10 May 2024 - 0 Comments
Harbour Board is a new indie folk rock project by actor Matthew Sunderland and producer Jeffrey Holdaway with Marc Chesterman and Nicolas Tillon.
Loss, regret, hope, stories of true crime, weathered by the salt air of long ocean voyages. Stories of being far from home inside songs of coming home with echoes of the tradition of Guthrie, Cash and Waits tempered by the influence of cinema soundtrack and contemporary influences such as Alt-J and Fontaines D.C.
Harbour Board are based in Auckland, Aotearoa, New Zealand. Today, Harbour Board release their debut EP The Strays, a collection of four songs exploring lost friends, lost climate and lost roads.
With a sound that nods toward the crooners of the 1950's or perhaps the softer ballads of Nick Cave, Harbour Board brings us a cautionary tale set on a lonely mountainside. With chiming bell-like guitars and sparse airy piano, Mathew Sunderland tells us a story of a man haunted by destruction backed by Heather Mansfield’s ghostly vocals.
“The Strays began as a demo I knocked out in a single take in a blind guitarist mate’s living room a few sheets to the wind. When Jeffrey and I reworked it, I realised it was about an old friend Tania who had lost her life under horrific circumstances in a Grey Lynn halfway house. I had first met her sitting at Verona cafe in the early noughties. It was very late and I was sitting in a booth by myself singing to no one in particular and suddenly this girl’s voice drifted across the room, singing along with me, like a call and response. Suddenly she appeared, this force of nature charisma machine and before you knew it we were thick as thieves, inseparable. We formed a band called “The Strays” and did our first and only gig at the W H Tongue funeral parlour on the corner of Symonds Street and Mt Eden Road. Then I moved Harbour Board to Sydney and we lost touch, and then, one terrible afternoon, she was gone”.– Matthew Sunderland.
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