GREATSOUTH

Writer: Joseph Maranta

Images: Geoffery Matautia - @southsides

As a kid, I always found it equal part humorous and pitiful that koalas subsist on eucalyptus leaves. I could never understand how an animal could evolve to have a near-wrinkleless brain, sleep 20 hours a day, and exclusively consume something which is seemingly detrimental to their survival. 

But once I fell hook, line, and sinker for the algorithmic trickery of TikTok and Instagram Reels, I felt a profound understanding for our arboreal friends. Too often I've escaped the blue-light trance to realise I’m embracing the Koala’s lifestyle. Shunning any duties and responsibilities, wasting away my youth and potential in pursuit of that next scroll, consuming for the sole sake of consumption. Overall, my affinity for Reels and TikToks has been an overwhelming net negative in the grand scheme of my life. 

However, despite the tech gods taking a skewed amount from me, they can at times give. Their giving can manifest as a funny video which becomes a running inside joke among friends, an ad for a great local bar which has just opened nearby, or it may be a snippet of a song from an incredibly talented and relatively unknown artist hailing from Papakura, South Auckland. 

I’ve been lucky enough to experience all three of the aforementioned, but stumbling across a video from Greatsouth remains my most serendipitous scroll to date. 

Since my first introduction to Greatsouth (Payton Taplin) a year and a bit ago, I’ve become a devotee to his effortless weaving of Pasifika motifs with contemporary indie-rock. 

The enthralling narratives boasted on his recent eponymous EP are incorporated across a variety of different genres, though his recent singles suggest he’s narrowing in on a more definitive ‘Greatsouth’ sound. A sound moulded by the alt-rock darlings of today, a deep connection to Māori heritage, taonga pūoro (Māori instruments), and Taplin’s own extensive musical journey. 

Here’s our chat with Payton Taplin of Greatsouth.

JOE: Greatsouth! It’s great to be able to speak to you. Having just entered 2026, how do you reflect on 2025?

PAYTON: It was a really cool year for me. 

Seeing the growth in the art I’ve been making and watching my vision come to life has been really great. I think one of the main things I’ll look back on this year is how I’ve allowed myself to be more of myself on social media. It's always a daunting thing doing the art and the music, then having to sell that to the world. 

JOE: I actually first came across your music via a TikTok-doomscrolling session, and since I’ve begun following you I’ve noticed your posts garnering a lot more interactions. How has that virality affected your listenership in Aotearoa compared to global audiences?

PAYTON: It’s been a bit overwhelming at times. 

Particularly being Māori, indie music or alternative-music isn’t the default, and because we’re so small in a global sense, I’ve always had people outside of my community interacting with my music. 

There’s been a wave of Māori across Aotearoa being like oh this is sick! But there’s also been a lot of people, particularly Indigenous communities, from across the world who have really connected with the music. I’ve gotten heaps of really cool messages from First Nations people in Canada, Australia, Hawai'i as well as South America. 

It’s very exciting. It’s like finding your community, or a group of people who you’re making the music for. 

JOE: You recently put out your latest track, ‘Hellhole of the Pacific’. Do you mind elaborating on the narrative behind the track?

PAYTON: I’m a big history buff, specifically the notions of how the past shapes our present. 

I like to look at things through the lens of Aotearoa, because you aren’t often taught a lot of the history of our own lands through the New Zealand school system. You’re more learning about everything else outside of this country, before learning our own history. I’ve always thought that was weird, to me it’d make more sense to learn about the things we’re directly linked to. 

Through university and being around Māori spaces of learning, I realised how rich our history is and how young our historical timeline is. Aotearoa was the last country / major landform to be discovered by humans, and learning more about my place in the world and what my connections are to it is something I get very excited and passionate about. 

So Hellhole of the Pacific itself is a historical term from the 1830s, specifically referring to a town in the North Island, across from Waitangi, where the treaty of Waitangi was signed. So this town called Kororāreka (Russell) was coined as the Hellhole of the Pacific, because it would attract all the whalers, fishermen and sailors and it was pretty much lawless. It was basically the wild west of the Pacific. 

From that framing I wanted to question what’s happening in today’s context, in regard to the pushback of Māori and Indigenous rights, sort of asking how far we’ve come from that period, where we’re still having those similar systemic issues. But I just love history, so there’s a lot of historical references to the Māori battalion which fought throughout the World Wars, during which Māori soldiers returned from fighting, having been promised access to land and other benefits, but receiving none of those benefits once they arrived home. 

JOE: What was the recording process like?

PAYTON: We did a lot of field recordings. We wanted the sounds in the song to reflect different places in the community I live in. We used many traditional instruments, taonga pūoro like the Pūtōrino, which is something I really want to lean into moving forward. I love those instruments because they’re so versatile, you can use them in so many different ways. 

One of my good friends is a very talented traditional Māori instrumentalist. He plays the Pūtōrino, and he explains some of the sounds you can produce from that instrument, as the sound of the New Zealand bush. It’s this squeaky, almost removed sound - similar to the cry of different birds across New Zealand. 

