About Margo Price:
Nearly a decade ago, Margo Price turned Nashville on its head with her breakthrough, beloved debut solo album, Midwest Farmer’s Daughter. Released in the throes of bro-country and before pop stars were crossing over into the genre left and right, it showcased an artist completely unafraid to double down not only on herself, but what she’d always loved: classic country songs written from the intellect and the gut, hell-bent on truth-telling and both timeless and urgent all at once. Respected by her peers, praised by critics and beloved by her fans, Price created a lane where independent-minded, insurgent country music can exist and thrive alongside the mainstream, and became an ardent fighter for her beliefs in a genre where the norm is to shut up and sing. A trailblazer and a champion for the craft, Price redefined what it meant to be a modern country artist.
And now she’s back with an exquisite, truly timeless album that reconnects with her roots and pays tribute to the art of the country song, inspired in part by the legends whom she now calls colleagues and friends. Hard Headed Woman is both a look forward and a look back: a way to march forward while staying true to yourself when the path of less resistance is right there in front of us, and short cuts are around every corner. And a way to look back when we need to trim what is no longer working, and to stay connected with where we’re from. It is a promise and a manifesto, a love song to both a city and a genre, and a defiant cry for individuality.
In creating Hard Headed Woman, Price brought all of her power as one of our most beloved and respected songwriters to craft a deep exploration of love and America in a time of unprecedented uncertainty. Featuring appearances from Tyler Childers, co-writes with Rodney Crowell and a Waylon Jennings song that his widow, Jessi Colter, urged her to sing, it is country music as only Price can make it: free of rules, cherishing tradition, hard headed to the core but with a delicate, beating heart.
Since releasing Midwest Farmer’s Daughter, Price has barely slowed down. She’s made four records, played Saturday Night Live, been nominated for a Grammy, toured the world alongside artists like Chris Stapleton and Willie Nelson, released a lauded memoir (Maybe We’ll Make It, due on paperback September 2nd), became an in-demand producer and was appointed as the first female board member of Nelson’s Farm Aid. And she’s been fearless when it came to genre, venturing into psychedelic rock on her most recent, Jonathan Wilson-produced record, Strays. It would have been easiest to just stay that course, and keep running. But Price doesn’t follow success or comfort. She follows the art.
It took a whole lot of hard work and honesty with herself and others to get there, but that’s never stopped Price before. “I made the decision that I had to rebuild everything from the ground up,” Price says. “There’s all this pressure to be pumping out content, and I felt the opposite in the way I wanted to approach this record and my life in general.”
Price had also established herself as one of the most passionate, vocal artists in country music and beyond when it came to standing up for political and personal causes, from the presidential election, to abortion to gun control: happily hard headed when it came to the fight for equality and justice, especially for the working class and underserved in our society. Price has always brilliantly woven her activism into her songs, but her role as a spokesperson had started to overtake, on occasion, her role as a songwriter. She wanted to focus on using her written word to deliver the most potent punch of all.
“I always hope to do like Johnny Cash did,” Price says, “which is speak up for the common man and woman. But there have been so many threats and anger and vitriol over the years, when I am only coming from a place of love.”
Price realized she just needed a break from everything outside of the bubble of family life and her art. She started spending more time at home, writing songs alone and with her husband, Jeremey Ivey. She started popping up in the dive bars and tiny venues around Nashville where she got her start, sometimes just to play a country cover or two or dance with the crowd. She refused guidance to write for pop stars or compromise her values for a quick buck. Most of all, she turned the emphasis in her music back to songwriting, exactly where she began.
“So much of Strays was leaning into this psychedelic, textural territory,” says Price. The music lent itself to vibrant, heavy stage jams, with Price often hopping behind the drumkit and bruising her thigh from a tambourine beat. She found herself longing for the days when it was just her and her guitar, playing at an East Nashville dive bar. “I always knew,” she adds, “I would come back to this more rooted sound.”
Hard Headed Woman is rooted to its core. Rooted in Price’s history and struggle to make it as a musician for so many years in a town that prizes uniformity and the bottom line, rooted in the country and folk sounds that have become her signature, rooted in the simplicity of a few key collaborators instead of songs-by-committee. At the heart of Price’s work is her creative partnership with Ivey, with whom she describes as having a “soul connection.” “I’m a songwriter,” Price says. “I’m not somebody who goes out and needs five people to craft a song, and then tack my name on it. That’s never been my style. I have something to say.”
Something to say, nothing to prove. The first song they wrote for the album that would become Hard Headed Woman was “Close to You,” a simple, pining call for a lover that is infused with the sounds of the desert. It’s unfettered and truth-telling, accented by some flamenco guitar and Price’s gorgeous, urgent vocals. “We played the jukebox while democracy fell,” Price sings, never letting her songs fall out of the context in which they exist. It’s the kind of thing that only she could write, carrying both love and fear in one single line.
As more songs started to form, an early boost of confidence came from her friends Rodney Crowell and Emmylou Harris, who heard some of the work at a political fundraiser and encouraged Price to keep going. “I have both of them to thank for building me up and making me believe in the songs I am writing in this season of my life,” Price says. Crowell remained not only an inspiration and supporter of the album but a contributor: he co-wrote two songs with Price and Ivey.
The album that unfolded from there is drenched in Price’s unique story and unshakeable instincts: while Midwest Farmer’s Daughter was about her journey from childhood to Nashville, Hard Headed Woman is very much her battle since from dive bars to tour buses, through parenthood and marriage, through scrutiny and sacrifice all while fighting constantly for what she believes in, and the music she loves. It begins with a proclamation on the prelude, which serves as the album’s mission statement: or, Price puts it, “a disclaimer and reminder that I don’t owe you fucking shit.”
Songs like the album’s lead single, “Don’t Let the Bastards Get you Down,” speak for the downtrodden and the forgotten, an “anthem for people who are being overlooked in society and need to be lifted up,” Price says, “because we are up against so much right now.” As so many of Price’s songs do, it speaks both for the personal and the political all at once. Price was inspired by the message Kris Kristofferson whispered to Sinead O’Connor when she was booed on stage at a Bob Dylan 30th Anniversary show, and even got Kristofferson’s widow’s blessing to include his name on the credits. “I always admired Kris for how he stood by her in that moment, instead of pulling her off the stage like they told him,” Price says. It serves as a reminder to anyone who encounters resistance in the face of fighting for justice to keep going, especially when it would be so much easier to capitulate and cower.
“The song was originally written for a movie that never happened, but it feels so timely with everything that’s going on in the world,” Price explains. “The phrase, ‘Don’t Let The Bastards Get You Down’ originates from Margaret Atwood’s brilliant 1985 piece of literature, The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s referred to in Latin and used as a rallying cry for resistance against the oppressive regime that symbolizes resilience and hope in the face of adversity. Nolite te Bastardes Caborundorum.”
That spirit resonates all across the songs of Hard Headed Woman. The blistering “Don’t Wake Me Up” was based around some writings that Ivey stumbled upon in one of Price’s notebooks, inspired in part by her deep readings of Frank Stanford, one of her favorite poets due to his freewheeling work free of boundaries. They spun it all into song in minutes that chugs with the essence of Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues”: “The way this world is going, ain’t where I’m at,” Price howls in her powerful, unmistakable voice. “Nowhere is Where,” turns slow and contemplative, road-worn but never broken, the call of someone who has been to the mountain but never forgets the prairie below. And “Losing Streak” whirls in with an organ and out with a weary, world-worn defiance: our worst times don’t define us, but they’re always part of who we are.
There are songs that go back to the beginning of Price’s early grind, like the western-tinged “Wild at Heart,” reflecting on how much her life and the city of Nashville has changed over the years – and how important it is to stay true to exactly who you are despite it all. Another, called “Red Eye Flight,” is about both leaving a lover and also leaving her longtime band the Pricetags. “I’ve been with those players for ten, thirteen years,” she says. “But I could feel that I needed to make a change, and to change texturally what’s going on with the band. But it’s a familial bond, different than a friendship.”
There are a few choice covers and cuts, too: “Love Me Like You Used To Do” is by Price’s friend Steven Knudson, an unsung Nashville writer on whom she hopes to shine a spotlight (helping to elevate the town’s incredibly talented but buried voices is one of Price’s favorite pastimes). Friend Tyler Childers joins Price on that waltzing country ballad, while “I Just Don’t Give a Damn” is Price’s “Jolene goes to Memphis” take on the Jimmy Peppers and George Jones classic. And showcasing how Price has been trusted by the greats to lead the next generation of country music renegades, “Kissin You Goodbye” was given to Price by Jessi Colter, Waylon Jennings’ widow, when Price was producing her record. They’re songs chosen to appreciate the past and the present as she sees it – not as Music Row or the algorithm might dictate – and place Price squarely amongst her heroes as a living and breathing part of the new country tradition.
