New Zealand may be incredibly far away, but Auckland outfit The Brunettes possibly didn’t realise it would take so long for their music to travel. 

Album number three, and first for the Sub Pop label, ‘Structures And Cosmetics’ was released last summer, and has become the first Brunettes-release (there have also been three EPs) to really garner attention worldwide.

“Our previous album ‘Mars Loves Venus’ was only released in Australia outside New Zealand. We started as a recording project as teenagers almost 10 years ago. It's fantastic to finally have an album available in the northern hemisphere and get to tour outside of New Zealand,” enthuses songwriter Jonathan Bree.

Alongside band-mate Heather Mansfield, Bree left a calling card with ‘Structure And Cosmetics’ – it’s an album of twee boy-girl indie pop, mixing Phil Spector-era production with Lee and Nancy-esque duelling, while also recalling more recent outfits like Rainer Maria or Mates Of State.

“In the beginning we were more influenced by girl groups like the Shangri-Las than we were by others in our own music scene at the time. Ten years ago the Auckland music scene was pretty much split into two camps, dance music played in clubs by DJs and "turn-your-amp-up-to-11 seventies-rock revivalists". We ended up playing shows with the rock bands around town but I think it was a depressing time and place to be young trying to create boy-girl pop music. If there was an indie pop music scene in Auckland at that time I certainly didn't know about it,” adds Bree.

While the label budget may have stretched for a slicker production job this time around, Jonathan feels that it isn’t necessarily as multi-textured as their previous studio forays. “Something our releases all have in common is layered instrumentation.

Having never felt the need to create within the restrictions of a typical live band that has say two guitars, bass and drums, we tend to record our songs using whatever instrumentation we think will suit the composition and worry about the live representation later. If anything, our latest album is a little more stripped back than the rest.”

This may be all well and good while a band is in the studio carefully constructing every facet of the record. However, when the haphazard world of live shows comes to the fore, how do The Brunettes deal with representing their sound?