Bic Runga is all aglow

Her new album Red Sunset is also a major milestone in itself, not only because it arrives almost a decade since her last, Close Your Eyes, but also because it marks her first slate of original songs in a full 15 years. Close Your Eyes was largely a covers project, taking in songs by the likes of Françoise Hardy, The Meters, Love, and The Blue Nile, but it did include two of Runga’s own – the title track and “Dream a Dream”, inspired by her three kids.

Now, in 2026, the oldest of the three is preparing to leave home and music is back on the agenda. “I’ve been laying low for a reason,” she tells BEST FIT over video call from New Zealand. “I’d sort of burnt myself out from touring so much, and I didn’t quite understand where the business was going. It was better to just take stock and do it again when I was ready.”

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That readiness began to filter through into Runga’s family life about two years ago, but the bulk of Red Sunset came together last February when she and longtime partner Kody Nielson (formerly of The Mint Chicks, currently of Silicon) based themselves in Paris with a focused mission to finish what they’d started back home. “We rented a place there and just got it done,” she says. “But a lot of the songs were already written, and a lot of the songs come from fragments and scraps that didn’t make it onto my first two albums.”

Inspired by a piece of advice David Bowie gave to Iggy Pop in the ‘70s, to “never waste an idea,” Runga revisited the older material through the lens of a much more experienced artist. “In those early days, I didn’t have enough skills to not waste an idea, so if something didn’t work out I’d just discard it,” she explains. “Where I’m at now, I have more skill to finish them and can control the process more. There’s something about taking an idea you had when you were in your early twenties and finishing it in your late forties. It's a nice bookend, like talking to your former self.”

Of course, the music industry has changed immensely since the ‘90s, and even since 2016, but Runga sees that as a net positive. “I think because I was always a bit of a niche artist, it’s probably a good time for me,” she says. “Back in the late ‘90s, when I was on a major label, it was a different landscape. Now it’s about growing your direct fanbase rather than just trying to be everything to everyone.”

Themes of reflection and renewal inform Runga’s new songs throughout the record. As much as it benefits from the past, Red Sunset largely revels in the present, introducing a funkier angle to Runga’s established indie-pop shine, particularly on the title track. She’s flirted with more dynamic rhythmic structures before, on certain tracks from Close Your Eyes and 2011’s Belle, for example, but a deeper sensuousness and broader range is apparent on Red Sunset. That, she says, has a lot to do with the strong foundations of her relationship with Nielson, who joins her as co-producer, occasional co-writer, musician, and engineer.

“Kody and I, we have very broad tastes,” she says. “He was brought up by a jazz musician and my mum was a lounge singer. We’re both multi-instrumentalists. We both play drums, bass, and keyboards. Plus, we’re both sort of like ‘half-caste’ kids from New Zealand. He’s Hawaiian and Danish, I’m Chinese and Maori. We’re so hybridised, it’s really normal to us.” More than anything, though, she says, it’s the art of songcraft that they “always hold firm to.”

As a couple, Runga and Nielson are “quite private and insular,” to the extent that Red Sunset’s every instrument was played between them. “We go deep into our studio at home and we’re just obsessed,” she enthuses. “A good song is just like an architectural plan, and we can make it into anything because our foundation is so strong. It’s a lot of fun.”

The dynamic that fuels Red Sunset may be intimate but the sounds are expansive. Whether it’s the picturesque instrumental “Glass Atrium”, the French yé-yé spritzed “Ghost in Your Bed”, or the avant-garde synth mood of “Paris in the Rain”, these tracks and everything contained on Red Sunset feel precise and sumptuous.

Narratively, Runga continues to investigate the human experience, and “it’s definitely personal.” “The beauty of having a long relationship and being an older woman is that you get to understand your emotions more,” she explains. “It feels like there are a lot of songs missing about middle-aged women and the things they think about. It’s a youth-oriented industry, but there are so many things that aren’t being said.”

Take the song “You’re Never Really Here (Are You Baby)”, for example, which stems from the “longing and desire” of being a stay-at-home mum while dad goes off on tour for months on end. “There was a good 10 years where I was home alone a lot with the children, feeling like the one left behind, and jealous,” she explains. “I was just trying to make something that was emotionally honest.”

Perfected over the years, Runga’s way with tunes that are catchy without being cloying is fully undiminished. Her sweet, soft lilt brings just the right touch of drama and delicacy, particularly on the wistful “It’s Like Summertime”. Thematically, love remains her central touchstone, but there are also songs of motherhood (“Hey Little One”) and related to our turbulent times (“Escape from Planet Earth”).

“The difference between the haves and have nots is so desperately divided these days, and I worry about that,” she says of the “psychedelic nursery rhyme.” “The song has this kind of backdrop of all these billionaires who want to travel to space, and I just keep thinking, ‘Why would you want to go and colonise Mars if we’ve got what we’ve got here?’ It seems so stupid to trash the place and then go find another place to live.”

With her return in full swing and her debut album Drive turning 30 next year, there’s room for a little introspection about her trajectory thus far. The self-produced debut, she says, was “all about willful naivety and thinking that you could do something big out of nowhere,” owing to “blind confidence” and an absence of fear. Runga also produced her second album, Beautiful Collision, by herself, and again wrote all the songs alone, “sort of trying to prove that I could do it twice.” The result was a ten-times platinum-selling album at home, and a breakthrough moment in Europe, charting in the UK and Ireland in the summer of 2002.

Her third album, Birds (2005), was a record she made to process the death of her father, who had been one of her biggest cheerleaders. “He really taught me to think big, so when I lost his influence, I felt lost,” she says. Though it won awards and went triple platinum at home, the moodiness of Birds made it a hard sell for Sony BMG. “It’s not the sort of record that a major knows what to do with,” says Runga, and her next album, 2011’s Belle, was made mainly as a way to close out that contract. “I was struggling too,” she says, and that’s when Nielson came into view, taking over production duties to help the album along.

By the time Close Your Eyes came around, five years later, Runga says she was still not quite back on her feet. “I just didn’t have it in me to be as prolific as a songwriter, as well as rearing a family, because it takes so much isolation, concentration, and undivided focus,” she explains. But the old excitement is back for Red Sunset, despite everything having turned on its head in the world at large. “I just feel free,” she says of the album’s more upbeat palette. “I feel like I could come out with a dance record next, or an acoustic folk record, and I love that. I’m not beholden to anyone.”

When it comes to role models for the middle-aged woman demographic that Runga wants to see better represented, it’s straight-talking, no-bullshit Cher that she looks up to. “I honestly think it’s a plus to be getting older, like her,” she says, grinning. “I love anything that she says or does – where would we be without that energy?”