25 September 2026 – New Zealand Alt-Folk Band sloer Release Shame and Take Their Slow-Burn Sound on Tour

Wānaka alt-folk group sloer release third single "shame" today while announcing a six-date New Zealand tour ahead of a planned debut album in 2027. The band have been steadily developing a sound built around spacious arrangements, emotional restraint and the ability to move from nearly skeletal passages into full-band crescendos involving piano, synthesizers, guitars, bass and drums.

Earlier singles "crawling" and "slaughter" established that approach, while "shame" pushes further into the atmospheric territory developed during recording sessions with producer Tom Bell at Seaward Studios in Port Chalmers. The band's reference points sit somewhere between Julia Jacklin's emotional clarity, Cowboy Junkies' nocturnal country melancholy and the cinematic darkness associated with Portishead, although sloer are increasingly finding their own space between them.

Their forthcoming tour begins at Auckland's Whammy Bar on October 8 before visiting Waiheke Island, Wellington, Wānaka, Dunedin and Christchurch through November. That makes "shame" less an isolated streaming release than another stage in a deliberately patient build toward the debut album. In an industry forever encouraging emerging artists to release seventeen vertical videos before breakfast, there is something appealing about a band allowing songs to develop through actual live folk-rock performances. Radical technology, apparently: a stage.