Local Listens: Wiri Donna plays Certified Rock Music™

LOCAL LISTENS | INTERVIEW | MAHI

Written by Liam Hansen (they/them) | @liamhanse.n | Editor-in-Chief

Interview with Bianca Bailey (she/her) | @wiri.donna | Interviewee

The hooks, guitar riffs, and heart wrenching lyrics of Wiri Donna’s ‘Being Alone’ EP from 2022 are seared into my brain. The title track alone, led with an incredibly simple yet enticing guitar line slowly explodes into a cathartic banger, constantly bursting at its seams in anger until it can’t hold still anymore. It holds one of the most excitingly catchy indie rock instrumentals Aotearoa has offered this decade thus far, and combines them with a tale taking the most personal and difficult moments of songwriter Bianca Bailey’s life and breaking it into a million pieces. Again, this is only the EP’s first track. 

The songs that follow continue to merge jangle-pop with introspective storytelling and a uniquely Wellington-like edge. I end up accidentally getting the 7/4 riff of ‘You Should Be Smiling’ stuck in my head about once a fortnight, I was behind the scenes as they performed a Trash Recital of ‘Dream of Me’ (long story), and I’ve had too many emo bus rides to closing track ‘Last Call’. 

Now, Wiri Donna is back with a vengeance, gracing the alternative music scene with ‘The Gold’ towards the end of June. This may as well be the theme tune for the most terrifying horror villain of all time, but if it was fantastically performed by a bunch of Wellington music grads and associates who loved distortion pedals. This is the heaviest track Bianca and co have released - a teaser to an EP that promises to continue on the bands catchy songwriting and certified rock bangers that have taken the country by storm. Off the back of the new release, I had a chat with Bianca about ‘The Gold’, her first EP, and what people can expect to come next. 

Liam 

Could you quickly introduce yourself and your music?

Bianca  

I'm Bianca - Wiri Donna is my musical project which I started back in 2020. After spending a lot of years playing the drums, I decided that I wanted to do more songwriting. The guitar felt like the instrument that I wanted to lead with - writing songs with drums being your main instrument is very creative, but you can't really achieve the level of communication that you want to get to with songwriting. It started off as an indie folk project, and I thought I was gonna write songs about gardening, but I feel like once I figured out how to play the guitar in the style that I wanted to and figured out the music that I wanted to make, it sort of started evolving into this indie rock, more alternative rock sound. I do all the songwriting, and then I work with Harrison Scholes on the bass, Elliott Dawson plays the lead guitar, and James McEwan plays the drums. 

Liam

Did it start off just being yourself? 

Bianca  

Yeah, but I was living with Harry at the time while writing all of the songs. He heard me every day in my bedroom playing the same six tracks over and over, and trying really hard to get good at the guitar. I got to the point where I played some solo shows, and then I booked these shows to have a band while struggling to find people who would actually be in it. One day at a gig, he came up to me and said “If you're struggling to find people to be in your band, me and James have got you. I know the songs incredibly well already, from hearing you playing them consistently. We can make this work.” 

Liam   

The band's first major release was the ‘Being Alone’ EP, back in 2022. What was the process for bringing that first piece of work together like? 

Bianca  

I had been in recording studios before, working on other people's projects. But it was the first time that I was trying to articulate my ideas and the vision I had for it to other people. But I definitely had the right people in my corner to be able to use the language that I had at the time to try and articulate these things - it definitely started off as using lots of silly, descriptive, non-technical words. 

Liam

How about your new single, ‘The Gold’? It’s a much darker sound than what’s on the EP - where did the ideas for this sound come from?

Bianca  

That particular song was only written about this time last year - The Gold was one of the last pieces in the puzzle of that record. I had known for a long time that I wanted it to be Rock Music™. I don't think there's any other way to describe it. It wasn't long after the first EP came out that I met with our producer James Goldsmith again, and I was like, “we're doing a rock record. It's going to be chaotic. It's going to be intense. It's gonna be fun”, you know?

Liam   

Are there any particular artists that inspired you to go down that sort of direction?

Bianca  

I think at the time, I would say like Black Country, New Road alongside Dry Cleaning and Fontaines D.C. - UK post rock had a huge chokehold on me to the point where we demoed some songs, and James was like, “You need to go and you need to do some work on this. This is a great direction, it feels like you, you need a file and you need to sit with you a little bit more in it.”

Liam   

You also directed the music video for ‘The Gold’. Was that the first time you had done mahi within that realm?

Bianca  

It was indeed! To be fair, the concept for the music video was just “flame cannon”, so it was a situation where there was just a very clear and simple idea, and I knew exactly what the parameters were and how it needed to be executed. I really like being able to focus on making the music and bringing in other sorts of creatives to work on the visual elements. So it just happened to be for this particular one, I just wanted to get an Elon Musk sort of flamethrower, which is really hard to get your hands on - I don't think they don't just give them out to people willy nilly. So we had to sort of re-focus on what we were trying to achieve, and I found a friend who works in lighting and had access to a pyro cannon. So we got to use that, which was pretty fun. 

Liam   

When it comes to the rest of the EP, what can people expect from that body of work as it’s slowly released throughout the year?

Bianca  

I like to think that this EP feels a lot more confident. The last one was definitely a very coming of age, self discovery sort of moment. This record feels like “Oh, I'm here and I'm doing the thing.” It feels like a sound that I've been trying to get to for a while, but maybe didn't have the right tools or resources or understanding of how to do that right. I feel like I'm making the right sound for the right time, and the right Wiri Donna that exists right now. That was so many rights. So many rights in a row. 

Liam   

Hopefully it’ll be a pretty alright record! 

Wiri Donna’s newest track, ‘The Gold’, is now available on Bandcamp and wherever else you stream your music. You can also listen back to her 2022 EP ‘Being Alone’, pick it up on vinyl at all good record stores, and follow her @wiri.donna to keep in the loop with her upcoming releases and tour announcement for when she’s back in Tāmaki Makaurau.