Over the past twenty years, a sense of the gothic has emerged in the popular music of Aotearoa, especially in music associated with genres such as alt-country, Americana, and indie-folk. Gothic sensibilities come through in the sounds of the music, the visuals, and the marketing, such as NZ indie label Flying Nun Records’ advertising of Erny Belle’s (Ngāpuhi) 2022 debut album, Venus Is Home, as “a showcase of gothic Pacific storytelling.” The use of the voice also adds a specific uncanny quality to the music, where the vocality is often mismatched with the lyrical darkness, such as Erny Belle calmly crooning about poisoned fish and nuclear annihilation or Marlon Williams crooning about passing away alone in the ocean. In this paper, I explore this sense of the musical gothic in recent albums by a range of musicians and argue that this music challenges dominant narratives of Aotearoa and the wider Pacific as paradise. References to environmental decay, ancestral disconnect, economic hardship, and senses of dislocation and loss mix with emotions of love and longing in much of this music. This discussion highlights the ongoing effects of colonialism and displacement and positions popular music as a vital form of expression in our Indigenous context. Through long-term research in Aotearoa, including discussions with musicians and other music industry contributors, attendance at local performances, as well as historical research in local archives, I explore new ways of understanding Pacific popular music through an Indigenous gothic lens.