How Making Music Together Strengthened the Bond of This New Zealand Family Band

“In a day-to-day sense, feelings can be quite elusive to me,” says Cello Forrester. “I think it’s such a blessing to have art as a means to explore what a feeling is trying to say before using words and sound to put those feelings in context while reflecting your internal world into the external.” A singer-songwriter, guitarist and string player, Forrester is the frontperson of Womb, the Tāmaki Makaurau and Whakatū-based dream-pop band they share with their siblings-cum-musical collaborators, Haz Forrester (synth, guitar) and Georgette Brown (drums). 

Together, the siblings are a tender and gentle trio who listen closely and speak thoughtfully, often cracking sly grins and chuckling wryly between making serious statements. Speaking with Rolling Stone ANZ via a group Zoom call, they’re talking about their recently released third album and the experiences that led them towards it. 

Paired with cover art that combines a photograph Haz took on a long bus ride through upper Te Waipounamu with four Hilma af Klint-inspired icons created by Georgette, One Is Always Heading Somewhere feels like a significant moment for Womb. Over twelve lovingly fleshed-out tracks, they continue to build on the Elysian fusion of lo-fi folk, slowcore, chamber-pop, and indie rock they’ve spent the last decade exploring while delivering some of the most pop-aspirational music they’ve made yet.

Lyrically unfolding like impressionistic journal entries set to music, the album opens with the glistening guitar figures and mist-enshrouded rhythms of the title track. Accompanied by Cello’s floaty reflections on the transformative power of having someone special in your corner, it sets the tone for everything that follows. “A lot of this album was written within the experience of a new love for me,” they reflect. “That kind of experience makes you very open to paying attention to everything around you.” 

From there, One Is Always Heading Somewhere explodes into full flight on the anthemic and lovestruck “Only You” before settling into a sunkissed and nostalgic cycle of songcraft inspired by not just blossoming romance but also the Vietnamese American writer Ocean Vuong’s vivid poetry, queer experiences, Chris Knox songs, and days spent driving, daydreaming, and staring at the sky and light on water. 

Written and recorded in colourful living rooms and bedrooms across Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Whanganui, Whakatū, and Tāmaki Makaurau between 2023 and 2024, the album is coloured by the sounds of everyday life. As Cello puts it, “I can hear the creak of my old chair, the sound of cars going by on the street I used to live on, the tap of the space bar on my laptop as I finish recording.” These spectral elements float in the background, lending a lived-in intimacy to the proceedings. 

When they’d finished recording One Is Always Heading Somewhere, the siblings mixed the album at Neil Finn’s Roundhead Studios in Tāmaki Makaurau with their latest collaborator, the audio engineer and musician De Stevens (Marlin’s Dreaming, School Fair). “It was fun to work with De,” enthuses Cello. “He brought out some beautiful aspects of the songs we didn’t even really know were there. The way I think about it is we recorded everything in a very lo-fi way, and he took it somewhere bigger.”

You can hear this quality throughout “Angels”, where Cello sings gently about the feeling of waking from a dream and coming to terms with your return to reality over flickering guitars and Georgette’s steady rhythms. Part of this expansiveness is about having a renewed appreciation for being together. “When we were recording our last album (2022’s Dreaming of the Future Again) during the pandemic, it was hard to be in the same spaces together,” explains Haz. “It felt nice to spend time together again in different places. It also felt like we made this album in a shorter time.”

However, when you talk about time with Womb, things get blurry fast. “I think the oldest song on there (‘Erosion’) is nine years old,” Cello reveals. “It’s cool how a song can be a record of a moment of time but also transcend that.” As Haz notes, another track, “Slip”, was built around a recording of a solo set Cello played in the forest at the Camp A Low Hum festival. “You can hear cicadas in there,” he says. “Technology can allow you to connect with your memories in quite a special way,” Cello continues.

Although there’s some internal debate over the band’s exact chronological start point, one version of events begins when Cello recorded a five-song EP for a boutique label and artist collective called Sonorous Circle in 2015. By then, Cello and Haz – both teenagers at this point – had spent several years performing within Te Whanganui-a-tara’s small but flourishing 2010s DIY music scene as the indie-folk duo Athuzela Brown before pursuing solo projects as Womb and A Hum of Voices, respectively. 

“That was a formative time for us,” Cello says. “It was exciting to play shows and feel connected to a community. I remember putting on house concerts and that kind of thing. It was a very intimate, close group of people.” “Music in Wellington felt so cool,” Haz adds. “It was a space I just wanted to be part of.”

Ostensibly, that first Womb EP was Cello’s solo project. However, if you look through the Bandcamp credits, you’ll see that Haz was involved in the music, and Georgette created “Vibrating Room”, the psychedelic painting that adorns the cover. Humble and lo-fi as they were, those early songs pointed towards what was about to unfold. “Teresa”, in particular, feels like a first attempt at the sort of sonics they would later fully realise with their siblings. From the beginning and perhaps even earlier, Womb was always a family affair. 

