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Amy Boroevich, also known as HINA, is a versatile producer and multi-instrumentalist hailing from Tāmaki Makaurau.
With roots in Te Rarawa and Ngāti Raukawa, she shares her artist name with a deity of the moon known throughout Polynesia. Recently, she dropped her second project, the mini-album Omen, following her 2020 debut EP, Muse.
“The governing themes are melancholia, desperation, and a primal need to belong to something bigger than myself,” she said about her latest project
“If Muse was summer, Omen is autumn. Aotearoa noir. For the past couple of years, I’ve felt drawn to expressing darker emotions in my songs and exploring more complex states of being. I’d previously shied away from it, so as not to seem ‘too much.’ But I’m learning to accept this more shadowed part of myself.”
Deeply involved in the local music scene, Boroevich collaborates regularly with a vast array of excellent musicians such as Babe Martin. She lent her talents to crafting the song “Me Pēhea Rā” for neo-soul artist MOHI, which earned the prestigious 2023 APRA Maioha Award. Additionally, she shared the stage with Em Walker, also known as Theia, lending her voice and bass skills to Theia’s te reo project TE KAAHU.
Rolling Stone AU/NZ sat down with HINA to delve into the details of each track on her latest release, which you can read below.
HINA’s Omen is out now.
Omen Track by Track:
“Dead Weight”
This speaks to a very intense yet fleeting relationship that ultimately spiralled into being an incredibly destructive force in my life. I wrote this song to try and figure out how we ended up in that place. I still haven’t really figured it out, but writing this song helped me let go of the need to understand why.
“Dangerous”
This one is fun. It allowed me to glamorise being single and romanticise detachment.
“Solitude”
This also explores the feeling of being single like “Dangerous”, but with the prospect of falling for someone when I tried to promise myself I wouldn’t. Being intoxicated by a new connection but being apprehensive at the same time. I wrote this after being thrown into close quarters with someone, travelling for work together in a different country.
I was having vivid dreams at the time and trying to reconcile those dreams with this new connection, and what they might mean, if anything at all. The ‘punch line’ of the chorus is my favourite. A zero sum can be understood in different ways in this context, so I’ll leave it up to interpretation.
“Undertow”
I wrote this song as a way to make sense of an intense and disproportionate emotional response I had to a situation. Rationally I knew that what I was feeling was excessive, but it still felt really overwhelming and I couldn’t figure out why. Water is my grounding element but my internal world can often feel flooded. I wanted to explore water imagery to illustrate this. It can feel like my emotional river is rising and will drag me under unless I fortress against it.
A quote that I love from Dune is as follows: “Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.” This strongly mirrors this song, much like another quote from the same passage is: “An animal caught in a trap will gnaw off its own leg to escape. What will you do?”
“Love Me Not”
This song is about how I can be my own worst enemy.
“To The Bone”
This song is about the death of a relationship and the rebirth that followed. A significant relationship in my life came to a close during Venus’ retrograde in 2022. Retrograde was an invitation to learn from my past experiences so as to not repeat them again. To make real change I needed to be honest with myself about the place this relationship had in my life. Venus guided me out of the burning flame of that relationship and home to the fire of myself.
