To celebrate The Mint Chicks receiving the IMNZ Classic Record award at the 2026 Taite Music Prize this week, we’re taking a closer look at one of the best Aotearoa albums of all time.
In January 2005, The Mint Chicks made an unforgettable appearance at the Big Day Out music festival in Tāmaki Makaurau. Walking out with a chainsaw, Kody Nielson cut down some corporate advertising signage before the band ripped into a cover of “Ever Fallen in Love” by the Buzzcocks.
For indie rock, punk, and D.I.Y. kids growing up around Aotearoa and Te Waipounamu during those years, that event is now inextricably intertwined with The Mint Chicks’ legacy. From the moment they arrived in the inner city in the early 2000s, their performances were visceral, electric, and unforgettable. In the wake of dance music’s late 1990s boom, they were a new band for a new era.
Hailing from the Hibiscus Coast, The Mint Chicks’ de facto leaders were Ruban and Kody Nielson, two part-Hawaiian brothers from a family with serious musical credentials. Ruban was the songwriter and guitarist, and Kody was the singer. As performers, they were firecrackers. Later on, they revealed themselves to be multi-instrumentalists and auteur record producers. In a counterpoint, the band’s rhythm section (bassist Michael Logie and drummer Paul Roper) provided a solid foundation for the chaos that often ensued onstage.
Credit: Supplied
Patrick Waller, aka DJ Dubhead, who served as music programmer at student radio station 95bFM in the early 2000s, once told me he heard something in The Mint Chicks’ demos straight away. By 2003, they were signed to Flying Nun Records and began releasing a series of EPs with minimal commercial marketing, culminating in their debut album, F**k The Golden Youth (2005).
The Mint Chicks quickly became a cult proposition in Tāmaki Makaurau through regular, in-your-face performances at a tiny CBD venue on Durham Lane. Equally well-received tours around the motu followed. When they were offered a cover story with the New Zealand music magazine Rip It Up, the band blindfolded and kidnapped the writer, Simon Pound, whisking him to a secret location where they questioned him. One night at the storied Kings Arms venue, Kody didn’t show up. Ruban assumed the role of lead vocalist. Later, it was revealed that Kody had been hiding in the audience the whole time.
In 2006, The Mint Chicks returned with their second album, Crazy? Yes! Dumb? No! Where F**k The Golden Youth had been more experimental and abrasive, their sophomore effort balanced those impulses with more sugary sensibilities. Over fourteen songs, they mapped out their own weird pop visions. In the process, The Mint Chicks put their disparate influences into an industrial-strength blender, then mixed them into gold. I’m speaking literally: by the following year, they’d been awarded five Tuis at the Vodafone New Zealand Music Awards and achieved gold sales certification in Aotearoa.
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Crazy? Yes! Dumb? No! opens with “Ockham’s Razor”, a fast-paced psychedelic punk number where flashes of simulation theory dovetail with cheap thrills. It’s a fitting entry point into a record that quickly expands into a multiverse. Throughout the first half, they wrestle with last chances at success, welcome listeners to nowhere, and contend with confusion, among other themes. Set against Paul and Michael’s turbo-charged drums and bass, squelchy synths, and Ruban’s freewheeling guitar, Kody soars.
Across the album’s second half, an equally frantic mix of baroque noise-pop (“Real Friends”) and sleep-deprived prog rock (“She’s Back on Crack”) builds towards a marching singalong on the title track. At the time, it was a huge record. Two decades on, Crazy? Yes! Dumb? No! hasn’t lost any lustre.
Following the runaway success of the New Zealand hip-hop scene in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Crazy? Yes! Dumb? No! represented a high-water mark for a new generation who saw guitars and electronics as going hand in hand. Although they ascended in the wake of Che Fu, King Kapisi, Nesian Mystik, and Scribe and Savage, The Mint Chicks’ music resonated in that world too.
As fervour built, the rapper David Dallas recorded a freestyle over an edited loop of “Crazy? Yes! Dumb? No!” and uploaded it to his Myspace page. In the inner-city nightclub scene, Rodi Kirk, aka DJ Scratch 22, created a remix of the song with a beat in the style of “A Milli” by Lil Wayne. It quickly became a student radio and DJ hot pick. In 2010, Ruban and Kody even contributed to King Kapisi’s single “Superhuman”.
On a personal level, my two favourite songs on Crazy? Yes! Dumb? No! arrive directly after the title track. “If My Arm Was a Mic Stand, Would You Hold My Hand?” sounds like an antipodean Kraftwerk breaking ranks from techno-pop for a post-punk number. “Sleeping During the Day” offers a glimpse into what might have been if The Mint Chicks had dug further into Arthur Lee, Love, and the 1960s/1970s Californian folk rock era. From there, the album closes with the new wave-tinged ‘Ammie’ and the drifting experimental outro, “100 Minutes of Silence”, an ending that suggests multiple pathways forward.
In the months following Crazy? Yes! Dumb? No!’s release, it felt like the sky was the limit for The Mint Chicks. The world was calling. Several years and another perfect, weird pop album later, Screens (2009), they imploded onstage. Some tensions take longer to boil than others. The next day, their website’s homepage was adorned with a single, simple commandment: start your own fucking band.
There’s no shortage of lore surrounding The Mint Chicks, but over time, it’s been slipping off the internet. You can still read about their foundations-shaking warm-up set for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Footage of their legendary cover of Rihanna’s “Umbrella”, however, seems to have been lost to the void. It’s a shame, because for a certain age group, it endures as a core memory. I don’t think their story, or their generation’s story, is anywhere nearly as well documented as it should be.
Inevitably, the band’s members reemerged in singular ways. Ruban created his leftfield guitar pop group, Unknown Mortal Orchestra. Kody explored psychedelia, synth-pop, and jazz fusion with his Oppossum, Silicon, and Kody Nielson projects. Michael turned to glitchy electronic rock as F in Math, before moving into audio post-production. Paul plays in the laidback pop group Leisure. There may have been brief periods of public silence, but the music never really stopped.
In 2012, Ruban took home the third-ever Taite Music Prize for Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s self-titled debut. Four years later, Kody scooped the same accolade for his first Silicon album, Personal Computer (2016). The next decade went by fast. It went by slowly as well. We’re in a different world now. Unknown Mortal Orchestra are five albums in and regularly tour the world. Kody has contributed to some of Ruban’s records. He also co-produced Bic Runga’s new album, Red Sunset. She’s his partner. Life still moves in mysterious ways.
Two decades after Crazy? Yes! Dumb? No!’s release, The Mint Chicks’ influence can still be felt throughout Aotearoa and Te Waipounamu. That said, their impact extends well beyond our oceanic borders, often in back-channel ways. In the late 2000s, I interviewed the respected UK drum and bass producer Klute, who was thrilled to purchase more of The Mint Chicks’ music between his New Zealand tour dates. On some level, you’d have to be crazy to make music this good. But dumb? You might be into some big dumb fun, but dumb dumb? No. Absolutely not. No way.
Find out more about the 2026 Taite Music Prize here.
