Soul Artist TEEKS Brings Māori-Rooted Sound to South African Stages

Te Karehana Gardiner-Toi, the New Zealand soul artist who performs as TEEKS, lands in South Africa this week for his first performances on the continent. His music had already found its own audience here before his arrival, with tracks including First Time and Remember Me circulating widely among South African listeners. Durban receives him on 28 August, Johannesburg on 30 August.

His artistic foundation is inseparable from his Māori heritage. That inheritance shapes his songwriting, his live performance, and the philosophical framework through which he moves through the world. He describes music as inseparable from ancestry, self-awareness, and the cultural practices that structure his daily life. Live performance, for him, functions as ceremony: a space where concentrated energy and reciprocal exchange between artist and audience produces something beyond entertainment.

The connection South African listeners have made with his quiet brand of soul music does not surprise him. He traces it back to the origins of soul itself, which he locates in African and black cultural traditions that have shaped virtually every modern musical genre. As an introvert, he accesses creative material through internal reflection, tapping into songs he believes already exist and bringing them into realisation through performance.

Soul and R&B have historically given male artists permission to express raw emotion. TEEKS approaches that permission with deliberate intentionality. His journey toward emotional honesty has required significant unlearning. Growing up in a country colonised by Britain, he absorbed cultural conditioning that discouraged men from expressing feelings or acknowledging vulnerability. Outside artistic contexts, emotional expression among men remained largely taboo. Through conscious effort over time, he has begun reclaiming ancestral knowledge that allows masculine and feminine qualities to coexist within himself. He views that softness not as weakness but as essential to authentic self-expression.

What changed the public conversation around his identity was a single. His June 2026 release My Boy prompted speculation about his sexuality, leading him to issue a statement on Facebook. TEEKS explained that coming out publicly was never something he felt necessary, noting that his sense of identity derives from a culture rich in origin stories, lineage, and connection to land and spirit. He acknowledged that colonisation has corrupted indigenous ideas around sexuality and manhood, perpetuating a false narrative that emotional or sexual fluidity diminishes masculinity. Security in sexuality, he argued, is not the absence of feminine or masculine qualities but their coexistence, and the absence of fear.

His debut album Something to Feel established him as a benchmark for contemporary soul. His newer material, including the single Red Light, signals a clear artistic evolution. The years between that first record and his current work have involved substantial life experience, trauma, and healing. Where Something to Feel leaned predominantly melancholic and yearning, his emerging work reflects a different chapter entirely. He no longer feels compelled to sing sad songs exclusively. He draws now from the full spectrum of human experience, including joy, and describes the new material as more mature, lyrically and melodically sophisticated, spoken from genuine experience without restraint.

His live shows have earned description as sacred, quiet spaces that bring audiences to stillness rather than functioning as conventional concerts. He adapts to different venues and crowd dynamics while maintaining emotional coherence, focusing on translating the weight of his music into a memorable journey regardless of setting.

Holding space for collective grief, love, and healing night after night requires rigorous preparation. He prioritises physical health through nutrition and sleep, combined with visualisation and meditation to remain grounded. Legacy matters deeply to him. He hopes his music communicates to future generations something about his origins and the era in which he lived, conveying the purity of human experience through authenticity and tenderness.

Once released into the world, his songs become shared experiences where audiences discover their own connections. He describes this as a beautiful ecosystem of feedback and creative reciprocity. Whether South African audiences, who found his music before he ever arrived, will deepen that ecosystem across two nights remains the open question of this week.