We’re kicking off Te Marama Puoro o Aotearoa | NZ Music Month with a stunning In My Room performance from Aotearoa singer-songwriter Alayna.
When Alayna made her debut, Self Portrait of a Woman Unravelling, she turned inward, picking apart the threads of who she was and how she had come undone.
But on her new album Set Her Free, the New Zealand artist shifts the lens outward, chasing something bigger, softer, and harder to define: love, in all its forms.
“Set Her Free was in my bones for a long time,” Alayna says. “I’ve always searched for this kind of freedom in myself, this liberation in all areas of my life. My journey as an artist, a human, and particularly as a woman, have all unfolded alongside each other.”
Love, she explains, is the biggest revelation. “The most ever-deepening understanding and wisdom as I go through this life is that love is this deep, expansive and pulsating life force that is at the centre of everything,” she says. “And with each experience I go through, it widens and deepens further.”
Written across continents — from Bali writing camps to Los Angeles sessions, before landing back home in Aotearoa with executive producer Ben Malone — the album unfolds like a series of quiet revelations.
Love Music?
Get your daily dose of everything happening in Australian/New Zealand music and globally.
Each song circles a different kind of love: the kind you build with yourself, the kind that shapes you as a woman, and the kind that pulls you into orbit with someone else.
It’s a record that asks you to look closer at the things you usually take for granted. Not just the table, but the glue holding it together.
“I found a strong pull to write about love in womanhood — I realised this profound love I had always looked for in romantic connections was actually always there in the relationships with the women in my life,” she says. “I wanted to focus on this love, this unseen ‘glue’ that is there within platonic friendships, the real reason we are held together.”
This perspective, she says, enabled her to better understand her relationship with herself.
“My ever-evolving understanding is that love is interwoven across such a spectrum of different types of expression and connections,” she says. “I want to celebrate how extraordinary the capacity of the heart of a woman is. Love is in the smallest cracks, and as vast as our entire sky — a love so big, but it still fits in all the tiny spaces.”
Alayna returns to our In My Room series for the first time in three years, performing select tracks from her latest album.
Watch her full session above.
Alayna’s Set Her Free is out now.