When it came time to record Hard Headed Woman, it was important for Price to keep that ethos alive, decamping to Nashville’s RCA Studio A and reuniting with producer Matt Ross-Spang, with whom she made her first two solo albums. Though she has worked with everyone from Sturgill Simpson to Jonathan Wilson since, it was Spang’s vocal rebuke of easy studio shortcuts that made her eager to reunite again. “He’s so unpretentious,” Price says. “He fully believes in me, he fully believes in my songs. He got us back to feeling it in your gut and not needing everything to be so perfect.”
It felt truly significant for Price to make the album in Nashville, a city where she’s lived for over two decades and played a seminal role in its transformation, yet somehow never recorded an album in the place she’s called home. The historic RCA Studio A helped connect Price even closer to the legacy of songwriting she holds so dear, a place where everyone from Dolly Parton to John Prine to Loretta Lynn have made albums. “It felt like there were ghosts and spirits just hanging out,” Price says. In perfect kismet, she also launched her own signature Gibson J-45 guitar, inspired by her 1960’s Gibson she’s had by her side for years as her career took off. It’s all part of the continuity that she wishes to create with her art, not just with timeless songs but inspiring future generations of women, mothers and artists in general who don’t want to sacrifice their vision, moral compass or family life in favor of mainstream success.
At its core, Hard Headed Woman is about that furious instinct to never waver, especially when ourselves, our values and our future is so clearly on the line. As she sings on the title track, “I ain’t ashamed, I just am what I am.”
“I hope this album inspires people to be fearless and take chances and just be unabashedly themselves,” Price says, “in a culture that tries as hard as it can to beat us into all being the same.”
Nearly twenty years into her ever-evolving career, London and LA-based, Brit award-winning singer, songwriter, actor and activist Kate Nash has seen it all. She’s achieved huge commercial success – 2007’s debut Made of Bricks, featuring the hit single Foundations, reached number 1 in the UK and spent seven months in the top 40 – seen the darker side of the industry after being dropped in 2012 following 2010’s Bernard Butler-assisted My Best Friend Is You, forged her own path as a successful independent artist via 2013’s punk-y Girl Talk and 2018’s Yesterday Was Forever, and starred in HBO’s hit wrestling drama, GLOW. She’s also been the subject of an award-winning documentary, Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl, and also co-created a musical, Only Gold, with Hamilton choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler. Oh, and she also starred in that too. Still only 36, Nash isn’t finished shape-shifting just yet; after signing with legendary label Kill Rock Stars, whose alumni include Nash favourites Elliott Smith and Sleater-Kinney, in early 2024, she’ll release her fifth album, 9 Sad Symphonies, in June.
Inspired by old Hollywood, vintage musicals and a desperate quest to find beauty in a rotten world, it’s another sonic shift following her “rage-y” recent output. “It needed to be cinematic and dreamy,” Nash says of the 10-track album (the title is both a joke and an ode to passing achievable goals when creativity crumbles). As for the sonic shifts, it’s just second nature: “I do things based on what I’m feeling at the time, and what I’m inspired by,” she explains.
That moment of the album’s creation was fuelled by two things; her work on Only Gold and a global pandemic that curtailed filming on the fourth season of GLOW and sent Nash – and everyone – into a tailspin. After a period of laying bed watching zombie movies, creativity started to arrive in the autumn and winter of 2020, with songs being worked on well into 2021. Having worked with Danish producer Frederick Thaae on her musical, they quickly reconnected to start work on 9 Sad Symphonies. “We were in this completely different landscape for writing songs [on the musical], which was completely freeing,” Nash explains. “I was writing for a story, I was writing about a King and a Queen and a proper story arc. In that world you need the audience to understand the songs immediately, it’s very direct, and it has lots of editing which I’d never done. It changed my outlook on songwriting. Also, we said at the beginning that we wanted to make something beautiful, nothing harsh. I’ve done a lot of harsh stuff before. We wanted loads of beautiful string arrangements.”
These melodic, bright-on-the-surface but deeply layered songs started to emerge out of creative scenarios that had been completely changed by the pandemic. “We were on Zoom, which was… challenging,” she laughs. “We discussed ideas and then we’d hang up on Zoom, go away for three hours, or Frederick would send me the small thing we’d started, then I’d start writing and doing melodies and lyrics, and he would do production, and then we’d meet up on Zoom later.” Slowly the songs started to evolve, their unusual creation adding intriguing problems to try and overcome. “We’d get stuck a lot but you just had to let the stress go and come back to it. It’s a different version of the album to the one we would have made normally.”
The album’s curtain raiser, Millions of Heartbeats, sets out the album’s lyrical themes perfectly. “It’s about that point in the pandemic where I had lost my spark for life,” she says. “And I’m a pretty sparky person, so it was really sad to me.” She references the lyric “the spark is lit at such a low flame” as a crucial moment. “I felt like I lost a part of myself. I didn’t know how to get it back.” As with all of the songs on the album, it’s not just about one thing, however. “I think it also sums up a lot of how I feel about how people act in the world right now. Am I a number or am I a person? What are we trying to be right now? I’m a human being. But we’re so quantifiable and packaged and everyone is a brand. We’re in this capitalist explosion and I feel the effect of it in a way I’ve never felt before.” But it’s also a song that, by its end, flickers with a light that can’t be completely put out. “At the end of the day, the world is beautiful, there are all these heartbeats out there, and there is hope,” she says with a smile. “We have to try! You can’t fucking give up. This song is a sign of what’s to come – there’s going to be darkness and depression but we’ll get to hope by the end.”
A rare guitar appears on Ray, which delves deeper into mental health struggles, detailing depression and anxiety. It’s a theme Nash is keen to share with her fans in a typically honest manner. “It’s natural for an artist to write about emotions and feelings and darkness,” Nash says. “Also a lot of my fans suffer from depression too and I noticed it more when I was doing my livestream chats over lockdown. Not talking about it is not the solution. Being open and creating that community within my fanbase is really important.” It’s one she’s fostered not only via the Kickstarter campaigns that funded Girl Talk and Yesterday Was Forever, but also her Patreon account which she used in the pandemic to connect with her loyal fans via livestreams.
That darkness also weaves through Misery, which marries a propulsive string arrangement and a buoyant beat to lyrics that try to outrun the emotion of its title, while the livid My Bile is an emotional exorcism married to beatific strings and crashing drums. “I guess that song is the little patience I have left to give to all the bullshit, all the shitty parts of the industry, the media, the way people talk to other human beings, me as a woman in the industry, all the things people say about you online,” she explains. “I’m done. I don’t have anything left to give to that. I’ve proved who I am with actions, which is more important. I just have bile left.” There’s love on the album too, specifically on Space Odyssey 2001, which recounts a first proper date with her now partner. On the surface it feels like a diss of the Kubrick classic, 2001: Space Odyssey, but is more about its poor choice given the context. “It’s the wrong film for a date,” she smiles, “but I love the film. I like making jokes in songs. I like that there’s this beautiful love song but it’s also complaining about this critically acclaimed film being too long. I don’t recommend it for a first date!”
While the album was finished at the end of 2021, Nash wasn’t sure what to do with it. Free from the typical record industry framework – no manager, no label, no booking agents – she did two things; went on tour in 2022, which was rejuvenating, and joined TikTok. Her first post was a timeline of her extraordinary career, which ended with her questioning the best way in which to release the new album (some of the songs, including Misery, Wasteman and Horsie, had already started to emerge without a label). That first post went viral, leading to an influx of offers from labels and managers, creating a scenario Nash had been in before; dealing with some of the industry’s shadier characters. One label, however, had been interested for a while. “Kill Rock Stars had been pursuing me for two years. They had been checking in for a while saying ‘we notice the album hasn’t come out, we really love it’.” Once Nash had secured an excellent new manager, the loose ends were tied up and the album was ready to go.
Recent one-off single, Change, released to coincide with the signing announcement, was an example of what having a label can give you. “I didn’t have to do anything,” she laughs. “I’ve been doing everything myself, alongside my band and my tour manager and my various managers, but I am always the driving force. But it’s like you’re driving a 16 wheeler – there’s so much you have to take responsibility for. What was so nice with this release was that I just did the creative bit and the stuff I’m good at. The label takes care of everything else.”
It’s been a refreshing change to be able to fully focus on the creative side. That creativity is also there in the artwork for 9 Sad Symphonies, which features Nash in front of an old school Hollywood backdrop that recalls British nature while also alluding to Nash’s on-off home of LA. That visual world will also extend to Nash’s always incredible live shows, which are a key goal for her in 2024. “You can always push things further and take it to a new place,” she says. “So with this album I want to play really quality shows.”
