Theia Wants You to Hear Her Fury

In the highest mountains and deepest forests of Aotearoa, something stirs — travel through the quiet, ancient parts of this vast and beautiful country, and you’ll feel it in your bones. 

In Māori tradition, the Patupaiarehe, fairy-like beings who are seldom seen, live up there. They are inherently musical, skilful players of the kooaau and puutoorino (traditional Māori flutes) and possessed of sweet, melodious voices. They are said to have light skin, red or fair hair, and definitely no moko (Māori tattoos). Some people think they are small, others normal sized, and those from Whanganui imagine them as giants. 

The Patupaiarehe are also intensely hostile to intruders, says Theia. Even across Zoom, thousands of kilometres away from each other, I can see why people in the past have referred to her as a Patupaiarehe: rosy cheeks bookend her fair face, and “waka blonde” hair peeks out from underneath an army-camouflage baseball hat. 

She sings of this connection to the Patupaiarehe on a waiata of the same name, featured on her debut album, Girl, in a Savage World. 

“I’m but a girl / I’m but a girl / With skin as white as snow / My pale blue eyes and haunting cries,” she intones. “High in the mist upon my mountain / There she calls to me / I am the child of centuries of warriors and kings / Try as you might you’ll never take away my hopes and dreams.”

“Theyre’s so [at] one with the land and inextricably bonded as kaitiaki, as guardians, and so that’s why I decided to write this way, from the perspective of [the] Patupaiarehe and their innate hostility towards intruders, making those intruders, of course, the colonisers,” she says, squinting under the Los Angeles sun. 

Intruders have been trespassing on Theia’s homeland for over 250 years, and today, in its towns and cities (not places the shy Patupaiarehe would ever venture), some of these intruders are getting increasingly louder and a lot more threatening. 

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“I personally — in my iwi — observe that, with enough faith and with enough belief, that we’ll be freed from the hands of the colonisers and our lands will be returned to us,” she says firmly. “And so that is what ‘Patupaiarehe’ represents.”

In “Patupaiarehe” — the waiata — Theia has little time for seeking comfort in mythology; her mind is focused on the dangerous present. “You stole the land upon which I stand / And have for a thousand years / Now you’ll dig your grave / I long for the day / Where you shall atone for your sins,” she sings. More warnings follow. “For the man who stole our land / Shall perish and be destroyed.” As the waiata proceeds like a theatrical, witchy waltz, her voice is deceivingly placid, unnervingly so. 

Here’s a selection of some of the other most incendiary lyrics spread throughout Theia’s new album:

“My country, she burns, it’s a holy war / We cannot return where we were before / Let us look above to the parting skies / Look upon the face of our Jesus Christ.” (“Holy War”)

“You wield your guns, you shot our sons / You made us rot in all you’ve done / Cut down our trees, brought your disease / You will not bring us to our knees.” (“Hoki Whenua Mai (Return the Land)”)

“I cannot breathe please step off of my chest / Loosen the noose tightening round my neck / I wish for freedom and to sing my song / We’re prisoners on the very land we’re from.” (“BALDH3AD!”)

“I mean this as a compliment, right? The album isn’t subtle,” I tell Theia. “It really hits from the start.” 

“Oh my gosh, 100%. Yeah. Every single song — I mean, I would have gone even more crazy on the ‘Indigie’ Riot Grrl stuff!” she admits. 

Because why, when the language of the opposing side — the intruders, the colonisers — is equally as incendiary, should Theia be subtle? “I just threw everything away and started afresh when that new government came into power, and [I] was just filled with fury and passion,” she says. 

Credit: Chris Cuffaro

“I just threw everything away” — that’s putting it mildly. 

Em-Haley Walker debuted her Theia project a decade ago, breaking out with the streaming behemoth “Roam” in 2016, which was followed by a self-titled debut EP one year later. As far back as 2017, she was earning multiple nominations at the New Zealand Music Awards, losing out in three categories to — you guessed it — Lorde. 

So why, then, a gap of eight years between debut EP and album? Choose any track from Theia, choose any track from Girl, in a Savage World, play them back-to-back, and you’ll hear why: these are not works by the same artist, or even the same person. They are different in every way — sonically, thematically, and, most important of all, spiritually. 

In the early stages of her career, Theia was signed to a major label, Warner Music New Zealand, but the restrictive nature of the major label-blossoming-artist relationship didn’t suit her. 

