Daily J

Daily J started as three brothers in a shed in Blenheim, at the top of New Zealand’s South Island: Jayden Paul singing and playing guitar, Jesse on synth and saxophone, Jonny on bass. Before the band, Jayden and Jesse worked as a saxophone-and-guitar duo — they went through Rockquest and, as Jayden tells it, “a little stint on New Zealand’s Got Talent, actually. There’s a video out there somewhere on Youtube, don’t look it up though.” The shed lasted until “the whole house was shaking with the bass and guitar” and the parents wore thin, at which point they moved to Auckland to “give this music thing a bit of a crack”. Rick Everard joined on drums once they were up north; for a few years after that they were a five-piece with Cody Wilcox on guitar, and the 2026 tour bills them as four again. The first album, Venus Ate Mars (2020), was produced by their friend Joe Faris — the band came out of those sessions in love with the vocoder and the Rhythm King Maestro, and there is a kombucha bottle somewhere on the record. It carried “Left Me Like Summer”, a song about “kids falling in love over summer, ignoring that it would soon have to come to an end”, to nearly two million streams within a year. Slush Honey followed in two halves in 2023, a year that brought 48 million streams and two sold-out Australian tours. Scatterbrains — their third album, released in February 2025 — made Rolling Stone Australia’s list of the year’s best New Zealand albums; its deluxe edition, cut after the band moved to Sydney in late 2025, took them onto US college radio and the NACC charts. Influences they will admit to start with Kings of Leon, a band they say they relate to for “so much passion & feeling” and “their humble beginnings”, and run through Tame Impala, Mac DeMarco, The Growlers, MGMT and Empire of the Sun; elsewhere they have named Arctic Monkeys, The Beatles, Phoenix and Death Cab. The sound is sunnier than that list suggests — surf-leaning indie with sax lines where other bands put a second guitar. Live, in their own description, “we like to dress up and have a bit of fun, get a bunch of props, make it like a proper show for everyone.” They have opened for girl in red at Spark Arena, played Laneway, and headlined the Powerstation. September 2026 is the Wabi Sabi — beautiful imperfections tour, their first time in Canada and mainland Europe: Toronto and Montreal, then Dublin, Glasgow, Manchester, London and Bristol, then Brussels, a sold-out Paradiso in Amsterdam, Hamburg, Berlin and a last night in Paris on 25 September.