Fifty years after Split Enz released their audacious debut Mental Notes, the band who redefined New Zealand music are revisiting their origins with a major archival release. ENZyclopedia Volumes One & Two, due 14 November 2025, captures the early years of Split Enz across a deluxe 5-CD box, a 3-LP vinyl set and an Atmos Blu-Ray edition, all curated in close collaboration with the group.
Formed in Auckland in 1972, Split Enz, originally Split Ends, built a sound that was completely their own. In the mid-seventies they bridged theatrical art-rock, eccentric pop and visual flair long before new wave became a label. For New Zealand musicians, they were a blueprint for ambition. “I was absolutely enchanted and inspired by Mental Notes as a 17-year-old,” Neil Finn says today. “It made me believe anything was possible. Fifty years later, it sounds as unique and timeless as it did then.”
The project’s newly shared track is a 2025 Eddie Rayner remix of Sweet Dreams, one of the three songs Split Enz recorded in London with Roxy Music’s Phil Manzanera for the international version of Mental Notes. Though never released as a single, Sweet Dreams became a fan favourite, turning up regularly in Tim Finn’s solo sets, in the Finn Brothers’ tours, and in later performances by Crowded House and Neil Finn with his son
Liam.
Listen to Sweet Dreams
ENZyclopedia Volumes One & Two begins with a 2025 remaster of Mental Notes by Phil Kinrade at AIR Studios, working from the original master tapes. The second disc offers Eddie Rayner’s complete new remix of Second Thoughts, the London album co-produced with Manzanera while Bob Marley and The Wailers were making Exodus in the studio below. Disc three presents a new remaster of the original Second Thoughts mix. A fourth disc gathers the band’s formative singles and early recordings, and the fifth, Wide Angle Enz, compiles unreleased and rare material including rough mixes and 1975 live recordings from Melbourne’s Ormond Hall recently unearthed in the Chrysalis archives.
The box set arrives housed in a tri-fold sleeve inside a rigid slipcase with obi-strip and a 40-page booklet filled with unseen photos, memorabilia and new commentary from Tim Finn, Eddie Rayner, Wally Wilkinson, Mike Chunn and Phil Manzanera. The 3-LP set mirrors the CD edition with 140 gram pressings of Mental Notes, Second Thoughts (2025 Eddie Rayner Remix) and The Beginning Of The Enz. The Blu-Rayfeatures Dolby Atmos and 5.1 mixes by Michael Carpenter, hi-res stereo versions of both Eddie Rayner’s new mix and the 1976 original, plus a restored Mental Notes and three music videos.
“Mental Notes was an album we carried around in our heads and hearts for a few years before we actually got the chance to make it,” Tim Finn recalls. “Phil and I had imagined epic and luxurious soundscapes that would stand alongside the masterpieces from the sixties we had fallen in love with in our most impressionable years, far removed in a land at the bottom of the world. Which is why, thinking we had fallen short, we tried to make our first album twice. Once in Sydney and again in London in 1976. So the ‘real’ Mental Notes is still hovering somewhere between two records, never to be fully realised. However, nowadays I can hear beauty in the flaws, and completeness in the imperfections.”
Phil Manzanera first encountered Split Enz on Australian television in 1975. “We arrived in Sydney after this horrendously long journey via Mumbai and all sorts of stopovers and I turned on the TV – there was Split Enz playing live on GTK. I was absolutely blown away,” he remembers. “They were playing with us at the Hordern Pavilion and I watched from the side of the stage, very impressed. I popped my head in their dressing room and said, ‘Hey guys, that was terrific. If there is anything I can do to help, let me know.’ Later, I organised the London sessions at Basing Street Studios. During the recording I was amazed by how together and accomplished they all were with the song arrangements.”
Keyboardist Eddie Rayner revisited those same tapes nearly five decades later. “The original 1976 mixes always felt right to me, no need to touch them,” he says. “But while sifting through digital transfers from the Chrysalis archives, the sessions quietly called to me… and curiosity got the better of me. Remixing something that didn’t need fixing was daunting, but hearing the raw tracks again I was hit by how inventive and fearless the arrangements were – and how good the band actually was.”
At the time of Mental Notes and Second Thoughts, Split Enz comprised Tim Finn, Phil Judd, Eddie Rayner, Mike Chunn, Emlyn Crowther, Noel Crombie, Wally Wilkinson and Robert Gillies. Together they helped shape what would later become the sound of Australasian pop through Crowded House, the Finn Brothers and beyond.
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