TOM LARK RELEASES ONE-OFF SINGLE, 'SUN'S UP'
Tom Lark – the project of multi-faceted artist and producer Shannon Fowler – has released a one-off single, 'Sun's Up'. The track is the artist's first new solo material since the 2025 release of his sophomore album, Moonlight Hotel.
"‘Sun’s Up’ is about exhausting optimism, and feeling drained by constant positive thinking," he reflects. "Sometimes it feels easier to disengage in order to keep things light."
Tom Lark was also nominated for APRA Best Country Song in May, for Moonlight Hotel's title track, and Fowler produced and contributed to Mainard Larkin's recent album Rattlesnake Boy, a concept country album about "a pro-wrestler on the skids."
Steeped in the Tom Lark persona's whimsical yet pragmatic sensibility, 'Sun's Up' continues the Tom Lark beat: sun-soaked odes to taking things as they come, and rolling with the punches.
The track is available across all key streaming platforms, and to purchase via Bandcamp
ARTIST BIO
Tom Lark is the musical project of Shannon Fowler, a Tāmaki Makaurau-based artist and producer from Ōtautahi. Returning from a seven-year hiatus in 2023 with his debut full-length record Brave Star, Fowler returned to his first love – which turns out to be making sunburnt psychedelic folk fit for sensitive cowboys to meander and philosophise to.
Brave Star was a finalist for both the 2024 Taite Music Prize and Te Kaipuoro Taketake Toa | Best Folk Artist at the 2024 Aotearoa Music Awards – also winning the artist an APRA Silver Scroll Award Top 20 nomination in 2023 for 'Live Wires'. The record followed two eponymous Tom Lark EPs, which were released in 2011 and 2015 respectively. Those early tunes found a home locally on the Student Radio Network, and abroad on Australian radio station Triple J – where 'Something To Tell You' reached #1 Most Played.
Named one of Rolling Stone's 50 Best New Zealand Albums of 2025, Moonlight Hotel saw Tom Lark return with another watertight collection of folk pop hits with a country bent, through which the artist explores the parallels between his family's historical displacement following the 1929 earthquake that destroyed Murchison – a pioneer town in the upper West Coast of the South Island – and his own following the 2011 earthquakes that levelled much of Ōtautahi.
In August 2026, Fowler released the one-off single 'Sun's Up', having been a finalist for APRA Best Country Song in May 2026, and produced and contributed to Mainard Larkin's acclaimed Rattlesnake Boy – also released in May 2026.
Fowler was born in Ōtautahi and relocated to Tāmaki Makaurau in 2012, after a stint recording in Berlin. He works from his Okie Dokie Studio, situated just off Karangahape Road. There he has produced, co-written and engineered tracks with a delightful collection of collaborators, including Fazerdaze, Georgia Lines, The Fuzzy Robes, Merk, Randa, A.C. Freazy, Belladonna, and the mysterious Rick Shrimp.