of his career and turns it into something surprisingly personal. “Gossip” was one of the songs that started the whole journey.
Larkin wasn't simply demonstrating a new genre tonight.
They were demonstrating that changing direction can sometimes be the most convincing way of moving forward.
PEARLY*
Then came Pearly*, and the temperature changed immediately.
The four-piece Ōtepoti outfit arrived with guitars loaded and an alt-rock attack that seemed to have been constructed from equal parts melody, noise, restraint and impending explosion.
There are obvious echoes of the grunge era here, that particular art of making a song sound beautiful just before smashing it into the wall, but Pearly* aren't simply recycling the past.
Their songs breathe.
They create space, allow the tension to build, then let the guitars tear through it.
It's the kind of dynamic that makes a short showcase feel considerably longer, because the songs have actual journeys inside them.
Formed in Dunedin in 2023, Pearly* have already moved remarkably quickly. Their self-titled debut EP arrived in 2024, followed by their debut album Not So Sweet, produced by Nick Roughan of Skeptics and Bailterspace fame. They've also shared stages with Voom, Office Dog and Twine.
And that Dunedin DNA is there, but tonight it felt less like nostalgia and more like evolution.
Pearly* are loud without simply being loud.
They understand dynamics.
They understand hooks.
And, crucially, they understand that sometimes the most effective way to make a listener pay attention is to make them wait for the explosion.
MOKOMOKAI
And now for something completely different.
Mokomokai!
If Pearly* arrived like a fist through a speaker cabinet, Mokomokai came armed with beats, bass and a completely different kind of ammunition.
Smooth, cool rap. Sharp lyrics. Heavy production. Sub-bass that didn't so much come out of the speakers as arrive physically in the room.
I've seen these guys perform a few times, but tonight they were absolutely on the money, and then some.
The interesting thing about Mokomokai is that they don't feel like an act simply waiting to become international.
They feel like an international act waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.
There was comedy, too, including a wonderfully surreal observation by lead rapper Manu Walters about being used to playing to a younger crowd “on ecstasy” and suddenly finding themselves in front of an older audience “on cocaine.”
Then came the line about wanting an electric guitar so he could smash it.
Delivered almost half-heartedly, it was funny, but there was just enough menace underneath it to make you wonder whether, given the right chemical encouragement, the guitar might actually have been in danger.
And that's part of the appeal.
There is humour here, but it isn't lightweight. The jokes sit alongside the music rather than replacing it.
Then Brandn Shiraz took the stage and the whole thing continued to roll.
The bass kept pounding.
The room kept moving.
And for 20 minutes, Mokomokai made a pretty compelling argument that the international hip-hop market should probably be paying closer attention.
LOUIS BAKER
Then Louis Baker walked on.
No introduction required.
Some artists need to tell you who they are.
Louis Baker simply starts playing.
The Wellington singer, songwriter, guitarist and multi-instrumentalist has spent more than a decade building one of the more distinctive soul voices in Aotearoa, blending modern soul, funk, folk and blues into something unmistakably his own. His debut album Open arrived in 2019, following years of singles, collaborations and international attention.
Tonight, the songs were smooth, soulful and beautifully constructed.
This is polished music without ever feeling sterile.
Baker picked up his Epiphone guitar and settled into the kind of performance that makes a 20-minute showcase feel like the audience has accidentally wandered into a headline set.
There was a particularly warm response to “Brighter Day”, with Baker talking about the meaning behind the song before letting the music do the rest of the talking.
“How you guys doing out there? Are you having a good night?” he asked, before giving a shout-out to the other musicians in the room.
It was a small moment, but an important one.
Because this wasn't simply a performance for the industry.
It was a musician acknowledging the musicians around him.
And then there was that bass.
A five-string Pavel bass sat underneath Baker's songs with a richness that seemed to fill every available corner of the room.
For all the international polish, this was still a working band in a working venue.
Which became very apparent during song four when the drummer's hi-hat stand began violently wobbling from side to side after one of the lugs came loose.
The joys of gear sharing.
You can put the world's music industry in the room, but somebody's hardware will still decide to have a nervous breakdown.
It was also a reminder of what makes showcase nights like this so compelling.
Behind all the industry talk, international deals, publishing conversations, A&R meetings and talk of export markets, there are still musicians standing on tiny stages trying to keep their equipment functioning long enough to play the next song.
And tonight, they did.
THE BIGGER PICTURE
That's what makes Going Global so interesting.
This isn't simply a collection of gigs.
It's a two-night audition for an entire country's music scene.
The international delegates aren't being shown one version of New Zealand music. They're being thrown into the deep end.
Country.
Soul.
Hip-hop.
Alt-rock.
Indie.
Electronic.
Pop.
Noise.
Whatever else happens to be lurking behind the next door.
And that's exactly how it should be.
Because the greatest strength of New Zealand music has never been that it sounds like one particular thing.
It's that it doesn't.
From Mainard Larkin's left-field country-blues reinvention to Pearly*'s guitar-driven sonic assault, from Mokomokai's earthquake bass to Louis Baker's slow-burning soul, the first night of Going Global offered another four very different arguments for the same proposition:
Aotearoa has something to export.
The question isn't whether the talent is here.
It's whether the rest of the world is ready to listen.
After tonight, I'd suggest they start turning the volume up.
Reviewer: Paul Marshall
Photography by Paul Marshall
WATCH THE LIVE VIDEO at Paul Was There -