Janine Foster first recorded herself singing on a double cassette player at five years old, hoping to “sing like Mariah”. Her parents arranged for lessons, though she was taught classical rather than popular music. At 13 she got her first guitar but didn’t have the “focus or patience” to learn other people’s songs. So she wrote her own, using the handful of chords she knew. By 14, she was appearing at open mic nights and joined a ska band at high school which wrote and performed original songs. When school ended, she enrolled in the Popular Music course at the University of Auckland.

She found other musicians to perform with, going through a few line-ups before finding some key collaborators.

“Will Henderson went to university with me, I remember seeing him and thinking he would be really great to work with. It’s been 16 years and we still create together to this day. I also put up an ad and found a drummer, Nik Donaldson, and had Oli Holmes play bass.”

Making a name

Janine’s sister was living in New York City so she arranged a to visit her, hoping to find a chance to perform.

“I researched a bunch of venues and told them I could bring a small crowd, although that wasn’t entirely true. I got a residency at Pianos upstairs lounge, booking five shows that month. At my first show, I was lucky there was a small crowd (not because of me) and after the show, I was mobbed by a group of people who wanted to know who I was and when I was playing next, which had never happened to me before.

At her first New York show, Janine was mobbed by people who wanted more

“Before I went to New York, I decided my name needed to sound bigger, since solo acts often get the opening spot when no one’s there. So I came up with ‘Janine and the Mixtape’. I was playing a synth as well as guitar, but I started making backing tracks to give the impression of a full band. I adjusted the beats and made loops to get the right sound. I really enjoyed being able to manipulate the sound but didn’t think I was a producer. Eventually I realised – oh, I’m producing my own music now.”

Her visit to New York only lasted a month, but she was hooked and arranged to return 18 months later.

By this stage, she’d accumulated half-a-dozen songs and taken advantage of the affordable indie rate at Roundhead Studios to record her vocals. She programmed the drum beats, but brought in Henderson and Holmes to record keys and bass respectively.

The Dark Mind EP (2013) drew from the classic R&B of her youth, but took a more atmospheric approach, with the vocals pulled back in the mix and washes of synths. Her idiosyncratic sound came through necessity. While she was in New York, she couldn’t borrow keyboards from friends so sang melody lines in, and then warped them with effects to create lush textures, in some cases dropping her voice down a couple of octaves.

She had some additional production on some songs from her flatmate, US producer Will McNair, but largely developed her songs through trial and error.

“I’m still proud of that EP, but I also cringe at hearing some of my production and very primitive attempts of tapping notes out on a keyboard, and my drum patterns were all over the place. It was also fun, because when you don’t know an instrument too well you’re free to play around and feel it out, whereas sometimes when you have more technical knowledge it can become too intellectual. More thought and less felt.”

In 2012 Janine had signed a distribution deal with Warner NZ for three songs. She released her first single ‘Bullets’ with them and then went on to release the EP in New Zealand and Australia, via Janine’s own label, Little Mixtape Records. The EP’s standout track was ‘Hold Me’, a song Janine still performs live, doing a special acoustic version at meet-and-greet events with fans.

“I originally did a little snippet of it on guitar and put it up on Tumblr, which got a good reaction. Then I was over at Will’s family house, and he added a bunch of different keyboards and weird and wonderful sounds, then Oli laid down a synth bass. I took the sounds away, moved them around, and chopped them up, so it had an ethereal sound, while still having aspects of classic R&B.”

The local music awards included a Critics’ Choice section that acknowledged ground-breaking acts that might be overlooked by the main categories. Janine performed at the event alongside the other nominees, singing while playing keyboards and triggering loops alongside drummer Joel Bremner. Despite not winning, her nomination proved that she was making work worthy of critical appreciation.

She found music was also having a life of its own overseas.

“I was asked if ‘Dark Mind’ could be used for the TV show, Black Ink Crew. They asked for the instrumental, so I thought that they’d just put that behind some scenes, but they actually used the full version and it did really well. It was the first time I’d seen one of my songs pass 60,000 plays in a day or two. Then I was asked if ‘Hold Me’ could be used on Love and Hip Hop Atlanta [a high rating show on cable television at the time]. I was actually back in New Zealand trying to figure out how to get back overseas. Suddenly that song went to the top of the R&B charts in the US and I had a bunch of major labels emailing me.”

“I went from pushing tees along to Pusha T’s music to having him on a track!”

Janine was eventually swayed by Craig Kallman at Atlantic Records. “Major labels used to be either run by sharks or by record men,” she says. “Craig was a record man. He was the person responsible for putting Aaliyah in the studio with Timbaland. Craig was the only person from a label who actually asked me to sing in person. Then, when I started making music with Atlantic, he was very involved. He would send notes back-and-forth about the mixes we were doing.”