On 9 Sad Symphonies, Nash has taken another huge step towards cementing her place as one of Britain’s most unique and fearless talents. “I’ve climbed through the sewers of this industry and so my goal is to make good music I believe in, to have longevity, and have good live shows,” she states. “I make a living from my music, which is awesome.” As for other ambitions and expectations, she’s been doing this long enough to know not to place your hopes in things you can’t control. “I don’t feel competitive with the industry anymore. I’ve been in the game for twenty years, and I’m in my own league now.”
Nearly twenty years into her ever-evolving career, London and LA-based, Brit award-winning singer, songwriter, actor and activist Kate Nash has seen it all. She’s achieved huge commercial success – 2007’s debut Made of Bricks, featuring the hit single Foundations, reached number 1 in the UK and spent seven months in the top 40 – seen the darker side of the industry after being dropped in 2012 following 2010’s Bernard Butler-assisted My Best Friend Is You, forged her own path as a successful independent artist via 2013’s punk-y Girl Talk and 2018’s Yesterday Was Forever, and starred in HBO’s hit wrestling drama, GLOW. She’s also been the subject of an award-winning documentary, Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl, and also co-created a musical, Only Gold, with Hamilton choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler. Oh, and she also starred in that too. Still only 36, Nash isn’t finished shape-shifting just yet; after signing with legendary label Kill Rock Stars, whose alumni include Nash favourites Elliott Smith and Sleater-Kinney, in early 2024, she’ll release her fifth album, 9 Sad Symphonies, in June.
Inspired by old Hollywood, vintage musicals and a desperate quest to find beauty in a rotten world, it’s another sonic shift following her “rage-y” recent output. “It needed to be cinematic and dreamy,” Nash says of the 10-track album (the title is both a joke and an ode to passing achievable goals when creativity crumbles). As for the sonic shifts, it’s just second nature: “I do things based on what I’m feeling at the time, and what I’m inspired by,” she explains.
That moment of the album’s creation was fuelled by two things; her work on Only Gold and a global pandemic that curtailed filming on the fourth season of GLOW and sent Nash – and everyone – into a tailspin. After a period of laying bed watching zombie movies, creativity started to arrive in the autumn and winter of 2020, with songs being worked on well into 2021. Having worked with Danish producer Frederick Thaae on her musical, they quickly reconnected to start work on 9 Sad Symphonies. “We were in this completely different landscape for writing songs [on the musical], which was completely freeing,” Nash explains. “I was writing for a story, I was writing about a King and a Queen and a proper story arc. In that world you need the audience to understand the songs immediately, it’s very direct, and it has lots of editing which I’d never done. It changed my outlook on songwriting. Also, we said at the beginning that we wanted to make something beautiful, nothing harsh. I’ve done a lot of harsh stuff before. We wanted loads of beautiful string arrangements.”
These melodic, bright-on-the-surface but deeply layered songs started to emerge out of creative scenarios that had been completely changed by the pandemic. “We were on Zoom, which was… challenging,” she laughs. “We discussed ideas and then we’d hang up on Zoom, go away for three hours, or Frederick would send me the small thing we’d started, then I’d start writing and doing melodies and lyrics, and he would do production, and then we’d meet up on Zoom later.” Slowly the songs started to evolve, their unusual creation adding intriguing problems to try and overcome. “We’d get stuck a lot but you just had to let the stress go and come back to it. It’s a different version of the album to the one we would have made normally.”
The album’s curtain raiser, Millions of Heartbeats, sets out the album’s lyrical themes perfectly. “It’s about that point in the pandemic where I had lost my spark for life,” she says. “And I’m a pretty sparky person, so it was really sad to me.” She references the lyric “the spark is lit at such a low flame” as a crucial moment. “I felt like I lost a part of myself. I didn’t know how to get it back.” As with all of the songs on the album, it’s not just about one thing, however. “I think it also sums up a lot of how I feel about how people act in the world right now. Am I a number or am I a person? What are we trying to be right now? I’m a human being. But we’re so quantifiable and packaged and everyone is a brand. We’re in this capitalist explosion and I feel the effect of it in a way I’ve never felt before.” But it’s also a song that, by its end, flickers with a light that can’t be completely put out. “At the end of the day, the world is beautiful, there are all these heartbeats out there, and there is hope,” she says with a smile. “We have to try! You can’t fucking give up. This song is a sign of what’s to come – there’s going to be darkness and depression but we’ll get to hope by the end.”
A rare guitar appears on Ray, which delves deeper into mental health struggles, detailing depression and anxiety. It’s a theme Nash is keen to share with her fans in a typically honest manner. “It’s natural for an artist to write about emotions and feelings and darkness,” Nash says. “Also a lot of my fans suffer from depression too and I noticed it more when I was doing my livestream chats over lockdown. Not talking about it is not the solution. Being open and creating that community within my fanbase is really important.” It’s one she’s fostered not only via the Kickstarter campaigns that funded Girl Talk and Yesterday Was Forever, but also her Patreon account which she used in the pandemic to connect with her loyal fans via livestreams.
That darkness also weaves through Misery, which marries a propulsive string arrangement and a buoyant beat to lyrics that try to outrun the emotion of its title, while the livid My Bile is an emotional exorcism married to beatific strings and crashing drums. “I guess that song is the little patience I have left to give to all the bullshit, all the shitty parts of the industry, the media, the way people talk to other human beings, me as a woman in the industry, all the things people say about you online,” she explains. “I’m done. I don’t have anything left to give to that. I’ve proved who I am with actions, which is more important. I just have bile left.” There’s love on the album too, specifically on Space Odyssey 2001, which recounts a first proper date with her now partner. On the surface it feels like a diss of the Kubrick classic, 2001: Space Odyssey, but is more about its poor choice given the context. “It’s the wrong film for a date,” she smiles, “but I love the film. I like making jokes in songs. I like that there’s this beautiful love song but it’s also complaining about this critically acclaimed film being too long. I don’t recommend it for a first date!”
While the album was finished at the end of 2021, Nash wasn’t sure what to do with it. Free from the typical record industry framework – no manager, no label, no booking agents – she did two things; went on tour in 2022, which was rejuvenating, and joined TikTok. Her first post was a timeline of her extraordinary career, which ended with her questioning the best way in which to release the new album (some of the songs, including Misery, Wasteman and Horsie, had already started to emerge without a label). That first post went viral, leading to an influx of offers from labels and managers, creating a scenario Nash had been in before; dealing with some of the industry’s shadier characters. One label, however, had been interested for a while. “Kill Rock Stars had been pursuing me for two years. They had been checking in for a while saying ‘we notice the album hasn’t come out, we really love it’.” Once Nash had secured an excellent new manager, the loose ends were tied up and the album was ready to go.
Recent one-off single, Change, released to coincide with the signing announcement, was an example of what having a label can give you. “I didn’t have to do anything,” she laughs. “I’ve been doing everything myself, alongside my band and my tour manager and my various managers, but I am always the driving force. But it’s like you’re driving a 16 wheeler – there’s so much you have to take responsibility for. What was so nice with this release was that I just did the creative bit and the stuff I’m good at. The label takes care of everything else.”
It’s been a refreshing change to be able to fully focus on the creative side. That creativity is also there in the artwork for 9 Sad Symphonies, which features Nash in front of an old school Hollywood backdrop that recalls British nature while also alluding to Nash’s on-off home of LA. That visual world will also extend to Nash’s always incredible live shows, which are a key goal for her in 2024. “You can always push things further and take it to a new place,” she says. “So with this album I want to play really quality shows.”
On 9 Sad Symphonies, Nash has taken another huge step towards cementing her place as one of Britain’s most unique and fearless talents. “I’ve climbed through the sewers of this industry and so my goal is to make good music I believe in, to have longevity, and have good live shows,” she states. “I make a living from my music, which is awesome.” As for other ambitions and expectations, she’s been doing this long enough to know not to place your hopes in things you can’t control. “I don’t feel competitive with the industry anymore. I’ve been in the game for twenty years, and I’m in my own league now.”
Nearly twenty years into her ever-evolving career, London and LA-based, Brit award-winning singer, songwriter, actor and activist Kate Nash has seen it all. She’s achieved huge commercial success – 2007’s debut Made of Bricks, featuring the hit single Foundations, reached number 1 in the UK and spent seven months in the top 40 – seen the darker side of the industry after being dropped in 2012 following 2010’s Bernard Butler-assisted My Best Friend Is You, forged her own path as a successful independent artist via 2013’s punk-y Girl Talk and 2018’s Yesterday Was Forever, and starred in HBO’s hit wrestling drama, GLOW. She’s also been the subject of an award-winning documentary, Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl, and also co-created a musical, Only Gold, with Hamilton choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler. Oh, and she also starred in that too. Still only 36, Nash isn’t finished shape-shifting just yet; after signing with legendary label Kill Rock Stars, whose alumni include Nash favourites Elliott Smith and Sleater-Kinney, in early 2024, she’ll release her fifth album, 9 Sad Symphonies, in June.