JOE: One of your latest tracks ‘it’s getting hotti’ has gone on to become your most commercially successful song yet. Did this come as a surprise to you? Considering you released it as a demo with some very humble cover art. 

PAYTON: Yeah it was unexpected, I honestly didn’t expect it to take off. 

I just put up a standard reel with the song as the audio prior to releasing it, and I was getting hounded in the DMs with people asking me to release it. I’d respond to them and say that I hadn’t finished mixing it and that it’s not finished. But people were still on my back, so I put out the demo version - I didn’t have any cover art so I just chucked up a photo of my auntie’s Rewana bread. 

I was just going with the flow, I guess. 

JOE: What sparked your decision to take your music into more of an indie direction sonically?

PAYTON: I’ve been making music since high school. I’ve been exploring and trying new genres independently for a while now. I didn’t even realise how vibrant the scene was in Auckland when I was first making music. 

I eventually forced myself to get out into the scene and go to local shows, even if I didn’t know anyone playing or attending. I wasn't on social media back then, so there was a bit of apprehension at first, just turning up to shows alone. But eventually, I met this one person who introduced me to other people in the scene, and I was able to grow that social network organically. I guess you could say that’s how I got into alternative music, but I was always listening to rock and random genres growing up, and those traditional Māori genres, if you can call it that, like reggae or BBQ reggae. 

JOE: You sound like an entirely different artist on your debut project ‘I’ll See You In Hawaiki’. How do you reflect on it, and how did your vision shift in regard to your latest, self-titled EP?

PAYTON: I was still trying to find my sound during the making of I’ll See You In Hawaiki. 

Sometimes we can get stuck in that mindset of ‘I started off like this, now it has to be that way forever.’

But for me, I loved the process of creating. I didn’t know where I would land, but I figured the best way to find out was to continue creating. I took a lot of inspiration from Frank Ocean, and I really loved that music, but I felt like it wasn’t really resonating. 

A couple of years ago I began playing music with my friends who are session musicians, and after that is when I first got that feeling of ‘yeah, this is what I’ve been chasing.’ I felt like my sound and my story could be really fleshed out in that space, and from there I just doubled down on it.

JOE: Touching on your self-titled EP, it definitely veers closer towards an expected ‘indie’ sound, but tracks like 2carsparked, 1863 and Speedstar show that your penchant for experimentation was still there during its production. Heading into your next project, do you think that experimentation with other genres will linger, or do you think it’ll be a more cohesive project in terms of its sound?

PAYTON: It’s definitely more cohesive. It’ll be my first project which will fall under that same soundscape. 

My previous EP, it felt like the passing of the baton in a way, from my old project FABLE into this new Greatsouth sound. This upcoming one is more definitively Māori indie rock I guess, or Polynesian post-punk. 

I’ve just started making up names for it at this point. 

JOE: How would you describe the health of local music in Aotearoa, and are there any acts you want to shout out?

PAYTON: There’s always so much going on, there’s a lot of talent and growth in our scene. In comparison to Australia though, our size does hold us back. I sometimes forget how small New Zealand is, and that size comes with its pros and cons.

There are some great acts like LEAO they blend traditional Fa‘asāmoa influences with alternative rock, creating this buzzy Pacific neo-psychedelia sound. Geneva AM is another cool Māori artist, she does buzzy instrumentals which fuse house and te reo Māori. She leans into her accent too, which is something I love when artists do, when you can hear that authenticity in their voice. 

JOE: How difficult is it for rising Kiwi bands to tour in Australia?

PAYTON: There is a big leap you have to take as a New Zealand act, to tour in Australia. To get down to Wellington from Auckland isn’t easy - but it's definitely doable. The cost does go up a fair bit to get across to Australia though, luckily Creative New Zealand and a few other funding programmes are a big help

Following this upcoming project, we are planning to head to Australia, but we’ve also been able to plan some collaborations with First Nations communities in Canada. 

JOE: Why Canada specifically?

PAYTON: An opportunity popped up with the curator of an anthropology museum at The University of British Columbia. It came through some connections, and the curator really likes our project and sound. They have a program there which brings in Indigenous artists to perform from across the world, so I’m hopeful of heading up there in addition to a few other museum spaces in Ireland and Scotland.

JOE: Just finally, how has the Greatsouth project brought you closer to your own communities and heritage?

PAYTON: It’s brought me heaps closer. This project has been the one where I felt like I’ve connected most to our traditional sounds and instruments. It’s helped me to unlock a new perspective on songwriting and processes of creating music. I’m always learning, and that’s something I want to reiterate. I’m definitely still in a stage of discovery personally. 

I want to learn more about the history of carving, whakairo, to learn more about the origins and find ways to incorporate that into the music. Whether that’s field recordings, experimenting with the sounds of traditional woods and then using those motifs to tell more about our stories.

GREATSOUTH LINKS -> | INSTAGRAM | SPOTIFY | BANDCAMP |