What to listen for
Mantis makes that new infrastructure audible. His 2025 single “Weatherman” moves among Bislama, French and English over a compact hip-hop production. The language changes address home, colonial language histories and a wider Pacific audience within one performance. His delivery alternates measured lines with denser rhythmic pressure, letting the beat carry tension without swallowing the words.
“Weatherman” won Pacific Break 2025 after competing with entries from across the region. That result brought a 2026 WOMADelaide performance, but the more important local fact is the team behind the record. Vanboii and Wilz produced it, and Mantis developed Kele Productions with members of the Confliction rap group after returning to Vanuatu. Artist, producers and production base form a scene more convincingly than a list of genre labels.
The song speaks about extreme weather from a ni-Vanuatu position. It does not turn the country into climate imagery: Mantis chooses the subject and controls its rhetoric. His earlier album Personal Therapy and later singles show an artist building a catalogue, while “Weatherman” is especially clear because language, production and public history meet in one concise work.
DADII-B's “E No Easy Overseas” offers a different 2025 perspective. Its Bislama title rejects the fantasy that migration is automatically escape or success. The vocal sits close to the listener and the production keeps the hook direct, fitting a song designed to move quickly through phones and diaspora networks. In 2026, releases including “Vanuatu United FC,” “Meri Vanuatu” and “Tam-Tam-Mu” showed how rapidly the same artist could answer sport, identity and public celebration.
That speed is a feature of the current industry. A studio session can become a national football song or an independence-period release without waiting for an album cycle. Producer credits matter because the beat, vocal treatment and final master often pass through a small circle of collaborators. DADII-B's work therefore belongs to the history of Vanuatu recording as surely as cassette studios do, even though the release is now a single heard on a phone.
The story of 26 Roots joins two eras. The Santo reggae group won the inaugural Pacific Break in 2008 with “Broken Promises,” then released its debut album Praise Jah in 2025. Sixteen years between those events reveal the difficulty of sustaining a band across islands, jobs and limited industry resources. The album is evidence of musicians keeping a repertoire alive until a full release became possible.
Stanleyson Antas offers another kind of return. On Akoustic Volume 1 (Play On) in 2025, the Stan and the Earth Force singer stripped songs such as “Sailing,” “Justice” and “No Worries” back to guitar and voice. The reduced frame exposes lyric, chord movement and breath that a full reggae arrangement can partially conceal. Acoustic does not mean earlier or more authentic here. It is a mature artist revisiting his own catalogue.
Tujah, originally from Aneityum, carried Vanuatu reggae onto the Fest'Napuan stage in 2025. His conscious writing and strong lead voice place him in the same regional conversation as Naio, 26 Roots and Stan, but not as their replacement. A festival appearance matters because it gives a live address: the scene is heard in Port Vila among local audiences, visiting acts and broadcast listeners.
Yosh Shing's debut album Island Life (2025) begins from another experience. Born in Port Vila and taught guitar by his mother, he wrote songs while travelling as an Olympic table-tennis player. Guitar became a portable connection to home before the songs were recorded as an album. The biography is unusual, but the musical point is familiar: travel can intensify local address instead of dissolving it.
Tio's “Black Butterfly” remains an important singer-songwriter work. Violin, guitar, ukulele, percussion and electronic texture create a gradual darkening around the voice. His Daakaka background and early experience of Ambrym tamtam inform the musical imagination without turning a public studio song into ceremonial evidence. The track earns its atmosphere through arrangement, not stock tropical ambience.
Vanessa Quai's “Freedom” belongs to an earlier phase of recorded gospel-pop, not to a false category of brand-new music. Her continuing public work, including new music heard in 2026, makes the career current even when this recording is historical. That distinction is useful: a living scene includes artists with decades of work as well as debut releases.
Women remain under-credited as producers and instrumentalists even while they lead gospel, pop and community forms. Current broadcasting has begun to make artists such as Shazza more visible, but a single mention cannot repair the record. The stronger response is to credit each verifiable release and to connect today's singers with the named women already heard in water music, lullaby, wedding dance and bamboo ensembles.
Rock and metal should not be inflated from scattered uploads. Huarere's amplified catalogue gives a documented rock-pop history, while contemporary heavy acts need the same standard applied to reggae and rap: named members, a stable release and a Vanuatu connection. Silence is preferable to inventing a scene from a loose genre tag.
Festivals in Port Vila, Luganville and provincial centres place string band, reggae, kastom dance, gospel and visiting Pacific acts beside one another. Tujah at Fest'Napuan is a concrete example; Mantis at WOMADelaide shows how the music travels outward. Current schedules still require checking because weather, travel cost and venue capacity can change a programme quickly.
The contemporary map is therefore not a search for Vanuatu's next dominant sound. It is a network of choices: Mantis moving through three languages, DADII-B turning a social sentence into a hook, 26 Roots completing an album after sixteen years, Stanleyson Antas hearing his songs acoustically, and Yosh Shing writing home while travelling. Their differences are the evidence of a functioning musical present.
