Shihad's Killjoy captures the moment a rock band came of age

When Shihad announced they would be calling it quits in 2025, they left not just a legacy of tinnitus-inducing live shows stretching back 37 years, but also one of the richest catalogues of recordings by any New Zealand band.

But if I had to choose a single album to show why Shihad really was the greatest hard rock band this country has produced, I’d wind all the way back to this one.

Killjoy, Shihad’s second album, came out in 1995, which from this distance seems pretty close to the start of their career. But the truth is that by that time, their years together already amounted to longer than the lifespan of the average band.

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Guitarist-singer Jon Toogood and drummer Tom Larkin had been playing together since high school.

There are a number of ways in which, as powerful as its predecessor Churn was, Killjoy would be a step beyond.

Several local critics at the time, comparing the two, noted that Killjoy was the warmer-sounding record. That may have had something to do with dialling back the machine-like textures of Churnand, emphasising instead the band’s sheer physicality. This is unmistakably music made by humans, albeit ones who have applied the discipline of pro athletes.

Where Jon Toogood’s earlier lyrics drew heavily on dystopian fiction and sci-fi themes, his writing was now becoming more hot-blooded, more personal, dealing with everyday dramas and the emotions these give rise to.

And that finds him calling up, at different times, most of the seven deadly sins: pride, greed, wrath and lust all get a look in, and ‘Envy’ gets a whole song of its own.

But on this album, Shihad discovered that they could apply just as lethal a burn by turning the blowtorch down to a slow but concentrated simmer, as they do in ‘Deb’s Night Out’, a final kiss-off to a liar, a user, for whom the singer’s sympathy has run dry.

The track is built around a sampled keyboard loop that guitarist Phil Knight had come up with. A far cry from the metal thrash of their early songs, it has more in common with some of the local bands Shihad had become familiar with, particularly the Palmerston North indie-industrial group The Skeptics.

Underpinning all of these tracks is Karl Kippenberger’s bass, which might be the most understated element of the whole thing, not that it should be underestimated. A track like ‘For What You Burn’ is really built from the bassline up.

Killjoy captures a band at the moment it comes of age. The hundreds of hours of rehearsal, thousands of kilometres of travel, the discoveries both musical and personal – all reach fruition here, in a heady, ecstatic rush.

They would carry on for another three decades, before playing what was billed as their final show at Wellington’s Homegrown festival in March 2025. Even then, they found they couldn’t stop, and wound up playing a second farewell at a much smaller venue the following night. There they played for over three hours, drawing songs from all corners of their catalogue. But when it came to the songs from Killjoy, they didn’t pick and choose. They played the whole thing.