Inspired by old Hollywood, vintage musicals and a desperate quest to find beauty in a rotten world, it’s another sonic shift following her “rage-y” recent output. “It needed to be cinematic and dreamy,” Nash says of the 10-track album (the title is both a joke and an ode to passing achievable goals when creativity crumbles). As for the sonic shifts, it’s just second nature: “I do things based on what I’m feeling at the time, and what I’m inspired by,” she explains.
That moment of the album’s creation was fuelled by two things; her work on Only Gold and a global pandemic that curtailed filming on the fourth season of GLOW and sent Nash – and everyone – into a tailspin. After a period of laying bed watching zombie movies, creativity started to arrive in the autumn and winter of 2020, with songs being worked on well into 2021. Having worked with Danish producer Frederick Thaae on her musical, they quickly reconnected to start work on 9 Sad Symphonies. “We were in this completely different landscape for writing songs [on the musical], which was completely freeing,” Nash explains. “I was writing for a story, I was writing about a King and a Queen and a proper story arc. In that world you need the audience to understand the songs immediately, it’s very direct, and it has lots of editing which I’d never done. It changed my outlook on songwriting. Also, we said at the beginning that we wanted to make something beautiful, nothing harsh. I’ve done a lot of harsh stuff before. We wanted loads of beautiful string arrangements.”
These melodic, bright-on-the-surface but deeply layered songs started to emerge out of creative scenarios that had been completely changed by the pandemic. “We were on Zoom, which was… challenging,” she laughs. “We discussed ideas and then we’d hang up on Zoom, go away for three hours, or Frederick would send me the small thing we’d started, then I’d start writing and doing melodies and lyrics, and he would do production, and then we’d meet up on Zoom later.” Slowly the songs started to evolve, their unusual creation adding intriguing problems to try and overcome. “We’d get stuck a lot but you just had to let the stress go and come back to it. It’s a different version of the album to the one we would have made normally.”
The album’s curtain raiser, Millions of Heartbeats, sets out the album’s lyrical themes perfectly. “It’s about that point in the pandemic where I had lost my spark for life,” she says. “And I’m a pretty sparky person, so it was really sad to me.” She references the lyric “the spark is lit at such a low flame” as a crucial moment. “I felt like I lost a part of myself. I didn’t know how to get it back.” As with all of the songs on the album, it’s not just about one thing, however. “I think it also sums up a lot of how I feel about how people act in the world right now. Am I a number or am I a person? What are we trying to be right now? I’m a human being. But we’re so quantifiable and packaged and everyone is a brand. We’re in this capitalist explosion and I feel the effect of it in a way I’ve never felt before.” But it’s also a song that, by its end, flickers with a light that can’t be completely put out. “At the end of the day, the world is beautiful, there are all these heartbeats out there, and there is hope,” she says with a smile. “We have to try! You can’t fucking give up. This song is a sign of what’s to come – there’s going to be darkness and depression but we’ll get to hope by the end.”
A rare guitar appears on Ray, which delves deeper into mental health struggles, detailing depression and anxiety. It’s a theme Nash is keen to share with her fans in a typically honest manner. “It’s natural for an artist to write about emotions and feelings and darkness,” Nash says. “Also a lot of my fans suffer from depression too and I noticed it more when I was doing my livestream chats over lockdown. Not talking about it is not the solution. Being open and creating that community within my fanbase is really important.” It’s one she’s fostered not only via the Kickstarter campaigns that funded Girl Talk and Yesterday Was Forever, but also her Patreon account which she used in the pandemic to connect with her loyal fans via livestreams.
That darkness also weaves through Misery, which marries a propulsive string arrangement and a buoyant beat to lyrics that try to outrun the emotion of its title, while the livid My Bile is an emotional exorcism married to beatific strings and crashing drums. “I guess that song is the little patience I have left to give to all the bullshit, all the shitty parts of the industry, the media, the way people talk to other human beings, me as a woman in the industry, all the things people say about you online,” she explains. “I’m done. I don’t have anything left to give to that. I’ve proved who I am with actions, which is more important. I just have bile left.” There’s love on the album too, specifically on Space Odyssey 2001, which recounts a first proper date with her now partner. On the surface it feels like a diss of the Kubrick classic, 2001: Space Odyssey, but is more about its poor choice given the context. “It’s the wrong film for a date,” she smiles, “but I love the film. I like making jokes in songs. I like that there’s this beautiful love song but it’s also complaining about this critically acclaimed film being too long. I don’t recommend it for a first date!”
While the album was finished at the end of 2021, Nash wasn’t sure what to do with it. Free from the typical record industry framework – no manager, no label, no booking agents – she did two things; went on tour in 2022, which was rejuvenating, and joined TikTok. Her first post was a timeline of her extraordinary career, which ended with her questioning the best way in which to release the new album (some of the songs, including Misery, Wasteman and Horsie, had already started to emerge without a label). That first post went viral, leading to an influx of offers from labels and managers, creating a scenario Nash had been in before; dealing with some of the industry’s shadier characters. One label, however, had been interested for a while. “Kill Rock Stars had been pursuing me for two years. They had been checking in for a while saying ‘we notice the album hasn’t come out, we really love it’.” Once Nash had secured an excellent new manager, the loose ends were tied up and the album was ready to go.
Recent one-off single, Change, released to coincide with the signing announcement, was an example of what having a label can give you. “I didn’t have to do anything,” she laughs. “I’ve been doing everything myself, alongside my band and my tour manager and my various managers, but I am always the driving force. But it’s like you’re driving a 16 wheeler – there’s so much you have to take responsibility for. What was so nice with this release was that I just did the creative bit and the stuff I’m good at. The label takes care of everything else.”
It’s been a refreshing change to be able to fully focus on the creative side. That creativity is also there in the artwork for 9 Sad Symphonies, which features Nash in front of an old school Hollywood backdrop that recalls British nature while also alluding to Nash’s on-off home of LA. That visual world will also extend to Nash’s always incredible live shows, which are a key goal for her in 2024. “You can always push things further and take it to a new place,” she says. “So with this album I want to play really quality shows.”
On 9 Sad Symphonies, Nash has taken another huge step towards cementing her place as one of Britain’s most unique and fearless talents. “I’ve climbed through the sewers of this industry and so my goal is to make good music I believe in, to have longevity, and have good live shows,” she states. “I make a living from my music, which is awesome.” As for other ambitions and expectations, she’s been doing this long enough to know not to place your hopes in things you can’t control. “I don’t feel competitive with the industry anymore. I’ve been in the game for twenty years, and I’m in my own league now.”
Nearly twenty years into her ever-evolving career, London and LA-based, Brit award-winning singer, songwriter, actor and activist Kate Nash has seen it all. She’s achieved huge commercial success – 2007’s debut Made of Bricks, featuring the hit single Foundations, reached number 1 in the UK and spent seven months in the top 40 – seen the darker side of the industry after being dropped in 2012 following 2010’s Bernard Butler-assisted My Best Friend Is You, forged her own path as a successful independent artist via 2013’s punk-y Girl Talk and 2018’s Yesterday Was Forever, and starred in HBO’s hit wrestling drama, GLOW. She’s also been the subject of an award-winning documentary, Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl, and also co-created a musical, Only Gold, with Hamilton choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler. Oh, and she also starred in that too. Still only 36, Nash isn’t finished shape-shifting just yet; after signing with legendary label Kill Rock Stars, whose alumni include Nash favourites Elliott Smith and Sleater-Kinney, in early 2024, she’ll release her fifth album, 9 Sad Symphonies, in June.
Inspired by old Hollywood, vintage musicals and a desperate quest to find beauty in a rotten world, it’s another sonic shift following her “rage-y” recent output. “It needed to be cinematic and dreamy,” Nash says of the 10-track album (the title is both a joke and an ode to passing achievable goals when creativity crumbles). As for the sonic shifts, it’s just second nature: “I do things based on what I’m feeling at the time, and what I’m inspired by,” she explains.
That moment of the album’s creation was fuelled by two things; her work on Only Gold and a global pandemic that curtailed filming on the fourth season of GLOW and sent Nash – and everyone – into a tailspin. After a period of laying bed watching zombie movies, creativity started to arrive in the autumn and winter of 2020, with songs being worked on well into 2021. Having worked with Danish producer Frederick Thaae on her musical, they quickly reconnected to start work on 9 Sad Symphonies. “We were in this completely different landscape for writing songs [on the musical], which was completely freeing,” Nash explains. “I was writing for a story, I was writing about a King and a Queen and a proper story arc. In that world you need the audience to understand the songs immediately, it’s very direct, and it has lots of editing which I’d never done. It changed my outlook on songwriting. Also, we said at the beginning that we wanted to make something beautiful, nothing harsh. I’ve done a lot of harsh stuff before. We wanted loads of beautiful string arrangements.”
