Aotearoa's Serebii Releases New Single ‘Verrans Corner’

On ‘Verrans Corner,’ the Serebii sound crests over a tall wave as Mower sings of “sailing like furniture on estuaries,” his voice recalling the jazzy falsetto of Thom Yorke.

Serebii explains the story behind new album single single 'Verrans Corner':

"The track was co-written with Leigth Sye Towers and came out of a session we had last summer. Calling it a session feels a bit odd. We’ve known each other since childhood, and music was just another thing we picked up along the way and interfaced with together. There’s a healthy regression that occurs when you work with a childhood friend. You can tap into the playfulness and naivety while still leveraging the insights and growth you've gained over the years. We approached this collaboration with the calm, comical, and unflappable sense of persistence afforded by our shared history. This sense permeated the track, from the ad hoc and primitive piano playing to the apparitional ornamentation and the lyrical allusions, all pointing to a nondescript circular issue trying to fit through an even less descript square hole."

The single is accompanied by a video, which Serebii continues, “The video aims to be childish, blending playfulness and grandeur. I’d never sailed a ship before, neither had I shrunk to the size of a small figurine. It was mostly an excuse to get out into lush landscapes in Aotearoa, New Zealand with a group of friends. I am extremely proud of how this video came out with such a small budget and timeline.”

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To celebrate the release of ‘Verrans Corner’, Serebii will bring his evocative soundscapes to the Auckland Unitarian Church for a one-of-a-kind performance on Friday, January 31, 2025. Avondale native Spdrtwnbby (pronounced "Spider Town Baby"), whose neo-soul melodies are laced with delicate guitar strings and R&B instrumentation, will join the bill. This one-night-only event promises to be a unique celebration of creativity and connection—a fitting prelude to the full album’s release in March. Get your tickets from Under The Radar (here).

For his second full-length LP and most realised release as Serebii yet, Callum Mower had one thing he had to overcome first: he was “terrified” of himself.

After establishing the Serebii project with several albums’ worth of trancing neo-soul and shape-shifting ballads, much of it done in collaboration with fellow New Zealander Arjuna Oakes, Mower had no lack of confidence in his musical abilities. But much of Mower’s focus in the past was on instruments and production—swirling, cinematic instrumentals under his own name or funky art-pop jams with others on vocals. On Dime, however, Mower knew he wanted to push forward with his own singing placed center stage. “It’s exposing,” Mower says of releasing music so heavy on his singing. “It feels like you’re walking into the public naked.”

Mower, it turns out, has nothing to be afraid of. He has a gentle croon deceptive in its power—on a song like ‘Feet for Pegs,’ for example, he lures you in with a Tropicalia guitar progression, but carries the song on vocal subtleties that pass like wisps of smoke. And using that voice, he’s created an album unlike anything he’s done before, rolling seamlessly from track to track—not just a collection of songs but a singular project conceived to work together as a unified statement. “That was the approach with Dime,” Mower says. “To really focus on putting something together that sounded like it was done in one sitting. One chapter.”

For a few months, Mower did little besides eat, sleep, and make music. Outside of a deep love for the music of Aldous Harding, which he takes as inspiration, Mower didn’t listen to much outside of his own work. Instead, he focused on developing a routine: yoga, walks, free writing in the morning to get everything out instead of letting it bottle in. “Just trying to feel, trying to release, and then going in and conjuring that while you’re hovering over a chord progression,” he explains. “Just focus on expression.”

’Dime,’ the title track, started as a finger-plucked guitar melody in a strange tuning that led to Mower putting the whole song together in a day. It’s a reflection on the feeling of having been cast into the world with little more than some loose change and ending up back where you started, wondering what it was all about: “Thought I’d never look back,” he sings, “Running a lie to keep on track.” But it’s also the word that came into Mower’s head when he wrote it—a dime, as in a perfect ten: “I just remember being like, that’s a dime. I got my dime.” (The album, notably, deliberately, features ten songs.)

Mower finished about 80 percent of Dime on his own before he realised that what was actually still missing wasn’t something he needed to do himself. “I got to a certain point where I just really missed working with people,” he says, laughing. “That is one of my favorite things to do: be in a room with someone and try to catch all those intricacies and bounce off each other.” Mower called up a few friends—Tessa Dillon, Carla Camilleri, Leith Sye Towers, Skud Gambosi—to add touches and play different parts. And then there was one last collaboration like no other.

For ‘The Randan,’ Mower asked his grandfather, Allan Watkins, to read some of his writing he’d done about adolescence. As Mower recorded his grandfather’s live reading of words about growth and social confusion, he improvised a backing synth track. The result is a song that feels experimental and otherworldly, but surprisingly warm at the same time. Three generations of New Zealanders bridged over a love of music and art—and a grandfather and grandson both pushing aside apprehensions about their own voices to make something beautiful and meaningful. (Watkins’ voice was affected by a recent stroke.)

Watkins, a musician himself, was the one who got Mower into music as a kid; in more than one sense, there is no Serebii without him. “It felt appropriate to get him on this,” Mower says, “as an ode to him for encouraging me in the first place.”

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