The Veils’ Fragile World is one of our favourite New Zealand albums of 2026 so far.
Following the critically acclaimed Asphodels in 2025, The Veils returned quickly with a bold new album, Fragile World. Inspired by crumbling institutions and the act of creation, it could be considered their most urgent and compelling album to date.
According to frontman Finn Andrews, it was written very quickly off the back of the band’s last record.
“It’s not uncommon for The Veils to disappear for five or six years between albums, but this one had a lot of songs, I guess, as a result of wanting to hide away from the world more and more over the last few years,” he tells Rolling Stone AU/NZ.
“I seem to have written a lot more, and perhaps it’s come out of a sort of new confidence… Rather than just stewing on them for years, it was nice to get to the studio and record them and get them off the desk, as it were.”
Most of the album was produced by Tom Healy (Tiny Ruins, The Chills, Folk Bitch Trio) across “three or four long weekends” at Roundhead Studios. People came and went while Andrews and Healy held down the fort.
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Recorded live to tape in New Zealand by Paddy Hill, Fragile World embraces the universal shift to more analogue mediums. It has a sound, Andrews says, that has always suited what The Veils do.
“[There’s] something quite cathartic about recording over yourself, you kind of hear parts of the old recordings bleeding through on the tapes. The ghosts of the old songs sort of make an appearance here and there.”
“[Recording to tape] makes you perform in a different way…it means there’s a lot more mistakes in it, but I think they’re pleasant mistakes,” he adds. Take his favourite track on the album, “High Hopes”, for example, with the “strange sort of synth” at the end.
Andrews’ tight production process from start to finish was vastly different from Ashphodel. Those tracks were honed over a period of years and taken on the road with him, he reveals. Fragile World, instead, was conceived mostly at Roundhead. Andrews entered the studio with 15 song ideas and spent the following weeks figuring out instrumentation and arrangements. It all added to the urgency of it; this album seemed to be come together in the moment.
“It was truly exciting having no idea what this record would sound like and only a few weeks to figure it out,” he says. “It was all very instinctual, quite full-on, and scary at times – but a good kind of scary… Not like the real world out there.”
The title, Fragile World, is Andrews’ summary of the way in which the world feels at the moment. “That general feeling of overwhelm, seeing so much horror, I suppose, and seeing just the worst sides of human behaviour over and over again…that’s where [the idea] began, initially.”
“That impulse to turn away from the world and to write songs, you’re kind of creating these other little fragile worlds within the broader fragile world – worlds within worlds within worlds,” he continues.
“We recently had a song in a ‘Spider-Man’ trailer, and someone’s been telling me about the Marvel universe. I’m sort of thinking The Veils feels a bit like that now as well.
“Every record you’re expanding on the world, expanding on the universe.”
Each of The Veils’ eight studio albums is a variation of musicians and a ‘band’, Andrews says, and Fragile World was no different in that respect.
“We have a sort of open-door policy in The Veils,” he explains. “I think The Veils has always been sort of neither a band nor a solo project. It’s always kind of had aspects of all of them.”
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Already spanning a 21-year career, band members’ lives have ebbed and flowed since Andrews was signed to Rough Trade Records aged just 16.
“People have had children, gotten jobs, their children have grown up, they join the band again, they leave their job, they join the band again… I guess that’s just been a part of it, but it’s allowed it to be a very flexible beast over the years,” he says.
Andrews and his band are taking their album on tour far and wide, with Australia next on the horizon before they head to Europe at the end of the year. They’re crossing the Tasman after a run of shows in their homeland.
“Auckland’s very special, it always still has that homecoming vibe to it,” Andrews says. “I loved that new venue in Wellington we played last time, Meow Nui, and our drummer Joe lives in Lyttelton, so it’s always fun going there with him showing us around.”
“It will be great to hear these songs played live,” he adds. “A lot of them we haven’t performed in front of people yet, so that’s always an exciting moment.”
The Veils play Sydney’s Oxford Art Factory on Thursday, August 20th, followed by Melbourne’s Northcote Social Club on Friday, August 21st. Ticket information is available here.
Hannah Powell is a freelance music journalist and radio host based in Ōtautahi Christchurch.
