The new Lung video took eighteen minutes to shoot.
Alan Beere of TrustFundKid111 put Dave White, James Woods and Zak White in the hallway of Dave’s Wellington home and filmed six complete single-shot takes of “Isolated Gun“. The song runs under three minutes. Six takes made eighteen minutes of filming, and the whole thing was wrapped before 9 a.m. Beere directed, shot and edited it himself, with the finished cut delivered later that day.
Dave’s explanation is even shorter.
“The video shoot was 6 x single-shot takes. The song is less than 3 minutes long so that meant it took 18 minutes to shoot. On the one hand, simple maths, but on the other, it’s the typical Lung attitude we use for recording in any situation. Do it full throttle, give it everything, make every second count, cos who knows how many seconds we have left ha ha.”
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Post-punk.com, who premiered the video in an August 5 feature by Alice Teeple, reported that the band were surrounded by friends in the hallway, giving the clip the look of a house gathering that had suddenly become a Lung set. The same piece quoted Dave describing “Fog” as their “most raw, fucked up, brutal, honest work to date” and “possibly the most punk we’ve become.” Those are Dave’s words to Post-punk.com, and they fit an album whose recording method leaves very little space between working something out and putting it on tape.
“Fog” is Lung’s sixth full-length studio album. It was released on January 24, 2026 through Yellow Bike Records on vinyl LP and digital formats, with the record also available through the usual streaming services. The current trio are Dave White on vocals, guitar and synths/organs, James Woods on bass and Zak White on drums.
They recorded its twelve songs across two days at The Surgery in Newtown, Wellington with engineer Lee Prebble.
“We had a couple of jams and messaged each other the odd riff before entering The Surgery but not too much was pre-organised cos we like things to collapse together in as fresh a state as possible,” Dave told us.
There was no grand pre-production argument waiting for them once they got there. Dave says Lung rarely agree much in advance because most songs come out of jamming. They may discuss options during mixing, but the performances are usually first takes with very little, sometimes no, overdubbing.
Their mixing method is similarly uncomplicated: turn everything up as loud as it will go.
Something another band might remove became one of Dave’s favourite moments on the record. At the end of “Xtra Spank”, James laughs.
“Perfect natural reaction to the chaos that became a song in one crazy loud as fuck take,” Dave says.
Several guitar parts were left alone too, even when they slipped out of tune or out of time.
“There are also guitar lines on several songs that legally could probably be deemed mistakes, out of tune, out of time kind of thing, but I love that shit and it gives the song its own space in time and roots it into our psyche and history. If every song was perfect, they’d bore me to death.”
That attitude explains “Isolated Gun” better than any story about a band looking back over 35 years.
Its words are old. Its rhythm is partly old. Its bassline grew from an older idea. None of those pieces were treated as museum objects.
The lyrics originally belonged to “She’s Got a Gun”, released on Lung’s 1991 debut “Cactii“.
Dave wrote it as a love/hate song about an imaginary woman. Around twenty years later, he found himself in a relationship with similar dynamics.
“Careful what you write about cos I ended up in a relationship with similar dynamics 20 years later… escaped (just) and am now happily not in that relationship anymore.”
He says it is not the only time something he wrote into a song later seemed to show up in his life.
“It’s actually spooky the number of song stories that have eventuated, call it prophecy, call it bad luck, call it what you like.”
For “Isolated Gun“, Dave kept the original lyric intact. He added two new verses. Both consist entirely of “and I ride.”
“Call it a positive ending, call it happy reality, call it life goes on.”
The music reaches back much less far. Both Zak’s drum figure and James’s bass idea grew from “Isolation“, released on 2024’s “Cancer“.
Lung particularly liked the traditional double-snare hit in “Isolation“. They pulled it out, moved it around and found a different use for it. Dave says the beat “works a treat on the dancefloor”, which gets close to what makes the current band different from earlier versions of Lung.
Recycling parts of songs is nothing unusual for them.
Dave points to the original “Dinosaur” on “The Clear Live Stomach” CD and the later extended version on “Bad Acid Soundtracks II”, where Zak’s playing brought in drum’n’bass drops.
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“Slaughterhouse“, originally on “3 Heads on a Plate”, was also rebuilt for “Bad Acid Soundtracks II”, this time with added la-la singalong parts.
“Songs are like stories, they’re always (sometimes) evolving and fun to play with.”
A Lung recording is therefore not necessarily the finished song. Onstage, Dave says, the recorded version can be little more than a hint.
“We love to fuck things up on stage and create new atmospheres and sometimes these get re-recorded, sometimes not.”
Thirty-five years have changed his voice more than they have changed his opinion of the words in “She’s Got a Gun”.
“Time means nothing to me, both myself and my band have never been in fashion or tried to follow any particular trend.”
He now sings those lyrics with another 35 years of good and bad experience behind them.