Not long after, Cello went on an American road trip with Haz before heading to Europe to walk the storied El Camino de Santiago trail with Georgette. On returning to Aotearoa, Cello and Haz asked Georgette to learn the drums so the siblings could play together. “There’s a photo of me on a drum kit when I was two or three,” Georgette says. “I’d always wanted to play the drums, but Haz and Cello were more musically inclined, and I was more inclined towards visual art. I see myself as an artist who drums. After they asked me, I just started doing it. I’m a bit older than them. The experience has propelled me to keep learning new skills.” 

Cello remembers recording their first band practice on cassette tape and being very pleased with the results. “It was a beautiful thing for us to be doing together,” she says. “We’re a blended family with different fathers, so it’s been really special for us to be able to explore our relationship together as siblings through music.” 

Although Cello and Haz encouraged Georgette to start drumming, they both note she helped shape their musical tastes when they were younger. Thinking back to the childhood and early teenage years they spent living between Australia and the American Midwest before moving to Aotearoa, they remember Georgette downloading MP3s off LimeWire to show them. “Georgette would always be deep into finding new music and exploring stuff,” Haz says. “So there’s an interesting relationship going on there.” 

Image: A young Georgette at the drums Credit: Supplied

On reflection, all three siblings feel lucky to be old enough on the millennial spectrum to remember the last moments of the pre-social media blog era that drove counterculture music in the 2000s. “I live with my partner and his family in Nelson,” Haz says. “Sometimes his nephews will be running around the house listening to ‘Maps’ by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. I used to listen to that song when I was twelve. They’re the same age I was, but they know because of hearing a Jersey Club remix of it on TikTok. We’re in a different era now.”

Three years after that first self-titled EP, Cello, Haz and Georgette unveiled their first Womb album through Sonorous Circle and Arcade Recordings, Like Splitting the Head From the Body (2018). From there, they signed with Flying Nun, with whom they have released the Holding a Flame EP (2021), Dreaming of the Future Again (2022) and now One Is Always Heading Somewhere. “Releasing music inherently involves putting it into a capitalist structure, so we try to keep our heads away from that and focus on why we make music, which is because we love making it,” Cello says. “I think it’s about having a balance of complete self-doubt and confidence. Too much of either isn’t a good thing, but staying somewhere in the middle keeps you curious.” 

Along the way, they’ve slowly stretched the parameters of their sound by including an increasing number of electronic elements, most notably synthesisers and the use of auto-tune as a stylistic affectation. Fittingly, where conventional pop artists might use auto-tune to perfect their recordings, Womb use it to reach into the psychedelic and the transcendental. It’s a quality you can hear clearly in the melange of elegiac melodies, electronic textures and spare guitar that drives the fifth track on the new album, “Unto”. “Sometimes, you can use it to achieve this feeling of spirit that can be very ethereal,” Cello explains. “I think if I can use technology to achieve something really beautiful, I’m all for it.”

In part, their use of auto-tune also feels like a knowing wink to growing up in the 2000s/2010s, when US hip-hop stars like T-Pain and Lil Wayne began using auto-tune to transform themselves into hitmaking singing robots. Another part feels indebted to the transhumanist aspirations of the PC Music-inspired hyperpop movement – artists using technology to make themselves more human by becoming more than human. “I like it when you can make one thing trickle into something else,” Cello says. “I think being confined within a genre would be kind of scary to all of us. Everything we do exists within a certain world, but I wouldn’t be surprised if sometime in the future we feel called to make music that sounds really different from what we’re doing now.”

Image: Haz and Cello at the piano Credit: Supplied

Over the last decade, Womb have shared stages with Marlon Williams, The Phoenix Foundation, The Bats, Alok Vaid-Menon, and Georgia Gets By (Broods), while regularly touring throughout Aotearoa, Te Waipounamu, Australia, and as far afield as China.

At the start of March, while the London tastemaker Flo Dill was visiting Tāmaki Makaurau for a two-night DJ residency at the Goblin lounge bar in Ponsonby, Cello and Georgette even managed to play a stripped-back performance for her which was aired on the storied NTS Breakfast Show. “We’ve made so many friendships through music,” Cello says. “Being able to dive into worlds that are equivalent to the worlds you spend time in where you live is a gift.”

While talking with attendees at the bar after shows, or relaxing in nearby late night restaurants, they’ve been told stories about mothers playing Womb while giving birth, drivers getting lost down rural country roads listening to their songs, and those in grief using their music to process the loss of a loved one. These are all special things to be told, but for the siblings, their greatest compliment yet recently came from their mother. “She said we make the music she doesn’t even know she wants to listen to,” says Cello. “I thought that was cute. After all, she made us.”

Womb’s One Is Always Heading Somewhere is out now via Flying Nun Records.