35 years of songs finally escaping the hard drive… Selfie, released in 2025, was a very different kind of OLDER album.
Unlike Human+ or Unmasked, which both had very clear themes and concepts running through them, Selfie was more like opening every cupboard, drawer and dusty old hard drive we had lying around and finally asking, “Right… what do we do with all these songs?” These songs were written over a span of about 35 years. Some were written before we met. Some came out of our time together in the ‘90s band Driving Morris. Others were songs that nearly made previous OLDER albums but just didn’t quite fit the mood or direction at the time. Not bad songs, quite the opposite really. Just homeless songs.
Eventually we realised they were too good to leave sitting unheard forever. It’s a bit like artwork shoved under the bed collecting dust when you should frame it, hang it and show the world. Selfie was a collection of songs that technically shouldn’t work together at all as they were written in different decades with different inspirations by different versions of ourselves. On paper it sounds like a disaster. Even Jel, producing the album, kept saying, “This shouldn’t work.” But weirdly… it did and does.
The trick was not simply dragging old recordings out and polishing them up. Most of the songs had to be completely reimagined. New drums, bass, guitars, keyboards, vocals, harmonies, tempos. Some needed chopping down because they dragged a bit. Others suddenly came alive once they were pushed harder or given more energy.
By this point we’d also developed the OLDER sound properly, particularly vocally. The harmonies on this album are ridiculous in places. At times there are six or seven vocal parts stacked together because Julie has absolutely no self-control when it comes to harmonies! (Jel encourages her too!)
One review described Selfie as “a classic Kiwi album” and honestly we were happy to take that.
The album opens with Showtime, which is basically a sarcastic little jab at living life through the television instead of actually living it. Living rooms are for the living after all, not just sitting zombified staring at screens.
Then there’s Whole, probably the closest thing we’ve ever written to a love song, although even that had to get slightly weird. The new video projects an old unfinished video we shot many years ago onto walls, TV screens and garage doors while creepy CCTV-style cameras watch everything unfold. Very healthy relationship energy – obviously!
The title track Selfie is really about self-identity – that feeling of drifting through work conversations and social niceties thinking, “You have absolutely no idea who I actually am.” But also realising that maybe that’s okay. As long as you know who you are, that’s the important bit.
Moment in the Sun goes right back to Jel’s trance music days around 2000. Originally a full-on high-energy dance track, it eventually evolved into this Joy Division-inspired reflective anthem about being present in your own life. ‘This is our moment in the sun’. This is it. Don’t spend your whole life looking backward or forward and forgetting to actually live the bit you’re currently in.
Then there’s songs like Mr Breezy, which starts off sounding wonderfully carefree before quietly revealing itself to be sitting in the shadow of nuclear war anxiety and world tensions. It takes some inspiration from the Protect and Survive public information campaigns in the UK in the 1980s. Typical OLDER really. Even the breezy songs have existential dread lurking somewhere in the background.
That Season came from the ‘80s too and captures that strange pressure-cooker atmosphere around Christmas when everything is supposed to be magical while relationships quietly implode behind the scenes. The older you get, the more you realise how many people are just surviving the “festive season” rather than enjoying it.
And then there’s Mavis and John, written in our twenties taking the mickey out of middle-aged couples quietly falling apart over wine and routine. The problem now is… we’re the age Mavis and John were supposed to be, which is hiliarious. Thankfully we’re still very happily together, but there’s something strangely beautiful about songs ageing alongside you.
Selfie is not just an album, but the closing chapter on about 15 years of OLDER and the songs we’d written even before that. It was a clearing out, a full stop. And now they’re out there, exactly where they should be, as we work on album #5, which promises to be something very different to what we have done to date.