“My voice has definitely become more confident with age, mainly cos I really don’t give a fuck ha ha.”
“Isolated Gun” opens “Fog” with James’s bass doing much of the heavy lifting. It grinds around the same low figure while Zak keeps the beat circular and physical. Dave’s guitar does not tidy the space above them. It scratches through it, disappears, then comes back in broad slabs of distortion.
“Fog” moves around a lot more than “Isolated Gun” alone would suggest. “TR*UNT” carries Zak’s drum’n’bass background into the record, “Panda” pulls towards something more danceable, “No Idea Yet” drops into ninety seconds of piano-led quiet, and James’s laugh at the end of “Xtra Spank” was left exactly where it happened. Dave told Post-punk.com that the songs range from “odes to hippies past, to flatmates’ cats, evil American arseholes, and simple not pop songs.” His advice there was simpler: “Play it loud. Not joking.”
Lung’s history makes the arguments about genre even messier.
Post-punk.com reported that Lung formed from a late incarnation of The Clear, active between 1988 and 1991. The same piece traced the early band through post-punk, no wave, noise rock, post-hardcore and industrial comparisons, with The Skeptics, Gordons and Bailter Space as obvious New Zealand points of contact and Einstรผrzende Neubauten, The Fall, Big Black and Butthole Surfers appearing further afield.
Dave’s own memories of Palmerston North in the late 1980s are much less tidy than those family trees.
He was organising all-ages gigs at The Stomach. His cohort in Cunt, Claire Pannell, organised most of the shows at The Superliquorman, a local dive where they were allowed to make a mess on Thursday nights, provided everything stopped by 10 p.m.
Dave only saw The Skeptics a couple of times.
One of those shows took place at Snail Clamps, their room behind the Square Edge arts centre. It was tiny, with a small stage and one couch sitting in the middle.
Dave and a friend went to a Saturday afternoon show, entered a completely dark room, found the couch and sat through around thirty minutes of noise.
Then the lights came on.
The Skeptics had gone.
Dave and his friend were the only people there.
His other memory is The Skeptics playing with Bailter Space in Wellington, several stories up inside an abandoned building at an illegal warehouse gig around four in the morning.
“It was loud as fuck and genius in every way.”
The Skeptics singer David D’Ath died in 1990 after having been ill for some time. Dave does not remember Palmerston North suddenly stopping around his death. A new generation of younger bands was already taking the town over.
“Like what happens to every music town every few years.”
One of the strongest links between those bands and Lung came through Brent McLachlan.
Brent played with Gordons and Bailter Space and was also the second drummer in a late two-drummer version of The Skeptics, alongside longtime drummer Don White. Gordons and Bailter Space shared essentially the same group of musicians apart from a short transition around the middle of the 1980s.
Brent produced “Cactii” in 1991 at Writhe Studios, the Wellington studio he ran with The Skeptics’ Nick Roughan.
Dave remembers the building immediately.
It was an old bank with a fully soundproof vault. Brent could put Dave and his guitar inside the vault, let him play as loudly as he wanted and still keep the drum microphones clean.
“Brent (RIP) was a genius.”
Lung played their songs, sometimes only once, while Brent got them onto tape. Dave says the mixes finally sounded like what the band had been hearing in their heads when they played live.
There was one exception.
“Sleep” was built from a short sample bent backwards and pitched down. Lung made the song up in the studio that day. Brent did not play on it, but Dave considers him part of what pushed the track into its final shape.
“If the Skeptics were an influence like the press like to say, then that song ‘Sleep’ is probably evidence of some kind.”
Brent did not push Lung towards a particular performance or stop them doing things. Dave remembers him getting the songs safely onto tape and then using whatever equipment and knowledge he had to make them sound as full and loud as possible.
He sees something similar in Lee Prebble’s approach to “Fog“.
Writhe itself had a place in the local culture beyond being somewhere to book recording time.
“Writhe was like an altar to young noise bands in Wellington back in 1991, like any good/bad religion, we respected the history but strived to outdo it simultaneously.”
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Brent died late in 2025.
Dave does not want to retrofit his death into “Isolated Gun“. The song came from a jam, then the old words were dropped into it. Brent was not a direct influence on its writing.
At 68, Dave has lost several musician friends.
“I’m 68 so Brent isn’t the first muso friend to die on me, there’s been a rash of them in the past few years.”
He admits some surprise at having made it this far after what he describes as the bad things he has done to his body. When someone like Brent dies, Dave tends to spend a week or two going back through their music, remembering the work and the noise they made together.
Then another day comes.
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The version of New Zealand music that travelled overseas was often a different one.
Dave remembers the country being dominated by the Dunedin jangly sound when Lung began looking outside New Zealand. Palmerston North had the opposite reputation.
It was, in his words, “the most uncool town in the country”.
Lung’s response was to answer invitations arriving from fanzines in the United States and Europe and go play.
