Between loss and light with Janine’s latest album 'Pain and Paradise'

25 Aug 2025 — 2 min read

Grief has a way of reshaping sound. It takes melodies once intended as declarations of freedom and bends them into reflections of survival. For Janine, one of Aotearoa’s most accomplished musical exports, her long-awaited new album PAIN AND PARADISE is a reckoning with love, loss, and the complicated middle ground where the two meet.

Sixteen tracks make up this body of work, yet the title alone tells you everything you need to know. Pain and paradise are not opposites in Janine’s world. They coexist. Sometimes lopsided, sometimes in fragile balance, but always entwined. That philosophy carries through every lyric and every shift in production, inviting listeners to sit with their own contradictions rather than resolve them.

The album’s history spans more than five years, shadowed by the pandemic and anchored by the sudden loss of Janine’s father. Songs that began as explorations of self-discovery and unhealthy love were rewritten in the wake of tragedy. In their reworking, you hear the sound of someone piecing life back together, and in doing so discovering new shapes of joy. The result is a record that spans moods and moments: music for grief, for defiance, for tenderness, for laughing through tears.

Tracks like Fit, Make You Proud, and Meet Me carry familiar strength, but it is the new material that sharpens the record’s edges. Thank You For Breaking My Heart embodies that duality best - equal parts love song and quiet rebellion, a gentle farewell to past wounds and a celebration of newfound care. Elsewhere, songs like Happy and Good Vibes remind us that joy deserves just as much room as sorrow, even when carried in the same breath.

Janine speaks of standing outside her family home, gutted by loss, yet struck by the beauty around her. That is the image at the heart of PAIN AND PARADISE: devastation in one hand, gratitude in the other. It is a career-defining record not because it aims for perfection, but because it captures what life really feels like - messy, contradictory, unbearably heavy, and yet undeniably precious.

More than anything, Janine wants this album to help people “feel and heal.” Listening to it, you sense that healing isn’t about erasing pain but learning to carry it alongside love, alongside laughter, alongside paradise.