“[F]or me as a person, it just did not satisfy me,” she reflects. “Like it was control[led] at every step… I wanted ballet in one of my videos, and they were like, ‘No, it has to be hip-hop,’ and stuff like that… It was just stupid things like that… there’s no way that I could turn around [and] be like, ‘I wanna do a decolonial song criticising the New Zealand government and the systems of power, and I want it to sound medieval.’ Yes, it’s been a huge blessing going independent.” 

Theia became a fully independent artist in 2020, beginning the five best years of her artistic life so far. She went from being on a label where “it was all men, maybe one woman,” she recalls, to being surrounded by a coterie of empowering wahine. 

“My gosh, it’s been the coolest thing that I’ve ever done… and I’ve got bulldogs of managers, my beautiful female team,” she says, beaming. “Yeah, if they hadn’t done that, I probably would have just quit [music] and gone back to studying and got my PhD or something… and sometimes I get on the verge of that — you know, it is still really tough doing music and being in this industry sometimes, [but] it’s [her album] been the coolest thing I think I’ve ever done creatively. I’m so proud of it because every single detail, even the photo shoots and working with my friend Madison, who’s [a] tattoo artist, to do my logo and everything like that, it’s just been so intentional and it’s just been an absolute joy.”

Theia interrupts herself to make an amendment. “I’m not sour towards labels [in general] because I understand, when you’re talking about alt and indie labels, they’re freaking phenomenal. They’re amazing and they have small rosters and they would give the world for them and I really appreciate that.

“So I’m not opposed to labels, period. But I definitely found that I can see now there’s some people [who] just want to fill stadiums and be famous and good for them. And if that’s their modus operandi, then they can go with a major label and make feel-good music or whatever, and that’s totally cool.

“When you’re with a major label, or when you just don’t have the resources to be able to develop your project, [it] means you don’t have a producer or a co-worker who is willing to take the time that it takes to make it [a record] the best it can be… The producers are always busy and you have small amounts of time where you might get literally one day in [the] studio and you’re expected to write and finish an entire song, vocals and everything… There’s no room to critique it, to develop it… I kind of just had to accept what I was given. I could have probably done better but there just wasn’t the room for the development because it was so go, go, go. 

“Rather than be like, ‘I can only slot you in from here to here,’ it [being independent] means that you can really look at each individual track with the idea that they’re gonna be sitting on the same body of work… I’m so proud that I trusted my gut and my vision, because I know it was a wacky freaking vibe!” 

I still remember the first moment I heard Theia live — well, sort of. 

At The Others Way 2022, tucked away inside Tāmaki Makaurau’s Pitt Street Church, she put on the performance of the festival as TE KAAHU, her Māori language and culture project (Walker is Waikato-Tainui, Ngaati Tiipaa).

TE KAAHU is the gentle folk sister to Theia’s stylish and brash feminist alt-pop; the former is devoted to her native tongue and tūpuna wāhine (female ancestors), while the latter is influenced by Peaches and Stevie Nicks and Fiona Apple and Charlie XCX; TE KAAHU looks to the past, Theia zooms into the future. 

Her projects are sonically worlds apart but intrinsically linked by a shared political and cultural purpose. Because while TE KAAHU allows Theia to feel closer to her people, particularly her ancestors, Theia as we know her now — the girl in the savage world — sings mostly in plain-spoken English on her debut album so as to make the earth shake beneath any ‘intruders’ who happen to listen. 

TE KAAHU was born after Theia but she released a TE KAAHU album first: 2001’s Te Kaahu O Rangi. (Her TE KAAHU debut received a four-star review from us, praised for highlighting the “transcendent power of music” across nine waiata; it would go on to earn two nominations, for Best Record and Best New Artist, at the 2023 Rolling Stone Aotearoa Awards.) 

That record was, she says, the necessary evolution point between her major label and independent eras. 

“[T]hat [TE KAAHU] really gave me permission to — you know, I felt like I really found my voice, in terms of physically, I never really sang that high before or anything like that… that was so refreshing. And I felt like that gave [me] permission to open up and just decide that I could make whatever I wanted and not be beholden to the old label days where you have to make something that’s non-confrontational, palatable for every ear on the mainstream… that’s so boring. I’d rather just quit and, I don’t know, be a professor or something.

“One thing I did learn from TE KAAHU is that it happened so organically whereas [during] my time with the label, it felt like my first couple of EPs were just standalone singles from studio sessions that had no real thread and no real intention and it wasn’t considered.”

Theia is missing home, and not for the first time. She moved to Los Angeles in 2023 to further her career, which has had the knock-on effect of near-weekly bouts of homesickness. 

