Teeks has made an album so hot it hurts

To get there, he had to emerge from ‘some of the darkest points of my life’.

He was travelling, taking time out, exploring the world. After his first album came out in 2021, “I didn’t have much to write about,” says Te Karehana Gardiner-Toi. He needed a break, to go live life for a bit. “I usually write from lived experience,” says the artist otherwise known as Teeks.

So Gardiner-Toi went to the UK, then around Europe, and spent some time in Japan. When he came home, he realised he’d returned with something unexpected: a long-distance relationship. 

“It was just a hot mess,” and a complicated one at that, sighs Gardiner-Toi. He’s sitting out front of his favourite Ponsonby café, sipping slowly at his coffee, as thoughtful and poised as always. “It was a situationship,” he says. “I would travel. They would come here. It was always blurry.”

That relationship pushed him around, tested Gardiner-Toi’s limits. “We just weren’t compatible,” he says. “It lasted probably a lot longer than it should have.” Toi pauses, chooses his words carefully, as he does often across the hour we spend together. “It took me to some of the darkest points of my life.”

He’s not bitter about it. Today, Gardiner-Toi (Ngāpuhi, Ngāi Te Rangi, Ngāti Ranginui) chuckles frequently. That’s because his relationship woes – a period that included, “a lot of growing, a lot of learning, a lot of pain” – have been turned into a brand new Teeks album, his second after his award-winning 2021 debut, Something to Feel. 

Lovers Comet explores Gardiner-Toi’s yearning for something just out of reach, examining a relationship that didn’t become exactly what he wanted it to be. “I kind of like it, all the drama, it makes it worth the while,” he sings over acoustic guitars on ‘Poetic’. “Are we pathetic? Or is it poetic?”

But this is not a soundtrack for those suffering the break-up blues. Lovers Comet sizzles and smoulders as a sultry, sexed-up summer soundtrack. You can feel the condensation dripping down the window on ‘Narcotica’ when Gardiner-Toi sings to a new lover: “I don’t even know your name". Then there's the first single, ‘My Boy’: “Can I practice on you? You can practice on me too.” 

That side of the album represents how Gardiner-Toi felt once he’d made his way through to the other side of that relationship. “I surrendered to the whole experience,” he says. “I needed clarity and that didn’t happen until after it ended. When I finally got [over it], I just wanted to enjoy myself and have fun.

“I got through it – that’s when I was ready to make music.”

Since the release of his first EP, 2017’s The Grapefruit Skies, Gardiner-Toi has become one of Aotearoa’s most cherished singer-songwriters. That EP introduced an artist blessed with powerhouse vocal talents that seemed to co-exist with an almost painful shyness – and a sharp collection of suits.

He made tentative steps forward, with music arriving sporadically. His first album landed four years after that EP; his second, released yesterday, comes five years later. Gardiner-Toi's never rushed things, instead building his career slowly, on his own terms. 

Patience has become a virtue for Teeks fans. As a result, when Gardiner-Toi commits to something, it’s always worth the wait. I last saw him perform at the Auckland Town Hall in 2025 at a one-off show with just a string sextet and a sold out crowd for company. 

Gardiner-Toi considers his live performances as a way to “open portals to somewhere that’s not here,” and that night felt like we were getting a livestream of raw emotion. Tears flowed often, not just among those in the crowd. 

The show came just a few months after the death of Gardiner-Toi’s Sony Music mentor Taryn Kljakovic. He dedicated ‘Never Be Apart’ to her and once he started singing, emotion hit him. “I don’t cry often, so that’s never happened to me before,” he says. “I couldn't sing properly. Those types of things I think are nice for people to see, because we're human beings."

It’s a sign that Gardiner-Toi is opening up to new ways of doing things. When he wrote ‘My Boy’, the first single from Lovers Comet, he felt a need to get it out into the world as fast as possible, which went against everything he'd done up until that point. 

Suddenly, he was on a plane, flying to Sydney for a video shoot, feeling anxious about the speed he was operating at. “Everything was very much down to the wire, last-minute," he says. "I was like, ‘What am I doing?’ I felt sick … you don’t know if it’s going to work out or not.”

Soon, the world got to see why Gardiner-Toi felt the need to rush things. ‘My Boy’ introduced a new, buff Teeks to the world, one who was out and proud about it. That June video, filmed in a male gym locker room full of rippling muscles, confirmed what those close to him already knew. “I … got tired of explaining or correcting people on my sexuality,” Toi told fans at the time. “I thought, ‘Fuck it. It’s now or never.’”

Lovers Comet continues that spirit, with songs that are playful and more confident than anything he’s made before. Some songs are beatless, Toi’s voice floating over the simplest of melodies. “If you trust me, take my hand, I’ll take you to the promised land,” he sings on ‘Promised Land’. 

For longtime listeners, it feels like all their patience has been rewarded by the emergence of an artist living more in the moment, open to a bit of mess, ready to embrace all facets of himself. 

It’s the last song on Lovers Comet that comes closest to capturing that vibe. Called ‘Feel My Love,’ it’s a slow, sultry meditation that wraps up the album's themes. “It feels like a prayer, a healing balm type thing,” says Gardiner-Toi. “The intention of it was yearning for someone to recognise the level of love I was willing to give.”

Once he’d made it, Gardiner-Toi realised he’d finally come out the other side of everything he'd been through. “I have a much deeper understanding of what it means to love somebody and to be loved,” he says. 

The coffee’s gone, a meeting at Sony beckons, then a gym session. This is Teeks as he is right now, “real, and vulnerable”. “It’s the purity, the light, but also the shadows of the whole thing that I was going through.”

Lovers Comet is out now.