Auckland Band Hangar 18 Run Walking To The Moon Past Five Minutes with Producer Steve James
5 min read
Auckland Band Hangar 18 Run Walking To The Moon Past Five Minutes with Producer Steve James
Two Veterans and Two Newcomers in Auckland Follow the Blueprint Butch Vig Used for Garbage
Walking To The Moon has joined the BestMusic.News rock playlist. It is the new single from Hangar 18, a band based in Auckland. Its bass player, Malcolm Foster, spent five years in the Pretenders. Drummer Paul Marshall composed it, Steve James produced it, and it came out on 11 September.
Hangar 18’s new single is in the playlist below, and the band’s full run of coverage sits on the Hangar 18 profile. Walking To The Moon came to BestMusic.News through PopHits.Co Music Charts, which verifies independent artists and places their releases across its network of music news desks. Listen first, then read on.
Listeners Raised on Garbage, the Pretenders and Everclear Are the First Audience for Auckland’s Hangar 18
The band was designed with a model in mind. Paul Marshall founded Hangar 18 as a male version of Garbage: two veterans with new blood at the front. Garbage came together in Madison, Wisconsin in 1993 around Butch Vig, Duke Erikson and Steve Marker. Vig had produced Nirvana’s Nevermind, and Shirley Manson only joined after being told to check his credits on that album.
In Hangar 18, then, the veterans are Marshall and Foster. Foster joined the Pretenders in late 1982 and helped finish Learning to Crawl, his only full album with them. From 1989 to 1995 he then worked as a session player for Simple Minds. That history gives the band an obvious audience among listeners who bought those records.
The third audience is one Hangar 18 have already met outside Auckland. The band toured Australia in support of Everclear, the Portland group behind Sparkle and Fade and So Much for the Afterglow. Everclear’s run on Capitol began with the first of those in 1995. They played the Croxton Band Room in Melbourne, The Gov in Adelaide and the Metro Theatre in Sydney.
Hangar 18’s Early Response Came From New Zealand Radio and Australian Stages Before Walking To The Moon
In fact, the first sign of response came from New Zealand radio. In April 2023, NZ On Air picked the band’s single All This Time as the lead track on its NewTracks compilation. NewTracks is a monthly selection of new New Zealand songs sent out to radio stations.
The live shows drew notices too. Writers who covered the Everclear dates in Melbourne, Adelaide and Sydney praised the guitar hooks. They also noted how quickly the band got each crowd moving.
On record, Say It To Me was the first release from the band’s album Terraforming California. A UK reviewer then singled it out for how catchy it was.
Since then the releases have come quickly. Marylyn’s Wine arrived in May 2025 and Never Gonna Be The Same that September. After that, Terraforming California and Lucy came out a week apart in July 2026. In its own notes on those 2026 singles, the band talks about raw guitar energy and modern indie-rock production. The song Terraforming California shares its name with the album. It imagines a re-engineered future California where nature, technology and ambition collide. Walking To The Moon is the next step in that run. Its producer is credited in the band’s own biography with records for The Jam and Shirley Bassey. The same list also takes in Cold Chisel and The Screaming Jets.
BestMusic.News’s curator team: “Five singles in a year and a half is a working band’s pace. Walking To The Moon is the one that brought Hangar 18 into our rock playlist.”
Hangar 18’s Community Reaches From Auckland to London, Manila and Macau
The community starts inside the band. Hangar 18 are based in Auckland, although the members come from London and Manila. Red Dela Pena and guitarist LC Reklamo complete the line-up.
Marshall writes every song. By the band’s own count he has more than 200 of them, with 40 already recorded or demoed. The subjects run from love and break-ups to gun control, murder and mental health. He also storyboards, films and edits the videos, with Reklamo and his crew helping on the bigger shoots. The clip for All This Time turns on a man who arrives home ten minutes late for dinner. It then leaves the viewer to decide whether the fight that follows would have happened anyway.
Beyond New Zealand and Australia, the band has also toured Hong Kong, Singapore, the Philippines, Malaysia, China and Macau. That map, with Auckland at its centre, is the community Walking To The Moon now goes out to.
Where to Stream and Follow Auckland’s Hangar 18
Stream Walking To The Moon on Spotify or Apple Music. There is more of the band’s music on Bandcamp and SoundCloud. Follow Hangar 18 on its Spotify artist page, the YouTube channel, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and X. Every link is also on the band’s Linktree and official site.
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