“Watch the door in case the cat comes out!” she shouts to someone off-screen. “We’re house sitting. Three cats and one dog in the hills — because there’s coyotes everywhere [they] are banned from coming outside.”

“I’ve been told there’s a nice New Zealand community in LA,” I say. 

“I suppose it’s just the nature of me being here… that most of the folks that I associate with are Los Angelesians or Americans,” she replies. “But I follow ‘Kiwis in LA’. It’s just really cute, and I always get all their newsletters and I really want to go to one of those get-togethers but I shall be home in like two days.

“I’ve got four marae and each of them except for one has its own Facebook page, so I’m following all of the comings and goings and all of the meetings. It’s really hard being away… I long to go back to my marae and to go to Taupiri, my maunga [mountain], and so I’m really excited to come back because amongst all the promo that’s in Tamaki Makaurau and stuff, I’m gonna get to go to my iwi’s radio station. So I’m really looking forward to doing that, it’s gonna be so cool.”

One week after our call, Theia returned to Aotearoa for the first time since February. She celebrated her album with a performance on the steps of Pitt Street Church before spending as much time with family and community as possible. 

Performing waiata such as “Patupaiarehe” and “Hoki Whenua Mai (Return the Land)” would have felt impossibly powerful being performed on Aotearoa ground, but, Theia tells me, their power in the first place came from being created so far from her homeland. 

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“I feel like though I’m physically away from home, I obviously carry my identity with me wherever I go… the nature of my mahi [work] at the moment is such that I feel like I’m always invited and encouraged to speak about where I’m from, the issues we’re facing, proudly share my language, and stuff like that. 

“So I do have homesickness but I also have really learnt to find a home wherever I am… the people who I’m able to commune with are forming my chosen family, if you will, over here… they make me feel at home and seen.”

She offers an example from the most unlikely of places: the conservative US state of Utah, where she headlined West Side Culture Fest a few months ago. 

“[A]fter that show, they did this meet and greet thing and they were like, ‘Okay, we’re just allocating 20 minutes to this and it’ll be like 11pm and then you can go, right?’ And an hour and a half later, we had some of the community bringing their Māori aunties, who’d been part of the church over in Salt Lake City for a long time and were part of their local Mormon kapa haka group and stuff, in and meeting and reminiscing about stories of home, and there were tears about the disconnection from culture and reo and everything like that… I’m like, ‘This is why I’m doing this record, you know.’”

The totality of vision Theia displays on Girl, in a Savage World could only have followed years of self-discovery. 

Her debut album deftly moves between sweetness and acidity, softness and toughness. “[Y]ou hear in ‘My Sister’s Hand in Mine’ and even ‘Patupaiarehe’, the lyrics are, like, ‘For the man who stole our land shall perish and be destroyed,’ but it’s sung so sweetly,” Theia notes. 

“[A]nd so I’m enjoying playing with that, where to the ear you might hear it carrying through a room or something and you’ll be like, ‘How lovely and sweet and angelic,’ and [then] you get a chance to listen to the lyrics and you’re like, ‘Holy shit.’ So I really love being able to deliver stuff with boldness and not beating around the bush, but then I also love the restraint of voice and making stuff just sound so heavenly but at the same time almost spitting poison with your lyrics.”

Not for the last time, Theia asserts how strange her album is. “[T]he kind of sound that I had in mind… It’s kind of weird and it’s hard to find someone who has the patience to work with me on that. 

“So that’s why it worked out really well with Abe [co-producer Abraham Kunin] to be able to cultivate those sounds and be like, ‘I want a medieval castle kind of vibe mixed with, you know, blah blah blah…’ It’s freaking wild but it works.”

Even during the album’s most political moments, Theia sounds like she’s having a lot of fun as a musician. Much of it borders on musical theatre — I can imagine Girl, in a Savage World as an operetta — without ever becoming too kooky. This balance was “all down to the production,” she says, and through “blending traditional Māori instrumentation with colonial sonic palettes” in order to make “medieval-esque, ethereal, fairy music.” 

Girl, in a Savage World is as sprightly as a punk rock album, finishing after barely 18 minutes, and, even when the tracks are alt-pop or pure balladry, or, hell, even cabaret, they still feel punk in spirit and language. 

And if the point of punk music is to speak truth to power, well, Theia’s debut album was fated to be released in Aotearoa as it is today.

