After bringing their singular sparkle to the 2024 Silver Scroll Awards and a recent sold-out theatre performance of ‘The Nature Project’ at the NZ Fringe Festival, Te Whanganui-a-Tara-based singer-songwriter and storyteller Iris Little is pleased to announce ‘2,’ the first single off their forthcoming debut album, PROJECT.

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The second act in a story told in five parts, ‘2’, is a vivid intermingling of delicate acoustic fingerwork, airy atmospherics, and clockwork rhythms. Over its first movement, the song gently unfolds into a triumphant paean to what Iris Little describes as “The original separation—the beginning of the other” before exploding into a flurry of hefty industrial electronics that fade gently into the good night.

Shaped in an almost telepathic collaboration with the Otautahi-based producer, musician and songwriter Chris Wethey (AJA, Deva Mahal, Byllie-Jean), ‘2’ was inspired by Portishead, Björk, FKA Twigs, Jenny Hval, and the 19th-century American poet Emily Dickinson’s masterpiece of prose, ‘Two—were immortal twice.’ Alongside vocals, piano, guitar and synth from Little, ‘2’ also features chopped-up drum loops originally played by Hikurangi Schaverien-Kaa and distorted guitars from Michael Howell.

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Iris Little walks between worlds, genres and gender. Influenced by a sacred array of musical auteurs that runs the gamut from Joni Mitchell to FKA Twigs, they’re an experimental singer-songwriter and storyteller who looks beyond binaries and boundaries, effortlessly combining quiet moments cribbed from jazzy folk with the physical heft of industrial, trip-hop and EBM, and the ritualistic psychedelia of avant-R&B. In the same tradition as the queer french surrealist Claude Cahun (1894-1954), Little’s striking visual language—half masculine, half feminine, all androgene— locates them within spaces known, unknown, and the firmament between.

Based at the ends of the earth in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa, Little exists in relation to a new wave of open-eared Antipodean music makers forging a holistically integrated new vision for music and art from the South Pacific. Over the last half-decade, their spellbinding stage presence, magnetism, and emotional honesty have won over audiences around the motu, North America and Europe. Along the way, they've toured, performed, and recorded with a bevy of established and under-the-radar New Zealand talents, including Bret McKenzie, Deva Mahal, AJA, Mā and ONONO.

Since 2024, Little has been developing their debut album PROJECT while recording and performing with a cast of musicians from around Aotearoa/Te Waipounamu and the producers Ben Lemi (Vera Ellen, Dawn Diver) and Chris Whethey. A universally relatable creation myth told in five movements, PROJECT represents the culmination of the first act of Little’s creative journey and everything they’ve learned and thought about along the way. Animated by their aspirations, musical influences, social connectivity and philosophical understanding of the experience of life, it’s an ambitious and gracefully realised statement of intent from an artist with a distinct point of view to share with the world.

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