If Irie Love, the Kailua-based Queen of Island Reggae, had to pick a few words powering her in 2026, she would go with: “all days on” and “collaboration.”
Love recently spoke with Aloha State Daily from Aotearoa, where she was set to have her first official performance in over a decade. She was a featured international artist at a pre-party event for Jim Beam Homegrown, a large music festival with seven stages that features local artists.
“I'm really excited,” she said. “It's been quite a long time since I've performed here. And I've never performed here without Fiji. It's gonna be emotional and nostalgic — and all the things.”
Love had been planning to go to Aotearoa to record new music with George Brooks Veikoso, known as Fiji, who had been based there the last few years of his life. Recently, she spent time looking through some of the tracks he started, which had not been published yet. Love, who knew Fiji for more than 20 years, was invited to finish a few of those, she said. They previously collaborated on singles like “It Is Wut It Is” and “Auright.”
Coming up this weekend, Love will take the stage at the Blue Note Hawaiʻi on Saturday, April 4. She will share music from her new album “Reflections,” which was released in December of 2025, as well as classics from her catalog and a few songs that were released before streaming existed. She has several extended plays that are only on CDs and plans to digitize them soon and release them on a monthly basis on streaming services as archive throwback songs. Love also recently released the single “Love Reggae” last month. At the upcoming performances, several of the young women she mentors through her nonprofit, Mana Wāhine Movement, will be opening, she said.
“It's going to be a musical journey from what I'm doing with the girls now, in present day, and my new music — all the way back to old catalog stuff,” she said.
Love has more than 235,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, with large populations of listeners in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi and other parts of the United States, as well as Aotearoa and Australia. Love has toured with Morgan Heritage, Pink, Chaka Khan, Fiji, J Boog, Katchafire, Tarrus Riley and more, according to her biography on the streaming platform.
“New Zealand is really good for genre bending, and that's kind of something I've always wanted to do,” she said, adding that Island Reggae is especially loved in Hawaiʻi, where she grew up. “My dad is part Jamaican, and my name is Jamaican, so reggae has always been kind of a foundational genre for me. But as an artist, I like to say, we don't ask painters to paint with one color. And for singers and musicians, one genre is like painting with one color.”
She is working on some Neo-soul/Reggae. Love has songs with Sammy Johnson and J Boog coming out soon, she said.
“I'm really trying to collaborate as much as possible too, because I feel we create things that we can't create on our own when we collaborate,” Love said. “For me as an artist, that's kind of my favorite thing is seeing the magic that we can create.”
Songwriting has been easier in Aotearoa and France than it is at home, she said.
“I feel like as human beings, when we have access to put ourselves in new environments, it brings out different aspects of our personality,” she said. “Some even dormant abilities, in the sense of when I create out here, I feel like songwriting for me is a lot easier than it is when I'm in Hawaiʻi. And it's easier for me when I was in France, so I really believe that it's just because I get to be my most authentic self in an environment that is less familiar to older versions of me.”
Whenever she returns home, her favorite comfort food is Saigon Noodle House in Kailua, she said.
“I get the same exact thing every time,” Love said. “It's the lemongrass tofu vermicelli.”
Sometimes, she gets comments on social media asking when she rests, she said.
“And from my vantage point, I'm barely doing enough,” she said. “I love what I do. I love how fulfilling it is to be able to be on stages and speaking. ... It feels like this is what I'm meant to be doing. I feel like I'm walking in my purpose. And so whenever we do that, we have this — I don't know — ancestral access of energy that just gives me the capacity to show up more, to sleep less, and to just do more.”
Love will be traveling a lot this year, with tours in Europe and Africa in the summer and Japan in the fall. In Aotearoa, she has been taking time to get outside.
“I always try to find the closest mauna to my hotel in the different cities I'm in here in Aotearoa and go for a walk — a trail walk or just sit in the parks that they usually have around the mauna,” she said. “I just want to encourage people to connect to the ʻāina, wherever you are. It's probably one of the easiest and most accessible ways to calm the nervous system in these trying times for humanity.”
Get tickets for her performances at 6:30 p.m. and 9 p.m. at the Blue Note Hawaiʻi. Doors open at 5 p.m. and 8:30 p.m., respectively. Tickets start at $25, plus fees and taxes.Follow Love on Instagram, YouTube and Spotify.
For the latest news of Hawai‘i, sign up here for our free Daily Edition newsletter.
Katie Helland can be reached at katie@alohastatedaily.com.
