Gareth Thomas, a founding member of both Goodshirt and Fazerdaze, has found an oddly upbeat way to process heartbreak: a new single called ‘Unfortunate’, built on themes of betrayal, acceptance, and getting through the hard stuff by staying creative.
He’s kept the tone deliberately understated. “I’m pretty mildly spoken and not used to expressing angst in a song, that’s why I chose the line ‘It’s just unfortunate’ for the chorus,” Gareth says. “It’s probably the least rock ‘n’ roll thing to sing, but it was exactly how I felt, and it helped.”
He’s kept the arrangement just as spare: piano and a drum machine, a setup borrowed from a gig he played alongside Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor. Vintage Linndrum programming and thick Moog lines run underneath, with a definite LCD Soundsystem influence in there too.
The accompanying music video tells an aquatic breakup story: a heartbroken shrimp, an unfaithful blowfish, and a psychedelic toad. Gareth animated it himself, working from the deadpan, slightly unsettling drawings of illustrator Nathan James Page, whose work he discovered on Instagram after a chance introduction from Fur Patrol’s Julia Deans.
“It was a cathartic experience animating such a heavy topic with Nathan’s absurd drawings,” he says. “There’s a loose narrative under there, but it’s really about expressing the grieving process through crude animation.”
The shrimp turns up again in ‘Stink Shrimp’, a small browser game made in collaboration with Gareth’s brother Matt, the family’s programming talent. You play as the shrimp, chasing hearts to win the blowfish back from the toad, dodging its drool along the way.
‘Unfortunate’ follows Gareth’s previous single ‘Lilly Knows Electricity’, written after a chance run-in with Wellington’s Mermaidens at AUM Festival that got him writing again and effectively kicked off the album. Both songs sit on his upcoming album ‘Bits’, due out on 30 October, and mark a fresh chapter in his solo career.
Gareth takes the record on the road across Aotearoa through October and November, with stops in Oamaru, Christchurch, Nelson and Golden Bay building up to an album release show at Auckland’s BIG FAN on 20 November, with support from Echomatica.
“Life’s chaos can give new depths and perspective to your songwriting,” Gareth says. “I realised creative output, and making things with others, really helps you move through the hard times.”
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