On Tuesday (November 11th), four days after Girl, in a Savage World dropped, the country marked one year since the beginning of Hīkoi mō Te Tiriti, a nationwide march which saw hundreds of thousands of Kiwis march and sang in hope, carrying with them the colours of tino rangatiratanga, united against the Treaty Principles Bill, the ACT Party’s controversial proposal which threatened to alter the way the Treaty of Waitangi, New Zealand’s founding document, was interpreted, and in turn undermine Māori rights in the country. The Treaty Principles Bill wasn’t passed, but Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s coalition government has seemed hell-bent on reversing years and years of progress towards celebrating Māori language and culture. Theia’s album, then, arrives at a time when Aotearoa is ruled by the most conservative government in her lifetime.

“I really don’t care if people like it or don’t like it,” she says of her provocative album. “[As] soon as you have Indigenous women speaking candidly about misogyny or colonisation or whatever, you get so much praise and comradery from fellow Indigenous folks, but you also get [people] spewing hatred and stuff like that… it’s really triggering for them and they just spiral into racism and misogyny and it’s like, ‘Hey that’s also valid as well.’ I respect that it makes people feel that way… and maybe the next girl who makes something like this they’ll start to unpack it.” (A recent incident comes to mind: at the 2025 Aotearoa Music Awards in May, senior government minister Chris Bishop threw a tantrum, claiming that Stan Walker’s performance, which featured banners promoting the Toitū Te Tiriti movement, constituted “overt politicking”; musician and national treasure Don McGlashan had to confront him over his boorish behaviour.)

The Hīkoi mō Te Tiriti was one of several important Māori events that Theia had to watch and support from afar. “I was really gutted to not be at Kīngi Tuheitia’s tangihanga, and then not to be at Ngā wai hono i te po’s coronation,” she says. “But you know, it’s all good… it’s not like my time’s wasted over here. I’m doing things that are really important to me in my music journey, being able to [be] with many other Indigenous folks and communities over here and share the message of what’s going on back home anyway.”

“It shouldn’t be insular,” I say. “You should take a record like this to people that might not normally listen to it.”

“I think I’ve spoken about this before but when I was younger I felt like we were just raised with this idea that our reo and our culture and our tikanga would not resonate or really carry us through outside of Aotearoa,” Theia admits. ‘But New Zealand’s the only place you can speak Māori,’ blah blah blah, and it’s like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ 

“And imagine how folks feel now seeing how our language is here, there, and everywhere, and our culture is appreciated all over the world… if we can in New Zealand appreciate, I don’t know, Italian opera or the beauty of Edith Piaf — I just don’t understand. It’s just straight-up internalised hatred for yourself.”

Supporting the revitalisation of her native language was always going to be a major part of Theia’s life, even if it came outside of music.

She shrugged off initial backlash “from those closest to me” to get her university degree in Indigenous Studies and Te Reo Rangatira.

“I think that it obviously never internalised with me because I really don’t care,” she says. “This is what I wanna do. I’m like a total geek for my culture and learning as much as I can so that I can educate myself and be able to educate others. And so it hasn’t affected me in that way.”

She recently took on a fulfilling new role, becoming the ambassador for Oceania in the Indigenous Youth Storytellers Circle, a United Nations project for the International Year of Indigenous Studies. 

“[T]he whole idea is that there’s so few places for us as Indigenous youth to be able to share our triumphs and our hurts and have them [be] embraced by fellow Indigenous youth,” she explains. The week before our call, she hosted a meeting with “fellow rangatahi from Nepal, from Ghana, from everywhere.” She’s got ambitious plans for her time in office, including implementing an online café, a “drop-in for Indigenous kids all over the world.” 

Theia saves the most crushing lyrics for her album’s swansong. 

“I picked a flower from the grave / Of my great-grandmother’s pain / She whispers quietly to me / Teaching me to fight for thee,” she sings on “I Picked a Flower From the Grave”. She sounds as placid as she did at the beginning of the record, her path forward just as clear in her mind. There is no instrumentation, lest it distract from her stark words. “Great-grandmother, hear my cry / Wipe these tears from my eyes / I will sing till my last breath / I will not let them forget / I will not let them forget.”

Theia may be a “child of centuries of warriors and kings,” but she is, above all, a descendant of fierce tūpuna wāhine. 

“[T]hat’s chronicling the many hurts — you know, my grandmother was beaten until she bled with a whip that she had to go and personally harvest the supplejack for,” Theia says of the waiata. “And there’s just so many things that are continually brushed off sometimes… it’s like, that’s the past, but obviously under this government and under regimes around the world it’s actively happening now. I feel stauncher than ever as wāhine Māori, [I’m] very proud.”

Theia’s Girl, in a Savage World is out now. Find out more about the limited edition vinyl here.