“The reason we first toured overseas was precisely because NZ was dominated by the Dunedin jangly sound and we didn’t fit.”
He has little patience now for debates about whether Lung have been properly recognised inside some official version of New Zealand music history.
“I honestly don’t give a shit about lineage or coolness, I play music primarily for my own enjoyment (and these days people would say mental health), I’m totally convinced that the distortion my guitar makes is the reason I’m still alive and enjoying shit.”
The technological change around music distribution interests him much more. People anywhere can now find Lung and stream their records without waiting for a famous publication or another gatekeeper to decide whether the band deserve access.
Dave calls that “fucking wicked”.
Post-punk.com reported that Lung disbanded in late 1994 at the end of their second US tour. Dave’s account for IDIOTEQ fills in what those tours actually looked like.
The band crossed the United States in 1992 and 1994.
“Small venues, big venues, huge venues, tiny venues, no venues, crazy obsessed fans and heaps of way friendly awesome people everywhere we went.”
They only played a few shows with Bailter Space, contrary to the way that connection can sometimes sound in shorter band histories. Bailter Space were heroes to Lung, which made sharing those rooms slightly strange. College radio was hitting Lung hard enough at the time that Dave remembers their own dancefloor response sometimes being stronger.
“We’ve never fitted any genre and noise has only recently become a thing as a thing in itself, we were just another rock n roll punk band with no expectations, no rules, except to be as loud as physically possible.”
Another old connection survived through Vorsen, the current band of Jon Halvorsen, whose history includes Gordons, The Skeptics and Bailter Space.
Dave says Lung’s last show with Vorsen was a New Year’s Eve event Jon organised at Paekฤkฤriki Beach. There was enough concern over Lung’s volume and the possibility of the event being shut down that they were put on very early.
Dave still remembers it as great fun.
He has not heard from Jon for a couple of years and worries that Brent’s death may have left him struggling.
There had long been a hope that Gordons might play a reunion show, especially after Bailter Space covered a Gordons song at an Auckland festival a few years ago.
After Brent’s death, that possibility disappeared.
The current Lung are not simply the old band reunited.
Dave is the only original member.
Dave and original bassist Phil Williscroft reunited Lung in 2019, with Dave’s son Zak replacing original drummer Brent Gemmill. Dave’s account adds another detail: when Dave moved to Wellington that year and persuaded Phil to return, Phil seriously suggested dropping the Lung name entirely and starting again.
Dave did not want to.
“For me, Lung was always what I was, it was the combination of a certain attitude to lyrics and a certain guitar sound, and that’s what I wanted to carry on.”
Zak was not walking into unfamiliar territory.
Dave and Zak had been jamming together since Zak was still in nappies. As soon as he could hold a drumstick, Dave gave him a drum.
“The old father-son DNA thing is definitely a thing, it’s real, I can play anything and Zak will be all over it like a rash, and then take it new places.”
That is why Lung recorded several older songs again on “Bad Acid Soundtracks II”. Zak was changing the mechanics of them too much for the old versions to describe what the band were now doing.
His background is part of the reason.
For nearly twelve years Dave ran drum’n’bass festivals and a club in Nelson and down the West Coast. Zak grew up working the gate. He became interested in the technical side of drum’n’bass drumming and carried that into Lung.
Dave points again to the later “Dinosaur” and the opening of “TR*UNT”.
“So basically, he brings the mechanics of the dance thing into our trashy punk rock.”
Phil later died.
James Woods stepped in on bass, but he had already spent plenty of time around Lung. He worked as their live sound engineer throughout the long 1994 US tour.
Dave also knew what James had been doing in Beastwars, particularly his “dirty phat bass”.
James now uses pedals to build his own layer underneath the guitar and drums. It gives the trio more room to move and lets Dave stop playing guitar entirely onstage when he wants to concentrate on vocals.
“We have more space and more spaces to go, which means evolving tunes in a live environment is easy, fun and fanatically manic, or not.”
The song does not reconnect Lung to 1991 by carefully recreating anything. It takes the complete lyric from “She’s Got a Gun“, adds two four-word verses, pulls the drum and bass foundation out of “Isolation“, then lets Zak, James and Dave turn those parts into what Lung sound like now.
The same method runs through “Fog”: songs assembled quickly, takes kept because something happened rather than because everything was correct, old ideas allowed to move, mistakes left where they fell.
“We like to work fast and furious and give it everything in one quick blast,” Dave said of the album and video. “That’s how we recorded Fog, and Alan immediately understood that approach. What you see is us, a genuine snapshot of our live performance and a taste of what audiences and promoters can expect.”
Then Beere put the three of them in a hallway and needed eighteen minutes.
“Fog” is out now through Yellow Bike Records. The album can be streamed and downloaded through Lung’s Bandcamp, with vinyl also available, while “Isolated Gun” can be watched on YouTube. Lung can also be found through Facebook, Instagram and Spotify.
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