Atlantic’s first move was to re-release the Dark Mind EP (in 2014) with a remix of ‘Hold Me’ that included cult rapper Pusha T. Janine recalls listening to his music while working at a T-shirt store in Auckland in her teens: “I went from pushing tees along to Pusha T’s music to having him on a track!”

By this stage, Janine was managed by expat New Zealander Kirk Harding, who introduced her to another of his artists – the production duo 4e, comprising Jonathan Dorr and Cecil Bernardy, who had co-produced hit records for another of Harding’s acts, The Neighbourhood.

The XXEP (2015) opened with ‘We Could Be Better,’ which was a good representation of how she collaborated with the 4e duo to add some oomph to her sound. The EP also included ‘Lose My Mind’. Janine intended to do a slowed-down version of ‘Party Up’ by DMX but soon realised the lyrics were totally wrong for her. Instead she riffed on the chorus line, building up a vocal stack that was then backed by synths and a steadily growing beat, resulting in an entirely new song, on which she got Will Henderson to add extra keyboard parts.

The EP helped her win the Urban/Hip Hop award at the following year’s New Zealand Music Awards. The award’s title reflected how R&B was not taken seriously at home – crammed in alongside hip hop, rather than given its own category. This changed the following year when Aaradhna protested by refusing to accept the award and giving it to SWIDT, leading to a standalone category.

Becoming Janine

In 2015, Janine undertook her first US tour, supporting UK neo-soul act Floetry. She arranged for Will Henderson to join her band for the tour and was just getting prepared when she tore her Achilles tendon playing basketball and had to hurriedly return to New Zealand for surgery.

“Floetry are a renowned soul group, with a very music loving, old school fan base. So the audience were very confused when this white girl on crutches came onstage with a funny accent. After the first few shows, I managed to get a moonboot but I still hobbled around and it left me in a lot of pain. Luckily, the crowd were amazing music fans. I would hear some people laughing when I first came out, but as soon as I opened my mouth to sing, they showed me so much love. They’d even wait in line to meet me after the show. It was a really special experience.”

That same year, Janine moved from New York to LA, which coincided with her sister moving there too. By 2016, she had completed an album with 4e, but its release was delayed for two years.

At this point, she reverted to her first name Janine, releasing a run of singles from early 2017 onwards which included the standout track ‘Never The Right Time’. It built nicely on her sound, with layered backing vocals washing over a downbeat backing track, while the main vocals were pulled back slightly in the mix to create a dreamy feel. She backed it with her first headlining tour of the US and was buoyed to perform for her fans in person.

her Record label atlantic moved her from their R&B roster to the pop roster

However, her label pushed for a change in direction – moving her from the R&B roster to the pop roster and insisting that the album should include some up-tempo, pop-directed tracks. ‘Too Late’ certainly made a good case for this approach, with a striking dropout at the start of each chorus that allowed Janine to sing the catchy hook with just a gospel choir and a single keyboard line as accompaniment. ‘Hold On’ had an even bigger beat and – despite being a solid track – seemed to take her further from the sound that made her unique.

When the album 99 finally arrived in 2018, it struggled to gain traction and Janine was called into a meeting with a newly-assigned A&R agent.

“Atlantic no longer wanted to work with me. I’d actually wanted to get out of my deal, so I felt pretty excited. I walked all the way from the restaurant where we’d had the meeting in Beverly Hills back to Los Feliz, which is probably at least a two-hour walk. I rang everyone I knew and told them that I was finally free. But when I got home I started to crash and it hit me that they didn’t want me. Even though I wanted to be dropped it was still a little devastating that Atlantic no longer believed in me. Also, the A&R had said to me, ‘You’re not in your early twenties anymore so that makes things harder.’ That wasn’t a nice thing to hear either.”

Independent spirit

The one upside of the album being so delayed was that Janine had already been writing new work. She used ‘Vacation’ to test the waters, relishing the ability to work at speed.

“Suddenly, I didn’t have to go through 50 emails just to do the smallest thing. Even after I’d left Atlantic, I asked to take over my artist website and I swear there were something like 200 emails in a chain, before one person finally gave me the code I needed. So, it was very freeing to get back to my roots, where I was just focused on creating music.”

Her next single ‘Broke Me Down’ was a turning point. She planned to get another guitarist to do the guitar part, but it didn’t sound quite right. So she eventually did it herself which provided the raw feel she was after, though she did add some shimmering licks from her live guitarist Joshua McClanahan to embellish the latter half of the song. The beat was kept simple and allowed the emotion in her voice to shine through. She released the track without much fanfare and soon found it clocking up 10,000 streams a day.

