Borderline are twenty and twenty-one years old, they’ve just wrapped a 14-date tour of the US and Canada, they’re nominated for Breakthrough Artist of the Year and Best Pop Artist at this year’s Aotearoa Music Awards, and today they’ve announced their debut self-titled album alongside a new single that sounds like the most fun they’ve ever had in a studio. Not bad going for a band of childhood friends from Auckland.
That Girl is out now, and it is exactly as unabashedly joyful as the band describe it. Leaning hard into 80s over-the-top instrumentation — vintage synths, Michael Jackson and Prince-inspired vocals, live musicianship front and centre — it’s the sound of four people letting loose and not apologising for a second of it. “The result of four musicians not shying away from self-indulgence,” they say, and that spirit is all over it. Big, bright, and built to make you move.
The music video, directed by Tom Grut and shot at an old abandoned asylum turned haunted house, goes full Scooby Doo — complete with matching outfits, spooky set design and the kind of high-energy chaos that suits the track perfectly. Their most ambitious video yet, by their own admission, and worth watching immediately.
The single is the latest preview of Borderline, their debut self-titled album due 26th June via EMPIRE, which also features recent singles Terrify, Tainted and Watching It Burn. The band describe it as the sum of every corner of musical inspiration from all four members — shaped through home studio sessions and late nights before coming together at Roundhead’s Brick Room, where they made use of vintage synths and timepiece guitars to explore and refine the album’s overarching soundscape.
“Every song has its own character and place for us,” they say. “Our self-titled debut album is something we’re all incredibly proud of.”
Ben Glanfield, Jackson Boswell, Matthew McFadden and Max Harries have been building toward this since they were teenagers, and everything about the way That Girl sounds suggests the album is going to be worth the wait. June cannot come quickly enough.
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