CHAII

Ahvaz to Christchurch, by way of The Real Slim Shady

Mona Sanei was born in Ahvaz, in the oil country of south-western Iran, in the early 1990s. The family emigrated to New Zealand in 2000, when she was eight, and settled first in Christchurch. She has told the story of her first English lessons more than once and it has not changed: she learned the language partly by rapping along to Eminem's "The Real Slim Shady" before she could hold a conversation in it. By eleven she was writing her own verses, largely as a way of processing being caught between two cultures.

The family later moved to Auckland, where she attended Epsom Girls' Grammar School. She studied spatial design at Auckland University of Technology, then went back to study audio engineering at SAE Institute. That second qualification explains more about her working method than the first: she writes, produces, engineers and directs, and the credit list on her own records is unusually short because of it.

The slow build, 2019 to 2022

The CHAII name appeared in March 2019 with "Digebasse (Enough)", which drew an APRA Silver Scroll nomination that same year. "South" followed in October 2019 and found an audience by an unexpected route — the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 + 2 soundtrack. In June 2020 she became the first New Zealand artist taken into Spotify's global RADAR programme.

Lightswitch EP arrived in July 2020, issued as a visual EP rather than a conventional release, and Pineapple Pizza followed in November 2021 with "Mano Tou" sung entirely in Persian. She relocated to Los Angeles late that year.

What carried her abroad in this period was not radio but synchronisation. Her music turned up in the Ms Marvel series finale, in The Old Guard, in Inventing Anna, in Wellmania, on the FIFA 21 Volta soundtrack, on Fortnite's Beat Box radio station, in an iPhone 12 commercial and in a Fendi campaign. For an independent-minded producer from a small market, those placements functioned as distribution.

Safar, and the awards run that nearly landed

"Drippin' In Gold" came in July 2023, and in August that year she played the FIFA Women's World Cup fan zone. The debut album Safar — the Persian word for journey — was released on 16 August 2024 through BMG. Rolling Stone Australia placed it eleventh in its 2024 ranking of the fifty best New Zealand albums. She also appeared alongside Tones And I and Young Franco on "(Can't Get You) Off My Mind" in July 2024.

On 8 April 2025 the Aotearoa Music Awards named her joint most-nominated artist of the year with Stan Walker, on five nominations: Album of the Year, Spotify Single of the Year for "We Be Killing It", Best Electronic Artist, Best Music Video Content for the self-directed "Night Like This", and a Best Engineer nod for Simon Gooding's work on the record. The ceremony was held at the Viaduct Events Centre in Auckland on 29 May 2025. She went home without a Tūī.

A European run followed almost immediately. She played The Great Escape in Brighton on 14 May 2025 and The Waiting Room in Stoke Newington on 16 May — the showcase circuit rather than the ticketed one, which is the honest shape of a New Zealand act's first serious attempt on the UK.

Planet Persia

She now lives in Sydney with Frank Keys, her husband and long-standing co-producer. The second album, VIP (Very Important Persian), came out on 16 October 2026 via BMG: fourteen tracks, co-produced with Keys, and framed as the soundtrack to Planet Persia, a surreal reworking of Iranian culture against the early-2000s New Zealand pop landscape she grew up inside.

The singles traced the idea out over several months — "Ride Or Die", "Persian Cowgirl", "Persianality", "Call Me On My Cellular", which carries a Farsi verse co-written with the Los Angeles-based Iranian rapper Erfan, and "So What". She was candid with RNZ in September 2026 about the limits of her own Persian: "My Persian poetry writing is equivalent to a very young [person], so [getting it right] was very important to me." She also described the record as leaning into a kind of main-character energy that her New Zealand upbringing had discouraged — "we don't want to talk about our stuff too much".

The "So What" video, which she directed with Taine Noble shooting and cutting it, was modelled on D12's "Purple Pills", and she has been clear about the register: "I wanted to capture that same sense of fun, not taking ourselves too seriously." Her framing of the longer project is less flippant. "I often think about the way a Persian rug is made over years and years," she said of the album. "I feel like there are many similarities between that and my career, as it's a lifetime labour of love."

Back on home soil

The VIP tour is four dates across Aotearoa in November 2026, and it is the first time the new material has been played at home: Meow in Wellington on Thursday 19 November, The Tuning Fork in Auckland on Friday 20 November, The Yard in Raglan on Saturday 21 November, and Totara Street in Mount Maunganui on Friday 27 November. Tickets are sold through chaiimusic.com, with the Raglan show also handled by Under the Radar. No support acts had been announced as of early November.

These are deliberately small rooms for someone whose catalogue has been through Marvel, FIFA and Apple. The year closes with a festival slot instead — Monument at the Coroglen Tavern on the Coromandel Peninsula over New Year, on a bill with Ladi6 and David Dallas. In between the album and the tour she also played a Sofar Sounds date in Kelowna, British Columbia, on 25 September 2026.