If you’re planning on opening a new landmark venue in Aotearoa this year, fair warning: Six60 will want to be the first band to play there.
This is said only somewhat in jest.
Aotearoa’s biggest band for a generation kicked things off last Friday by opening the Te Paepae Theatre at the New Zealand International Convention Centre in front of a sold-out Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland crowd. It will be the turn of Ōtautahi Christchurch in May, when they play the first-ever concert at the city’s shiny and new One NZ Stadium.
Even before they were announced for the latter, I suspected they’d be booked for the prestigious event, because one word immediately springs to mind when I think of Six60: reliability.
Last Friday also saw the release of their fifth studio album, Right Here Right Now, which follows four consecutive No. 1 albums — earlier tonight (February 20th), they made it five on the trot.
This is precisely why Six60 keep getting booked for major event after major event; such an extensive back catalogue, containing a plethora of radio-friendly hits listened to by a majority of New Zealanders, almost guarantees a good night.
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I say “a majority” of New Zealanders, because Six60’s music is as derided as it is enjoyed in their homeland. Popularity begets pettiness, which is why the enduring band’s music hasn’t always been received fairly.
“Six60: Killing music since 2006,” the headline for a particularly catty ‘appraisal’ by a Stuff journalist read in 2012.
Six60 found the Stuff hit piece — of course they did, in a country this small, with a declining media landscape even as far back as 2012. The band documentary Six60: Till the Lights Go Out showed them reading it, in what The Spinoff called an “uncomfortable scene.”
What place, really, did such a piece have in a national publication?
No place, is the blunt answer.
All bands deserve to be critiqued properly, even if one doesn’t particularly care for their music. No band deserves to be disparaged through artless, bad-faith writing, subjected to the ramblings of one person’s odd vendetta. (The writer of the Stuff hit piece later took to Letterboxd, of all places, to continue accosting the band last year, writing of their documentary that “[t]he best bit of this well-meaning cringey bore-fest was when a really funny, insightful, brilliantly written piece of band-critique was read out by one of the critters from the group.” Ouch.)
Six60 are the biggest band, in a commercial sense, to break out of Ōtepoti Dunedin, but they have always been out of step with the city’s traditional sounds; Flying Nun-ready they are not.
When we launched a special Scene Report on Dunedin last year, we kicked off the series with a Six60 interview, but the bands that have since featured have been wildly different to them: a donk DJ and an indie rocker, moody alternative outfits and DIY punks aplenty.
But this is essentially the point I’ve been building towards: in 2026, a country’s media must treat all homegrown acts, regardless of size or style, with the same critical respect.
It must give young independent musicians a vital platform, promoting their music to as many people as possible, and it must also engage with the work of bigger acts at the level of a Six60. To pretend that one or the other is unworthy — or doesn’t even exist — would be an error.
Six60’s new album initially sounds like more of the same, containing typically breezy and easy roots-meets-reggae-rock songs (with a generous helping of gentle pop), but it’s also a departure for the band whose origin story is well known by now.
Before they entered the world of stadium shows and chart-topping albums, Six60’s members were just university mates making music in their dusty Castle Street sharehouse in Dunedin, and Right Here, Right Now, released two decades after that humble beginning, returns them to those early jam sessions.
The album was recorded entirely live, with each final track captured in a single take, which lends the record a pleasingly lived-in atmosphere. If “BBQ reggae” has been used pejoratively with regard to bands like Six60 in the past, here the term could be used in a slightly more positive sense.
By keeping everything as stripped-back and simple as possible, there’s a real warmth and unfiltered quality to the collection; by laying into uncomplicated structures, the tracks come across, as Six60 intended, as the sound of a bunch of mates just jamming away. At its best, the toe-tapping “Knocking At Your Door”, you’ll be swept up by the good-natured geniality of it all; at its worst, during the opening sections of “Endlessly” and “The Alchemist”, with an acoustic strum straining to be heard, you’ll wonder why they didn’t add a little more instrumental power.
Frontman Matiu Walters leads with intent throughout the album. (”We are at the top of our game, and I feel like I was born to sing these songs!” he said.) Tracks like “We Are Kings” and “Endlessly”, the latter in particular, isolate his modest but sweet vocals, the sincerity in his voice unmistakable.
The lyrics have always been the weaker parts of Six60 songs, with their songwriting tending towards the clichéd and literal, and it’s a similar story in many of these tracks.
“Love is really all we need / It’s a simple thing,” Walters ponders on “We Are All Kings”, which opens with some clunky but well-meaning metaphors: “I’m just a working man / With a broken spoke / On the wagon wheel / Building a house of cards / In a steady wind / On a slanted hill.”
Later, on “The Alchemist”, he offers straightforward platitudes, “Well I guess I’ll see you around / The sooner you get lost / The sooner you’ll get found / Sure I’ll be sad when you go / But what takes you away / Is the same thing that brings you home.”
No one is expecting elegant intricacy from a Six60 song, but there’s something to be said for the endearing self-reflection displayed elsewhere in the songwriting. Much of Right Here Right Now finds Walters and his bandmates in an existential mood, carefully remembering their roots and their long journey to this point.
“Oh, I know it’s been a bumpy road / Keep thinking there’s so far to go / But take a look around, it’s amazing / If we made it here, then we made it,” Walters sings in the opening track “We Made It”. “No better place I’d rather be / All of my people herе with me / Never took thе time to celebrate it / But if we made it here, then we made it.”
“Be Gentle, Please” has a more melancholic bent, aided by more arresting instrumentation, as Walters confides, “Fragile’s a word / That never lived in my world / Until you wrapped your arms around me,” his voice breaking.
The tracks on Right Here Right Now aren’t necessarily made for me — but they’ll definitely connect with someone.
Reconsider the aforementioned lyrics, “Love is really all we need / It’s a simple thing”: this hews close to the sort of easily-digestible, mantra-leaning poems that currently populate social media. These poems have an audience in the millions, as do Six60. There’s a time and a place for complexity, and there’s also a time and a place for simplicity — both will always find an audience.
The tricky question for Six60 now is where do they go from here?
Having five consecutive No. 1 albums spread across 15 years is a tremendous achievement deserving of respect, regardless of what one thinks of the music. Such longevity, though, surely can’t be sustained forever. Whisper it, but Right Here Right Now, even if the Six60 boys themselves wouldn’t admit it, would have been an ideal ‘final’ album: a full-circle record, returning them to the style of those first jam sessions in that unremarkable sharehouse. Very few bands get the opportunity to go out on top like this.
But if the fans are still interested, as today’s chart result clearly shows they are, why stop?