These melodic, bright-on-the-surface but deeply layered songs started to emerge out of creative scenarios that had been completely changed by the pandemic. “We were on Zoom, which was… challenging,” she laughs. “We discussed ideas and then we’d hang up on Zoom, go away for three hours, or Frederick would send me the small thing we’d started, then I’d start writing and doing melodies and lyrics, and he would do production, and then we’d meet up on Zoom later.” Slowly the songs started to evolve, their unusual creation adding intriguing problems to try and overcome. “We’d get stuck a lot but you just had to let the stress go and come back to it. It’s a different version of the album to the one we would have made normally.”
The album’s curtain raiser, Millions of Heartbeats, sets out the album’s lyrical themes perfectly. “It’s about that point in the pandemic where I had lost my spark for life,” she says. “And I’m a pretty sparky person, so it was really sad to me.” She references the lyric “the spark is lit at such a low flame” as a crucial moment. “I felt like I lost a part of myself. I didn’t know how to get it back.” As with all of the songs on the album, it’s not just about one thing, however. “I think it also sums up a lot of how I feel about how people act in the world right now. Am I a number or am I a person? What are we trying to be right now? I’m a human being. But we’re so quantifiable and packaged and everyone is a brand. We’re in this capitalist explosion and I feel the effect of it in a way I’ve never felt before.” But it’s also a song that, by its end, flickers with a light that can’t be completely put out. “At the end of the day, the world is beautiful, there are all these heartbeats out there, and there is hope,” she says with a smile. “We have to try! You can’t fucking give up. This song is a sign of what’s to come – there’s going to be darkness and depression but we’ll get to hope by the end.”
A rare guitar appears on Ray, which delves deeper into mental health struggles, detailing depression and anxiety. It’s a theme Nash is keen to share with her fans in a typically honest manner. “It’s natural for an artist to write about emotions and feelings and darkness,” Nash says. “Also a lot of my fans suffer from depression too and I noticed it more when I was doing my livestream chats over lockdown. Not talking about it is not the solution. Being open and creating that community within my fanbase is really important.” It’s one she’s fostered not only via the Kickstarter campaigns that funded Girl Talk and Yesterday Was Forever, but also her Patreon account which she used in the pandemic to connect with her loyal fans via livestreams.
That darkness also weaves through Misery, which marries a propulsive string arrangement and a buoyant beat to lyrics that try to outrun the emotion of its title, while the livid My Bile is an emotional exorcism married to beatific strings and crashing drums. “I guess that song is the little patience I have left to give to all the bullshit, all the shitty parts of the industry, the media, the way people talk to other human beings, me as a woman in the industry, all the things people say about you online,” she explains. “I’m done. I don’t have anything left to give to that. I’ve proved who I am with actions, which is more important. I just have bile left.” There’s love on the album too, specifically on Space Odyssey 2001, which recounts a first proper date with her now partner. On the surface it feels like a diss of the Kubrick classic, 2001: Space Odyssey, but is more about its poor choice given the context. “It’s the wrong film for a date,” she smiles, “but I love the film. I like making jokes in songs. I like that there’s this beautiful love song but it’s also complaining about this critically acclaimed film being too long. I don’t recommend it for a first date!”
While the album was finished at the end of 2021, Nash wasn’t sure what to do with it. Free from the typical record industry framework – no manager, no label, no booking agents – she did two things; went on tour in 2022, which was rejuvenating, and joined TikTok. Her first post was a timeline of her extraordinary career, which ended with her questioning the best way in which to release the new album (some of the songs, including Misery, Wasteman and Horsie, had already started to emerge without a label). That first post went viral, leading to an influx of offers from labels and managers, creating a scenario Nash had been in before; dealing with some of the industry’s shadier characters. One label, however, had been interested for a while. “Kill Rock Stars had been pursuing me for two years. They had been checking in for a while saying ‘we notice the album hasn’t come out, we really love it’.” Once Nash had secured an excellent new manager, the loose ends were tied up and the album was ready to go.
Recent one-off single, Change, released to coincide with the signing announcement, was an example of what having a label can give you. “I didn’t have to do anything,” she laughs. “I’ve been doing everything myself, alongside my band and my tour manager and my various managers, but I am always the driving force. But it’s like you’re driving a 16 wheeler – there’s so much you have to take responsibility for. What was so nice with this release was that I just did the creative bit and the stuff I’m good at. The label takes care of everything else.”
It’s been a refreshing change to be able to fully focus on the creative side. That creativity is also there in the artwork for 9 Sad Symphonies, which features Nash in front of an old school Hollywood backdrop that recalls British nature while also alluding to Nash’s on-off home of LA. That visual world will also extend to Nash’s always incredible live shows, which are a key goal for her in 2024. “You can always push things further and take it to a new place,” she says. “So with this album I want to play really quality shows.”
On 9 Sad Symphonies, Nash has taken another huge step towards cementing her place as one of Britain’s most unique and fearless talents. “I’ve climbed through the sewers of this industry and so my goal is to make good music I believe in, to have longevity, and have good live shows,” she states. “I make a living from my music, which is awesome.” As for other ambitions and expectations, she’s been doing this long enough to know not to place your hopes in things you can’t control. “I don’t feel competitive with the industry anymore. I’ve been in the game for twenty years, and I’m in my own league now.”
Nearly twenty years into her ever-evolving career, London and LA-based, Brit award-winning singer, songwriter, actor and activist Kate Nash has seen it all. She’s achieved huge commercial success – 2007’s debut Made of Bricks, featuring the hit single Foundations, reached number 1 in the UK and spent seven months in the top 40 – seen the darker side of the industry after being dropped in 2012 following 2010’s Bernard Butler-assisted My Best Friend Is You, forged her own path as a successful independent artist via 2013’s punk-y Girl Talk and 2018’s Yesterday Was Forever, and starred in HBO’s hit wrestling drama, GLOW. She’s also been the subject of an award-winning documentary, Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl, and also co-created a musical, Only Gold, with Hamilton choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler. Oh, and she also starred in that too. Still only 36, Nash isn’t finished shape-shifting just yet; after signing with legendary label Kill Rock Stars, whose alumni include Nash favourites Elliott Smith and Sleater-Kinney, in early 2024, she’ll release her fifth album, 9 Sad Symphonies, in June.
Inspired by old Hollywood, vintage musicals and a desperate quest to find beauty in a rotten world, it’s another sonic shift following her “rage-y” recent output. “It needed to be cinematic and dreamy,” Nash says of the 10-track album (the title is both a joke and an ode to passing achievable goals when creativity crumbles). As for the sonic shifts, it’s just second nature: “I do things based on what I’m feeling at the time, and what I’m inspired by,” she explains.
That moment of the album’s creation was fuelled by two things; her work on Only Gold and a global pandemic that curtailed filming on the fourth season of GLOW and sent Nash – and everyone – into a tailspin. After a period of laying bed watching zombie movies, creativity started to arrive in the autumn and winter of 2020, with songs being worked on well into 2021. Having worked with Danish producer Frederick Thaae on her musical, they quickly reconnected to start work on 9 Sad Symphonies. “We were in this completely different landscape for writing songs [on the musical], which was completely freeing,” Nash explains. “I was writing for a story, I was writing about a King and a Queen and a proper story arc. In that world you need the audience to understand the songs immediately, it’s very direct, and it has lots of editing which I’d never done. It changed my outlook on songwriting. Also, we said at the beginning that we wanted to make something beautiful, nothing harsh. I’ve done a lot of harsh stuff before. We wanted loads of beautiful string arrangements.”
These melodic, bright-on-the-surface but deeply layered songs started to emerge out of creative scenarios that had been completely changed by the pandemic. “We were on Zoom, which was… challenging,” she laughs. “We discussed ideas and then we’d hang up on Zoom, go away for three hours, or Frederick would send me the small thing we’d started, then I’d start writing and doing melodies and lyrics, and he would do production, and then we’d meet up on Zoom later.” Slowly the songs started to evolve, their unusual creation adding intriguing problems to try and overcome. “We’d get stuck a lot but you just had to let the stress go and come back to it. It’s a different version of the album to the one we would have made normally.”
The album’s curtain raiser, Millions of Heartbeats, sets out the album’s lyrical themes perfectly. “It’s about that point in the pandemic where I had lost my spark for life,” she says. “And I’m a pretty sparky person, so it was really sad to me.” She references the lyric “the spark is lit at such a low flame” as a crucial moment. “I felt like I lost a part of myself. I didn’t know how to get it back.” As with all of the songs on the album, it’s not just about one thing, however. “I think it also sums up a lot of how I feel about how people act in the world right now. Am I a number or am I a person? What are we trying to be right now? I’m a human being. But we’re so quantifiable and packaged and everyone is a brand. We’re in this capitalist explosion and I feel the effect of it in a way I’ve never felt before.” But it’s also a song that, by its end, flickers with a light that can’t be completely put out. “At the end of the day, the world is beautiful, there are all these heartbeats out there, and there is hope,” she says with a smile. “We have to try! You can’t fucking give up. This song is a sign of what’s to come – there’s going to be darkness and depression but we’ll get to hope by the end.”
