Emerging from the ashes of much-loved Wellington witch-rockers HEX, Giantess is something of a rebirthing for the project - still led by the inimitable Kiki Van Newtown and backed by Jason Erskine on production duties, the new outfit has the pair aiming at transcendence with their “heart-songs steeped in floods and fires.” They’re announcing today their forthcoming album Big Woman is set to drop on May 14th, and to tie us over until the release, they’ve shared the enthralling ‘Gone Gone Golden’.

With an intoxicating haze hanging over the track, ‘Gone Gone Golden’ instantly emerges with a tangle of crystalline guitar atop a sturdy backbeat, creating a sound that feels simultaneously tranquil and illusively volatile. Floating at the centre is Kiki’s enigmatic vocals, her gentle delivery defying the hint of menace in her voice, and we’re soon lulled into a trance as the soundscape continues to evolve around us.

As the intensity builds and the thunderous grooves amount, we’re immersed in a swirl of turbulent, ghostly guitars, yet Kiki holds steady, resisting the urge to erupt with the instrumentation. Instead, her vocals remain disarmingly ethereal, resulting in a darkly evocative atmosphere - especially so as the track simmers at its conclusion, revealing a sinister fury that has been bubbling underneath ‘Gone Gone Golden’ since the very beginning.

Speaking about the track, Kiki shares “over the last few years I've been deep in the alchemy of creating a life with intention, and ‘Gone Gone Golden’ came at the beginning of this process, when I was imagining what I wanted my future to be like. This song has circled around with a sort of prophetic insistence since I wrote it, as both a calm reflection on the past and a covenant with the future.”

Capturing a similar sense of liminality, the accompanying clip has Kiki performing the track, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. She explains, “we made the video on a whim at the end of summer on a day when everything was glowing. I swayed around right where a river meets the ocean, one foot in the water and one foot on the land. The sunset felt like the confluence of birth and death - a great, wide and infinite light. The beach was so quiet apart from one man fishing, and I couldn't get enough of the stillness. A week later we went into protective isolation, and stillness stretched across the world.”