Like so many things you can say about Bill Direen, mentioning that he is a New Zealander is both true and incomplete. He was born there in 1957, and he was just named a 2025 Arts Foundation Te Tumu Toi Laureate. (For non-Kiwis, that’s an award for outstanding, still-practicing New Zealand artists whose work has made an impact at home and abroad.) But in between those timeline points, he’s spent enough time outside of the country—particularly in France—that his NZ retirement benefit has been cut.
Direen’s international existence leaves marks on Neverlasting. First and most obviously, the recording is a remote collaboration with American multi-instrumentalists Alex McManus and Matt Swanson, who first met Direen when he toured the U.S. in 2018 and have made one previous LP with him. They’ve crafted a hybrid sound that honors elements of Direen’s past, but sets him adrift in time and space. The plush texture of a Wurlitzer piano uncouples the music from any particular decade. Ashcan drums recall Direen’s early, garage/punk recordings from back when he was flashing a musical lantern to show where the early Flying Nun folks could go, while judicious slide-guitar garnishes hint at other early rock and country influences. And over it all looms Direen’s voice, dry and restrained until it suddenly isn’t.
The traveler’s perspective, writ small, also informs his terse writing. He uses small observations and unguarded acknowledgments—which are phrased in first person, but aren’t necessarily representations of Direen himself—to form sugar-free, poetic observations of the human condition and inhumane conditions. The things in his songs happen in one place, but they’re connected, because Direen writes about human universality, one squinty-eyed closeup at a time. Among Neverlasting’s 15 tracks are ponderings of the toll of remorseless resource churning; American highways from the perspective of people who built and traveled them; the eternal resourcefulness of the impecunious; life at the grinding end of social and structural change; and the alienating effects of technology.
While universal, the phenomena that Direen describes are also impermanent. Each song freezes a notion or occurrence that might otherwise exist for only a moment, then vanish. The fact that they’re fixed in song pushes back against Neverlasting’s title and affirms the old punk’s enduring defiance. [Carbon/Grapefruit]
—Bill Meyer