A rare guitar appears on Ray, which delves deeper into mental health struggles, detailing depression and anxiety. It’s a theme Nash is keen to share with her fans in a typically honest manner. “It’s natural for an artist to write about emotions and feelings and darkness,” Nash says. “Also a lot of my fans suffer from depression too and I noticed it more when I was doing my livestream chats over lockdown. Not talking about it is not the solution. Being open and creating that community within my fanbase is really important.” It’s one she’s fostered not only via the Kickstarter campaigns that funded Girl Talk and Yesterday Was Forever, but also her Patreon account which she used in the pandemic to connect with her loyal fans via livestreams.
That darkness also weaves through Misery, which marries a propulsive string arrangement and a buoyant beat to lyrics that try to outrun the emotion of its title, while the livid My Bile is an emotional exorcism married to beatific strings and crashing drums. “I guess that song is the little patience I have left to give to all the bullshit, all the shitty parts of the industry, the media, the way people talk to other human beings, me as a woman in the industry, all the things people say about you online,” she explains. “I’m done. I don’t have anything left to give to that. I’ve proved who I am with actions, which is more important. I just have bile left.” There’s love on the album too, specifically on Space Odyssey 2001, which recounts a first proper date with her now partner. On the surface it feels like a diss of the Kubrick classic, 2001: Space Odyssey, but is more about its poor choice given the context. “It’s the wrong film for a date,” she smiles, “but I love the film. I like making jokes in songs. I like that there’s this beautiful love song but it’s also complaining about this critically acclaimed film being too long. I don’t recommend it for a first date!”
While the album was finished at the end of 2021, Nash wasn’t sure what to do with it. Free from the typical record industry framework – no manager, no label, no booking agents – she did two things; went on tour in 2022, which was rejuvenating, and joined TikTok. Her first post was a timeline of her extraordinary career, which ended with her questioning the best way in which to release the new album (some of the songs, including Misery, Wasteman and Horsie, had already started to emerge without a label). That first post went viral, leading to an influx of offers from labels and managers, creating a scenario Nash had been in before; dealing with some of the industry’s shadier characters. One label, however, had been interested for a while. “Kill Rock Stars had been pursuing me for two years. They had been checking in for a while saying ‘we notice the album hasn’t come out, we really love it’.” Once Nash had secured an excellent new manager, the loose ends were tied up and the album was ready to go.
Recent one-off single, Change, released to coincide with the signing announcement, was an example of what having a label can give you. “I didn’t have to do anything,” she laughs. “I’ve been doing everything myself, alongside my band and my tour manager and my various managers, but I am always the driving force. But it’s like you’re driving a 16 wheeler – there’s so much you have to take responsibility for. What was so nice with this release was that I just did the creative bit and the stuff I’m good at. The label takes care of everything else.”
It’s been a refreshing change to be able to fully focus on the creative side. That creativity is also there in the artwork for 9 Sad Symphonies, which features Nash in front of an old school Hollywood backdrop that recalls British nature while also alluding to Nash’s on-off home of LA. That visual world will also extend to Nash’s always incredible live shows, which are a key goal for her in 2024. “You can always push things further and take it to a new place,” she says. “So with this album I want to play really quality shows.”
On 9 Sad Symphonies, Nash has taken another huge step towards cementing her place as one of Britain’s most unique and fearless talents. “I’ve climbed through the sewers of this industry and so my goal is to make good music I believe in, to have longevity, and have good live shows,” she states. “I make a living from my music, which is awesome.” As for other ambitions and expectations, she’s been doing this long enough to know not to place your hopes in things you can’t control. “I don’t feel competitive with the industry anymore. I’ve been in the game for twenty years, and I’m in my own league now.”
Nearly twenty years into her ever-evolving career, London and LA-based, Brit award-winning singer, songwriter, actor and activist Kate Nash has seen it all. She’s achieved huge commercial success – 2007’s debut Made of Bricks, featuring the hit single Foundations, reached number 1 in the UK and spent seven months in the top 40 – seen the darker side of the industry after being dropped in 2012 following 2010’s Bernard Butler-assisted My Best Friend Is You, forged her own path as a successful independent artist via 2013’s punk-y Girl Talk and 2018’s Yesterday Was Forever, and starred in HBO’s hit wrestling drama, GLOW. She’s also been the subject of an award-winning documentary, Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl, and also co-created a musical, Only Gold, with Hamilton choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler. Oh, and she also starred in that too. Still only 36, Nash isn’t finished shape-shifting just yet; after signing with legendary label Kill Rock Stars, whose alumni include Nash favourites Elliott Smith and Sleater-Kinney, in early 2024, she’ll release her fifth album, 9 Sad Symphonies, in June.
Inspired by old Hollywood, vintage musicals and a desperate quest to find beauty in a rotten world, it’s another sonic shift following her “rage-y” recent output. “It needed to be cinematic and dreamy,” Nash says of the 10-track album (the title is both a joke and an ode to passing achievable goals when creativity crumbles). As for the sonic shifts, it’s just second nature: “I do things based on what I’m feeling at the time, and what I’m inspired by,” she explains.
That moment of the album’s creation was fuelled by two things; her work on Only Gold and a global pandemic that curtailed filming on the fourth season of GLOW and sent Nash – and everyone – into a tailspin. After a period of laying bed watching zombie movies, creativity started to arrive in the autumn and winter of 2020, with songs being worked on well into 2021. Having worked with Danish producer Frederick Thaae on her musical, they quickly reconnected to start work on 9 Sad Symphonies. “We were in this completely different landscape for writing songs [on the musical], which was completely freeing,” Nash explains. “I was writing for a story, I was writing about a King and a Queen and a proper story arc. In that world you need the audience to understand the songs immediately, it’s very direct, and it has lots of editing which I’d never done. It changed my outlook on songwriting. Also, we said at the beginning that we wanted to make something beautiful, nothing harsh. I’ve done a lot of harsh stuff before. We wanted loads of beautiful string arrangements.”
These melodic, bright-on-the-surface but deeply layered songs started to emerge out of creative scenarios that had been completely changed by the pandemic. “We were on Zoom, which was… challenging,” she laughs. “We discussed ideas and then we’d hang up on Zoom, go away for three hours, or Frederick would send me the small thing we’d started, then I’d start writing and doing melodies and lyrics, and he would do production, and then we’d meet up on Zoom later.” Slowly the songs started to evolve, their unusual creation adding intriguing problems to try and overcome. “We’d get stuck a lot but you just had to let the stress go and come back to it. It’s a different version of the album to the one we would have made normally.”
The album’s curtain raiser, Millions of Heartbeats, sets out the album’s lyrical themes perfectly. “It’s about that point in the pandemic where I had lost my spark for life,” she says. “And I’m a pretty sparky person, so it was really sad to me.” She references the lyric “the spark is lit at such a low flame” as a crucial moment. “I felt like I lost a part of myself. I didn’t know how to get it back.” As with all of the songs on the album, it’s not just about one thing, however. “I think it also sums up a lot of how I feel about how people act in the world right now. Am I a number or am I a person? What are we trying to be right now? I’m a human being. But we’re so quantifiable and packaged and everyone is a brand. We’re in this capitalist explosion and I feel the effect of it in a way I’ve never felt before.” But it’s also a song that, by its end, flickers with a light that can’t be completely put out. “At the end of the day, the world is beautiful, there are all these heartbeats out there, and there is hope,” she says with a smile. “We have to try! You can’t fucking give up. This song is a sign of what’s to come – there’s going to be darkness and depression but we’ll get to hope by the end.”
A rare guitar appears on Ray, which delves deeper into mental health struggles, detailing depression and anxiety. It’s a theme Nash is keen to share with her fans in a typically honest manner. “It’s natural for an artist to write about emotions and feelings and darkness,” Nash says. “Also a lot of my fans suffer from depression too and I noticed it more when I was doing my livestream chats over lockdown. Not talking about it is not the solution. Being open and creating that community within my fanbase is really important.” It’s one she’s fostered not only via the Kickstarter campaigns that funded Girl Talk and Yesterday Was Forever, but also her Patreon account which she used in the pandemic to connect with her loyal fans via livestreams.
