New Zealand-based internet cult phenoms Mild Orange announces its third album, Looking For Space, due Feb. 11. The band, who have racked up over 100 million streams across all platforms, will be touring the world in 2022, hitting North America in February (see full dates below).Looking For Space is the band’s most ambitious project yet, recorded in six beautiful locations across Aotearoa New Zealand over a year, and it’s also Mild Orange’s first time entering a proper studio which was a necessary part in making this record sound as intended. It’s a sonic journey about navigating life, always finding room to grow, considering outlooks and maintaining belief in oneself as we choose our paths. True to MO, it doesn’t sit on one sound and will take you up and down, while feeling like a natural progression.
After spending two albums carefully organising the framed photos and applying an even layer of paint, Mild Orange felt the urge to tear apart the four walls that defined their bedroom pop sound, capturing the wilderness that lay beyond. And rather than be deterred from that goal by a pandemic and lockdown that left the New Zealanders stuck on their island, Mild Orange used that time to envision a new world. “Colourise”, the first track off the quartet’s fittingly titled third album, Looking For Space (due February 11th 2022 via AWAL), feels like the gate to the land of Oz, a portal behind which hypercolour and fantasy unfolds. “Trust the waves and where you’ll go/ ‘Cause you never know what it may hold,” Josh Mehrtens sings, a snare march, lithe electric guitar, and washes of echo trailing behind. Together, frontman/producer Mehrtens, lead guitarist Josh Reid, bassist Tom Kelk, and drummer Jack Ferguson aren’t just looking for space, they’re carving out grand landscapes all their own.
That collaborative vigour and childlike imagination should come as no surprise for a band in which two of the members didn’t even realise they’d once been childhood friends. Halfway through recording Mild Orange’s debut album, Reid told his mum about how he’d been working on a new project with a guy named Josh Mehrtens. Her response: dusting off some old photo albums. “We had been best friends at ages three or four years old, but then we both moved to different towns,” Reid explains. “My mum had these photos of us playing together when we were kids, and we had no idea that we even knew each other.”
Midway through recording the album, Mehrtens came down with pneumonia and pleurisy, a single breath capable of leaving him in excruciating pain. The experience not only changed the perspective of the rest of the record, but of Mehrtens’ life. “That put me into some pretty dark spaces,” he says. “But I’m an optimist, so I was searching for the beauty in the dark.” That buoyant spirit shines in lead single “This Kinda Day”, the first song Mehrtens wrote while recovering. “But for now this moment too will all make sense someday,” he vows. The song arriving at a tender moment looking out at the beachfront. “A storm was battering the coastline of Oākura and I realised that the turbulence eventually passes and is a requisite part in growing, shaping and maintaining the balance on the beautiful beach – like us”.
After building a catalog based on understanding the intimacies of the human heart, Looking For Space honours and extols the far reaches that the resulting emotions are capable of. Fittingly, Mild Orange spent chunks of last year surveying and recording in far-flung parts of New Zealand, embracing isolation as a route to deeper connection. “Out there, on the beach, with a paddock of five horses just out the window, we could make as much noise as we liked,” Reid says. By honouring those spaces and crafting their own, Mild Orange have not only struck out on their search for meaning, but simultaneously found meaning where they were all along.
NORTH AMERICAN TOUR DATES
TICKETS AT MILDORANGE.COM
2/16 – Brooklyn, NY – Baby’s All Right
2/18 – Toronto, ON – Baby G
2/19 – Chicago, IL – Schuba’s
2/23 – Oakland, CA – Starline
2/24 – Los Angeles, CA – The Roxy
2/26 – San Diego, CA – Soda Bar