Released without fanfare, ‘Broke Me Down’ soon clocked up 10,000 streams a day

“It was different being on a major label, because you might get a decent advance, but once you go through that money then it’s hard to know when you will see any more income. So it was a beautiful thing to upload a song myself and start to see a few dollars coming in. I began to realise that I could build it up until it was enough to pay my rent, so it was an important moment for me.”

She followed up with ‘3AM’ which took a minimalistic approach, resulting in an ethereal, dream-pop feel. Both singles passed 10 million streams, and surprisingly the hurriedly produced track ‘Vacation’ eventually reached the same level.

Janine spent the early months of the Covid lockdowns holed up in her tiny studio apartment in LA, continuing to build her following, single by single. She filmed a live set from home with an online tip jar and was chuffed when fans sent her a couple of thousand dollars in response, as well as buying the merch she’d made to sell online.

In mid-2020, Janine released the evocative, downbeat love song ‘Best Thing’ and it was a streaming success. Even better was the uplifting song ‘Loving Me’ which she’d written to give herself encouragement. Despite losing her label and subsequently parting ways with her booking agent and publisher, she still managed to release a run of singles in a two-year period that would amass over a hundred million streams between them.

However, there was tragedy on the horizon. “My three-year visa was running out in 2021, so I was back in New Zealand visiting Auckland when my dad unexpectedly passed away. My whole world was turned upside down. My parents had moved to Tasman, which is 45 minutes out of Nelson, so I stayed there with Mum for a year. It took some time to get back into making music. After Dad’s funeral, my mum, sister and I went up to Auckland to see friends before my sister went back to LA. I ended up at a little club on K Road, bawling my eyes out and talking about life and death and grief – just the person you want to be out at a club with. I jokingly told my friends I’d write a song about ‘crying in the club’ so I did. I hope the humour of the title doesn’t take away from the fact it’s actually a heavy and heart-breaking subject.”

Her output stopped for over a year after the single ‘Crying In The Club’ but at the end of 2021, she received NZ On Air project funding that allowed her to keep working on her next album. It was a well-deserved boost; she had survived without NZ On Air support for over eight years at that point. Finally, in 2023 she returned to the live stage, independently booking her first show in four years, at the legendary Troubadour in LA. The show sold out.

In 2024 she did her first world tour, working with Jordan Stone from high-profile booking agency WME. He had first connected with her at the 2023 Troubadour show.

“He’d been asking about me for years, but no one at Atlantic had put him in contact. He saw that I was performing at the Troubadour and contacted me via the venue to ask if it’d be okay if he came along. I said, ‘absolutely’. It’s pretty rare that a booking agent will turn up to a show before you’re even working together. So he brought me on and we put together my first world tour in 2024, which included Australia, the US, London, Paris and Amsterdam. That was an incredible experience and we followed it with a US tour in 2025.”

now fully in control of her music, Janine revelled in the chance to explore new sounds

That year, she also released ‘If I Call’ which kicked off the album campaign that would lead to Pain and Paradise (2025). She was now fully in control of her music, though this didn’t exclude the possibility of working with collaborators; UK producers Monro and GG both contributed to the album and she also brought in members of her US live band, Joshua McClanahan, Joel Hill, and Dylan Elise. She also worked with Aotearoa-based producers Will Henderson and Edward “Edy” Liu, as well as guitarist Sam Nakamura. She revelled in the chance to explore new sounds.

“There are elements of so many genres in Pain and Paradise but they all came from a place of full ownership and a place of truth,” she says. “For example, I fell in love with this sweet electronic music head. It wasn’t music that I usually liked back then, but it helped me when I was in such a dark place that I couldn’t listen to anything sad. I realised I need to make songs for my fans, for the days when they feel the same. ‘Fit’ is a fun R&B pop song, which is different for me but I’m proud of it because it’s still 100 percent genuine and a track that might lift someone up when they need it. ‘Happy’ shows the crossover electronic influence, although if you listen to the lyrics it isn’t actually a happy song. I do like having songs where it’s ambiguous. It could be about a romantic relationship, but for me that’s actually a song about missing Dad.”

She backed the album up with a US tour at the end of 2025.

Janine’s international success has been gratifying, but she has also appreciated spending more time in her home country.

“My priorities changed a lot after losing Dad. I felt a new connection to being home and how much that means to me. Everywhere I’ve gone, I’ve always wanted to represent Aotearoa and that’s one of the reasons why it kind of hurts for me as an artist that I’ve been so much more successful overseas than here. I spend a lot more time back home these days. At some point I would really love to make an impact in this country as well as help the new generations of Kiwi artists. I’m so proud of where I’m from.”