That darkness also weaves through Misery, which marries a propulsive string arrangement and a buoyant beat to lyrics that try to outrun the emotion of its title, while the livid My Bile is an emotional exorcism married to beatific strings and crashing drums. “I guess that song is the little patience I have left to give to all the bullshit, all the shitty parts of the industry, the media, the way people talk to other human beings, me as a woman in the industry, all the things people say about you online,” she explains. “I’m done. I don’t have anything left to give to that. I’ve proved who I am with actions, which is more important. I just have bile left.” There’s love on the album too, specifically on Space Odyssey 2001, which recounts a first proper date with her now partner. On the surface it feels like a diss of the Kubrick classic, 2001: Space Odyssey, but is more about its poor choice given the context. “It’s the wrong film for a date,” she smiles, “but I love the film. I like making jokes in songs. I like that there’s this beautiful love song but it’s also complaining about this critically acclaimed film being too long. I don’t recommend it for a first date!”
While the album was finished at the end of 2021, Nash wasn’t sure what to do with it. Free from the typical record industry framework – no manager, no label, no booking agents – she did two things; went on tour in 2022, which was rejuvenating, and joined TikTok. Her first post was a timeline of her extraordinary career, which ended with her questioning the best way in which to release the new album (some of the songs, including Misery, Wasteman and Horsie, had already started to emerge without a label). That first post went viral, leading to an influx of offers from labels and managers, creating a scenario Nash had been in before; dealing with some of the industry’s shadier characters. One label, however, had been interested for a while. “Kill Rock Stars had been pursuing me for two years. They had been checking in for a while saying ‘we notice the album hasn’t come out, we really love it’.” Once Nash had secured an excellent new manager, the loose ends were tied up and the album was ready to go.
Recent one-off single, Change, released to coincide with the signing announcement, was an example of what having a label can give you. “I didn’t have to do anything,” she laughs. “I’ve been doing everything myself, alongside my band and my tour manager and my various managers, but I am always the driving force. But it’s like you’re driving a 16 wheeler – there’s so much you have to take responsibility for. What was so nice with this release was that I just did the creative bit and the stuff I’m good at. The label takes care of everything else.”
It’s been a refreshing change to be able to fully focus on the creative side. That creativity is also there in the artwork for 9 Sad Symphonies, which features Nash in front of an old school Hollywood backdrop that recalls British nature while also alluding to Nash’s on-off home of LA. That visual world will also extend to Nash’s always incredible live shows, which are a key goal for her in 2024. “You can always push things further and take it to a new place,” she says. “So with this album I want to play really quality shows.”
On 9 Sad Symphonies, Nash has taken another huge step towards cementing her place as one of Britain’s most unique and fearless talents. “I’ve climbed through the sewers of this industry and so my goal is to make good music I believe in, to have longevity, and have good live shows,” she states. “I make a living from my music, which is awesome.” As for other ambitions and expectations, she’s been doing this long enough to know not to place your hopes in things you can’t control. “I don’t feel competitive with the industry anymore. I’ve been in the game for twenty years, and I’m in my own league now.”
Nearly twenty years into her ever-evolving career, London and LA-based, Brit award-winning singer, songwriter, actor and activist Kate Nash has seen it all. She’s achieved huge commercial success – 2007’s debut Made of Bricks, featuring the hit single Foundations, reached number 1 in the UK and spent seven months in the top 40 – seen the darker side of the industry after being dropped in 2012 following 2010’s Bernard Butler-assisted My Best Friend Is You, forged her own path as a successful independent artist via 2013’s punk-y Girl Talk and 2018’s Yesterday Was Forever, and starred in HBO’s hit wrestling drama, GLOW. She’s also been the subject of an award-winning documentary, Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl, and also co-created a musical, Only Gold, with Hamilton choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler. Oh, and she also starred in that too. Still only 36, Nash isn’t finished shape-shifting just yet; after signing with legendary label Kill Rock Stars, whose alumni include Nash favourites Elliott Smith and Sleater-Kinney, in early 2024, she’ll release her fifth album, 9 Sad Symphonies, in June.
Inspired by old Hollywood, vintage musicals and a desperate quest to find beauty in a rotten world, it’s another sonic shift following her “rage-y” recent output. “It needed to be cinematic and dreamy,” Nash says of the 10-track album (the title is both a joke and an ode to passing achievable goals when creativity crumbles). As for the sonic shifts, it’s just second nature: “I do things based on what I’m feeling at the time, and what I’m inspired by,” she explains.
That moment of the album’s creation was fuelled by two things; her work on Only Gold and a global pandemic that curtailed filming on the fourth season of GLOW and sent Nash – and everyone – into a tailspin. After a period of laying bed watching zombie movies, creativity started to arrive in the autumn and winter of 2020, with songs being worked on well into 2021. Having worked with Danish producer Frederick Thaae on her musical, they quickly reconnected to start work on 9 Sad Symphonies. “We were in this completely different landscape for writing songs [on the musical], which was completely freeing,” Nash explains. “I was writing for a story, I was writing about a King and a Queen and a proper story arc. In that world you need the audience to understand the songs immediately, it’s very direct, and it has lots of editing which I’d never done. It changed my outlook on songwriting. Also, we said at the beginning that we wanted to make something beautiful, nothing harsh. I’ve done a lot of harsh stuff before. We wanted loads of beautiful string arrangements.”
These melodic, bright-on-the-surface but deeply layered songs started to emerge out of creative scenarios that had been completely changed by the pandemic. “We were on Zoom, which was… challenging,” she laughs. “We discussed ideas and then we’d hang up on Zoom, go away for three hours, or Frederick would send me the small thing we’d started, then I’d start writing and doing melodies and lyrics, and he would do production, and then we’d meet up on Zoom later.” Slowly the songs started to evolve, their unusual creation adding intriguing problems to try and overcome. “We’d get stuck a lot but you just had to let the stress go and come back to it. It’s a different version of the album to the one we would have made normally.”
The album’s curtain raiser, Millions of Heartbeats, sets out the album’s lyrical themes perfectly. “It’s about that point in the pandemic where I had lost my spark for life,” she says. “And I’m a pretty sparky person, so it was really sad to me.” She references the lyric “the spark is lit at such a low flame” as a crucial moment. “I felt like I lost a part of myself. I didn’t know how to get it back.” As with all of the songs on the album, it’s not just about one thing, however. “I think it also sums up a lot of how I feel about how people act in the world right now. Am I a number or am I a person? What are we trying to be right now? I’m a human being. But we’re so quantifiable and packaged and everyone is a brand. We’re in this capitalist explosion and I feel the effect of it in a way I’ve never felt before.” But it’s also a song that, by its end, flickers with a light that can’t be completely put out. “At the end of the day, the world is beautiful, there are all these heartbeats out there, and there is hope,” she says with a smile. “We have to try! You can’t fucking give up. This song is a sign of what’s to come – there’s going to be darkness and depression but we’ll get to hope by the end.”
A rare guitar appears on Ray, which delves deeper into mental health struggles, detailing depression and anxiety. It’s a theme Nash is keen to share with her fans in a typically honest manner. “It’s natural for an artist to write about emotions and feelings and darkness,” Nash says. “Also a lot of my fans suffer from depression too and I noticed it more when I was doing my livestream chats over lockdown. Not talking about it is not the solution. Being open and creating that community within my fanbase is really important.” It’s one she’s fostered not only via the Kickstarter campaigns that funded Girl Talk and Yesterday Was Forever, but also her Patreon account which she used in the pandemic to connect with her loyal fans via livestreams.
That darkness also weaves through Misery, which marries a propulsive string arrangement and a buoyant beat to lyrics that try to outrun the emotion of its title, while the livid My Bile is an emotional exorcism married to beatific strings and crashing drums. “I guess that song is the little patience I have left to give to all the bullshit, all the shitty parts of the industry, the media, the way people talk to other human beings, me as a woman in the industry, all the things people say about you online,” she explains. “I’m done. I don’t have anything left to give to that. I’ve proved who I am with actions, which is more important. I just have bile left.” There’s love on the album too, specifically on Space Odyssey 2001, which recounts a first proper date with her now partner. On the surface it feels like a diss of the Kubrick classic, 2001: Space Odyssey, but is more about its poor choice given the context. “It’s the wrong film for a date,” she smiles, “but I love the film. I like making jokes in songs. I like that there’s this beautiful love song but it’s also complaining about this critically acclaimed film being too long. I don’t recommend it for a first date!”
While the album was finished at the end of 2021, Nash wasn’t sure what to do with it. Free from the typical record industry framework – no manager, no label, no booking agents – she did two things; went on tour in 2022, which was rejuvenating, and joined TikTok. Her first post was a timeline of her extraordinary career, which ended with her questioning the best way in which to release the new album (some of the songs, including Misery, Wasteman and Horsie, had already started to emerge without a label). That first post went viral, leading to an influx of offers from labels and managers, creating a scenario Nash had been in before; dealing with some of the industry’s shadier characters. One label, however, had been interested for a while. “Kill Rock Stars had been pursuing me for two years. They had been checking in for a while saying ‘we notice the album hasn’t come out, we really love it’.” Once Nash had secured an excellent new manager, the loose ends were tied up and the album was ready to go.
