30 January 2025 - 0 Comments

Today, Australia’s The Jungle Giants return with their first release in over a year, Hold My Hand. The foundational taste of the group’s upcoming fifth album, a lot of life has been lived since 2021’s #1 ARIA Chart-topping Love Signs. In 2024, frontman Sam Hales was thrown headfirst into a phase of self-discovery following the end of a decade-long relationship and a jet-ski accident requiring surgery and 2 months of recovery. Searching for something that felt real in a period of numbness, Hold My Hand was the first time he was able to surface for a breath of air and punctuate an old chapter of his life.

He shared, “These are all beautiful, beautiful, positive memories that changed me for the better. It was just really hard to figure out a way to write about it and figure out a way to define how I felt. This song really helped open up a lot of the writing for the album. All the songs I wrote before weren't feeling real enough. Once I landed on Hold My Hand, a lot of things fell into place for me. I had this real emotional reaction to it.”

From its inception, Hales wanted Hold My Hand to feel like a collage of sounds. Bolstered by a live orchestra and layers upon layers of strings, the instrumentation of the song emotes in a way that words can’t. With a hypnotic, repeating mantra pleading “hold my hand,” you feel Hales’ conversation-like pain and release; an experience that will undoubtedly hit a live audience like a wall of sound and emotion. Listen HERE

“Things have changed, but there's beauty to all this. I would not do anything differently. This is really important to me as an artist, really important to me as a friend, and a lover and everything. Hold My Hand really captures the feeling of 10 years with someone, and watching the love just evolve.”

To celebrate the new single, The Jungle Giants are excited to announce their return to Auckland and Wellington in May as part of their Australasian Hold My Hand single release tour.

This is the first time The Jungle Giants have played New Zealand in two years and will be their only NZ tour of 2025. The band will play The Powerstation in Auckland on Friday May 2 and Meow Niu in Wellington on Saturday May 3.

PARK RD will be the opening act for both shows. Tickets are on pre-sale HERE with the general public on sale at 11am Monday February 10.

South Island fans don’t miss out, the band are also one of the headliners at Electric Avenue Festival, being held in Christchurch on February 21.

With The Jungle Giants’ fifth album arriving later this year, Hales is more emotionally grounded than he has ever been. Hales has spent the past few years travelling the globe with his bandmates, playing major festivals and meeting fans from all over, but the place he needed to settle in for the new album was internal. The Jungle Giants’ genre-agnostic sound has taken a memento from everywhere they’ve been, resulting in a pluralism of alternative pop, dance, rock and experimentalism all informed by the experiences that brought them here.

The Jungle Giants – NZ dates:
Friday February 21 - Electric Avenue Festival, Christchurch
Friday May 2 - Powerstation, Auckland w/ special guests PARK RD
Saturday May 3 - Meow Niu, Wellington w/ special guests PARK RD

Tickets are on pre-sale HERE with the general public on sale at
11am Monday February 10.

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