Borderline

New Zealand four-piece rock band Borderline played Hallamshire Hotel in Sheffield last week. Ahead of their headline show, we caught up with the band about crafting a live show and the joy in small venue performances.

You’re at the start of your UK and Europe tour. How's it feeling so far?
Feeling great. We’re enjoying every single city we’ve been to. It’s nostalgic in a way we’ve done these smaller gig runs in Australia and New Zealand, and now that we’ve built a fanbase there, we’re playing much bigger rooms, like 300 to 500 people.

Here, it feels like we’re getting our feet on the ground again. We’re still putting on the best show we can, just on a smaller scale.It’s crazy being from New Zealand and coming literally as far away as possible, and people still show up.

We played Glasgow last night to about 70 or 80 people. None of us had ever been to Scotland before, so seeing a room full of people with energy for our music was surreal. You see numbers on Spotify, but it sinks in when you’re actually there.

Is this your first time performing in the UK?
We were actually born here Hackney and Plymouth though we’ve never been back to either.

Your live show has a reputation for being energetic and instrument-driven. How do you approach performing your songs on stage?
We’re very much a live band. We play all our instruments in the studio and especially live - everything is real, everything is played. Because of that, it’s fun to mess around with new arrangements and try different vibes out on stage.

The song that’s changed the most live is That Girl. It’s already massive in the studio version, but live we bring it up even more. We lean into it musically, get a bit techy, and push it further.

It’s important to us that you don’t come and watch us stand there and play one song after another. Every track has its own live feel, and the whole set blends together smoothly.

Your music spans genres, nothing feels predictable. How do you build a setlist that reflects that variety?
He’s the king of that. Even in the studio he’s already thinking about the order of songs and how to transition between them. Some of the live arrangements in the show were ideas before the album was even finished.

We don’t create music specifically for how it will translate live, that can be limiting. There are only four of us, so in the studio we just throw stuff at the wall and make whatever we want. Then we figure out how to do it live afterwards.

When we write, we jump in a big studio and all play together to get a rough demo of what it feels like with all four of us bouncing off each other. So the recordings feel live to a certain extent, just more polished.

This is the first time many people will be seeing you live. What do you hope they take away from the show?
Hopefully good memories, a feeling that they really lived in the moment. We hope people walk away thinking it’s the best small show they’ve seen.

We’re good at making a small gig feel like an arena show. We put everything into it, and we want people to leave saying, “I can’t wait to see them on a bigger stage.” That’s what we’re aiming for, and we think our sound will suit those bigger stages.

We don’t adjust for the rooms we’re in, we just do the set we’re going to do, and hopefully the rooms adjust.