No Cigar

Auckland Grammar, then a band

The group begins with a friendship rather than an audition. Singer, lyricist and rhythm guitarist Willy Ferrier and drummer Ned Gow were close through Auckland Grammar and on into Auckland University, where they played together in an earlier band called Kaleidoscopes. No Cigar came out of that in 2019, filled out by Josh Morrice on lead guitar and Sam Benson on bass and keyboards. Arthur Gillies joined on rhythm guitar in 2020, which had the practical effect of taking a guitar off Ferrier for large parts of a set and letting him concentrate on singing.

The first single, Tickets To Space, appeared in 2019, followed by the Radical Road EP in 2020. What built the early audience was ordinary New Zealand radio — ZM, Radio Hauraki, The Edge — and the summer festival circuit, including Rhythm and Vines and That Weekend. The members are all in their thirties with commercial working experience behind them, and they have used it: management duties are shared inside the band rather than farmed out, record label offers have been turned down as premature, and the records are self-released, distributed through Gyrostream in Australia. That arrangement has held through three albums and a decision to expand overseas, which is unusual for a band at this level and explains a good deal about the shape of their touring.

Bienvenido, The Great Escape, and a word they made up

The debut album Bienvenido arrived in September 2022, with The Great Escape following in 2023. Both work off the same core: guitar interplay built on a groove rather than a riff, songs that lean melodic and sun-warmed even when the words are not. The band have resisted the indie-rock label and call the result semi rock, which is less a genre than a refusal to pick one.

The Great Escape produced the band's most durable single. Concubine placed tenth in The Rock's 2000 Countdown in 2024 — a listener-voted poll run against the whole recorded history of rock music, not against new releases. For a band four years old at the time, and one without a label behind it, that is the clearest single measure of how far the songs had travelled at home.

Under The Surface, written in a rented house in France

The third album, Under The Surface, was released on 1 August 2025, and it was largely made on the road. Roughly half of it was written in October 2023 in Chantilly, north of Paris, in a three-hundred-year-old building the band had rented while touring Europe. The neighbours enforced quiet after nine in the evening, and that constraint pushed the writing towards a more restrained, more deliberate sound on tracks such as Problem and Oh Behave. Other sessions happened in Tawa in the Hutt Valley; drums were cut at Battery Studios in London and at Roundhead Studios in Auckland; vocals were recorded in Thailand. Connor Jaine, formerly of Mako Road, recorded, produced and mixed it, with Andy Baldwin mastering and Matt Colton handling two tracks.

The lead single, Chantilly, was written in a few hours after the 2023 Rugby World Cup final, when Ferrier walked off a party and turned the resulting anxiety into a song about holding onto hope through self-doubt. The record keeps the band's groove-led centre but darkens the material around it, taking in funk and jazz phrasing and a harder rock edge. Its subjects run to addiction, anxiety and drift: Clean on ambition gone too far, Russian Roulette on two people quietly coming apart, Ketamine as an argument against pharmaceutical answers to mental health, Cherry Blossom Girl on a chance meeting at a Tokyo airport, Best Behaviour written from the point of view of a father sizing up a daughter's boyfriend.

Reviews treated it as the band's widest record. Beats Per Minute scored it 70 per cent, with Sydney Peterson describing greater emotional and sonic range than anything before it and a good deal of stage-ready material. In December 2025 Rolling Stone Australia placed it at 47 in its 50 best New Zealand albums of the year, singling out Chantilly, Problem and Best Behaviour as songs that could each have carried the record on their own.

Where the band stand in September 2026

No Cigar spent late 2025 working the album hard. An eight-date Australian run ran from 23 October to 1 November 2025 across the Gold Coast, Brisbane, Sydney, Newcastle, Perth, Torquay and Melbourne, with one of the two Sydney shows selling out. The New Zealand release shows followed in November: Meow Nui in Wellington on the 7th, the Ngaio Marsh Theatre in Christchurch on the 8th, and the Powerstation in Auckland on the 14th.

The band opened 2026 on festival stages. They played Electric Avenue at Hagley Park in Christchurch on 28 February 2026, and The Big Chill at Armidale Showground in New South Wales on 16 May. The Australian relationship is now the largest part of the business — it is their biggest market by listenership — and in 2026 it produced thirteen shows, described by Blunt as their biggest Australian tour to date. A regional leg ran from 10 to 20 September 2026 through Pulse Bar on the Sunshine Coast, Miami Marketta on the Gold Coast, the Great Northern at Byron Bay, Moonee Beach Tavern, The Baso in Canberra, the University of Wollongong, Felons Barrel Room in Sydney and the Hamilton Station Hotel in Newcastle. The metropolitan dates follow in October: the Factory Theatre in Marrickville on the 15th, The Triffid in Brisbane on the 16th, 170 Russell in Melbourne on the 17th, Freo Social in Fremantle on the 23rd and Lion Arts Factory in Adelaide on the 24th.

From there the band cross to Europe. London Calling Festival in Amsterdam on 31 October is followed by B72 in Vienna on 5 November, Urban Spree in Berlin on the 7th, Molotow in Hamburg on the 9th, Rust in Copenhagen on the 10th, Garagen Club in Cologne on the 12th and Le Hasard Ludique in Paris on the 16th. The British and Irish leg opens at the Grand Social in Dublin on 19 November, which went on sale on 9 September 2026 with Frank On Tap as support, then Cluny 2 in Newcastle on the 22nd, The Key Club in Leeds on the 24th, the Electric Ballroom in Camden on the 26th, Thekla in Bristol on the 27th and The Bodega in Nottingham on the 28th.

How the rooms got bigger

The growth has been incremental and traceable. The band played Bigsound in Brisbane in September 2024, and their largest Australian audience at that point was 450 people at the Corner Hotel in Melbourne. In June 2025 they played The Great Escape in Brighton during New Zealand Music Month, and their previous European run took in Scotland, France, Germany and the Netherlands. Blunt's assessment of the Australian pattern is that each return has meant a larger venue and a louder crowd, which matches the step from the Corner Hotel to 170 Russell, and from a UK club run to a headline date at the Electric Ballroom.

None of this rests on a record deal. The band have said they want management to handle further international expansion but have been deliberate about not signing to the wrong one, and the tours have been built on repeat visits rather than a single push.

What comes next

The 2026 dates close out the Under The Surface cycle, and the band have indicated that new material is already in progress beyond it. The year ends where their years usually do, at home: Rhythm and Alps at Wanaka over new year. Given that the last album was written in a rented house in France between shows, the touring schedule and the next record are unlikely to be separate projects.