Recent one-off single, Change, released to coincide with the signing announcement, was an example of what having a label can give you. “I didn’t have to do anything,” she laughs. “I’ve been doing everything myself, alongside my band and my tour manager and my various managers, but I am always the driving force. But it’s like you’re driving a 16 wheeler – there’s so much you have to take responsibility for. What was so nice with this release was that I just did the creative bit and the stuff I’m good at. The label takes care of everything else.”
It’s been a refreshing change to be able to fully focus on the creative side. That creativity is also there in the artwork for 9 Sad Symphonies, which features Nash in front of an old school Hollywood backdrop that recalls British nature while also alluding to Nash’s on-off home of LA. That visual world will also extend to Nash’s always incredible live shows, which are a key goal for her in 2024. “You can always push things further and take it to a new place,” she says. “So with this album I want to play really quality shows.”
On 9 Sad Symphonies, Nash has taken another huge step towards cementing her place as one of Britain’s most unique and fearless talents. “I’ve climbed through the sewers of this industry and so my goal is to make good music I believe in, to have longevity, and have good live shows,” she states. “I make a living from my music, which is awesome.” As for other ambitions and expectations, she’s been doing this long enough to know not to place your hopes in things you can’t control. “I don’t feel competitive with the industry anymore. I’ve been in the game for twenty years, and I’m in my own league now.”
Nearly twenty years into her ever-evolving career, London and LA-based, Brit award-winning singer, songwriter, actor and activist Kate Nash has seen it all. She’s achieved huge commercial success – 2007’s debut Made of Bricks, featuring the hit single Foundations, reached number 1 in the UK and spent seven months in the top 40 – seen the darker side of the industry after being dropped in 2012 following 2010’s Bernard Butler-assisted My Best Friend Is You, forged her own path as a successful independent artist via 2013’s punk-y Girl Talk and 2018’s Yesterday Was Forever, and starred in HBO’s hit wrestling drama, GLOW. She’s also been the subject of an award-winning documentary, Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl, and also co-created a musical, Only Gold, with Hamilton choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler. Oh, and she also starred in that too. Still only 36, Nash isn’t finished shape-shifting just yet; after signing with legendary label Kill Rock Stars, whose alumni include Nash favourites Elliott Smith and Sleater-Kinney, in early 2024, she’ll release her fifth album, 9 Sad Symphonies, in June.
Inspired by old Hollywood, vintage musicals and a desperate quest to find beauty in a rotten world, it’s another sonic shift following her “rage-y” recent output. “It needed to be cinematic and dreamy,” Nash says of the 10-track album (the title is both a joke and an ode to passing achievable goals when creativity crumbles). As for the sonic shifts, it’s just second nature: “I do things based on what I’m feeling at the time, and what I’m inspired by,” she explains.
That moment of the album’s creation was fuelled by two things; her work on Only Gold and a global pandemic that curtailed filming on the fourth season of GLOW and sent Nash – and everyone – into a tailspin. After a period of laying bed watching zombie movies, creativity started to arrive in the autumn and winter of 2020, with songs being worked on well into 2021. Having worked with Danish producer Frederick Thaae on her musical, they quickly reconnected to start work on 9 Sad Symphonies. “We were in this completely different landscape for writing songs [on the musical], which was completely freeing,” Nash explains. “I was writing for a story, I was writing about a King and a Queen and a proper story arc. In that world you need the audience to understand the songs immediately, it’s very direct, and it has lots of editing which I’d never done. It changed my outlook on songwriting. Also, we said at the beginning that we wanted to make something beautiful, nothing harsh. I’ve done a lot of harsh stuff before. We wanted loads of beautiful string arrangements.”
These melodic, bright-on-the-surface but deeply layered songs started to emerge out of creative scenarios that had been completely changed by the pandemic. “We were on Zoom, which was… challenging,” she laughs. “We discussed ideas and then we’d hang up on Zoom, go away for three hours, or Frederick would send me the small thing we’d started, then I’d start writing and doing melodies and lyrics, and he would do production, and then we’d meet up on Zoom later.” Slowly the songs started to evolve, their unusual creation adding intriguing problems to try and overcome. “We’d get stuck a lot but you just had to let the stress go and come back to it. It’s a different version of the album to the one we would have made normally.”
The album’s curtain raiser, Millions of Heartbeats, sets out the album’s lyrical themes perfectly. “It’s about that point in the pandemic where I had lost my spark for life,” she says. “And I’m a pretty sparky person, so it was really sad to me.” She references the lyric “the spark is lit at such a low flame” as a crucial moment. “I felt like I lost a part of myself. I didn’t know how to get it back.” As with all of the songs on the album, it’s not just about one thing, however. “I think it also sums up a lot of how I feel about how people act in the world right now. Am I a number or am I a person? What are we trying to be right now? I’m a human being. But we’re so quantifiable and packaged and everyone is a brand. We’re in this capitalist explosion and I feel the effect of it in a way I’ve never felt before.” But it’s also a song that, by its end, flickers with a light that can’t be completely put out. “At the end of the day, the world is beautiful, there are all these heartbeats out there, and there is hope,” she says with a smile. “We have to try! You can’t fucking give up. This song is a sign of what’s to come – there’s going to be darkness and depression but we’ll get to hope by the end.”
A rare guitar appears on Ray, which delves deeper into mental health struggles, detailing depression and anxiety. It’s a theme Nash is keen to share with her fans in a typically honest manner. “It’s natural for an artist to write about emotions and feelings and darkness,” Nash says. “Also a lot of my fans suffer from depression too and I noticed it more when I was doing my livestream chats over lockdown. Not talking about it is not the solution. Being open and creating that community within my fanbase is really important.” It’s one she’s fostered not only via the Kickstarter campaigns that funded Girl Talk and Yesterday Was Forever, but also her Patreon account which she used in the pandemic to connect with her loyal fans via livestreams.
That darkness also weaves through Misery, which marries a propulsive string arrangement and a buoyant beat to lyrics that try to outrun the emotion of its title, while the livid My Bile is an emotional exorcism married to beatific strings and crashing drums. “I guess that song is the little patience I have left to give to all the bullshit, all the shitty parts of the industry, the media, the way people talk to other human beings, me as a woman in the industry, all the things people say about you online,” she explains. “I’m done. I don’t have anything left to give to that. I’ve proved who I am with actions, which is more important. I just have bile left.” There’s love on the album too, specifically on Space Odyssey 2001, which recounts a first proper date with her now partner. On the surface it feels like a diss of the Kubrick classic, 2001: Space Odyssey, but is more about its poor choice given the context. “It’s the wrong film for a date,” she smiles, “but I love the film. I like making jokes in songs. I like that there’s this beautiful love song but it’s also complaining about this critically acclaimed film being too long. I don’t recommend it for a first date!”
While the album was finished at the end of 2021, Nash wasn’t sure what to do with it. Free from the typical record industry framework – no manager, no label, no booking agents – she did two things; went on tour in 2022, which was rejuvenating, and joined TikTok. Her first post was a timeline of her extraordinary career, which ended with her questioning the best way in which to release the new album (some of the songs, including Misery, Wasteman and Horsie, had already started to emerge without a label). That first post went viral, leading to an influx of offers from labels and managers, creating a scenario Nash had been in before; dealing with some of the industry’s shadier characters. One label, however, had been interested for a while. “Kill Rock Stars had been pursuing me for two years. They had been checking in for a while saying ‘we notice the album hasn’t come out, we really love it’.” Once Nash had secured an excellent new manager, the loose ends were tied up and the album was ready to go.
Recent one-off single, Change, released to coincide with the signing announcement, was an example of what having a label can give you. “I didn’t have to do anything,” she laughs. “I’ve been doing everything myself, alongside my band and my tour manager and my various managers, but I am always the driving force. But it’s like you’re driving a 16 wheeler – there’s so much you have to take responsibility for. What was so nice with this release was that I just did the creative bit and the stuff I’m good at. The label takes care of everything else.”
It’s been a refreshing change to be able to fully focus on the creative side. That creativity is also there in the artwork for 9 Sad Symphonies, which features Nash in front of an old school Hollywood backdrop that recalls British nature while also alluding to Nash’s on-off home of LA. That visual world will also extend to Nash’s always incredible live shows, which are a key goal for her in 2024. “You can always push things further and take it to a new place,” she says. “So with this album I want to play really quality shows.”
On 9 Sad Symphonies, Nash has taken another huge step towards cementing her place as one of Britain’s most unique and fearless talents. “I’ve climbed through the sewers of this industry and so my goal is to make good music I believe in, to have longevity, and have good live shows,” she states. “I make a living from my music, which is awesome.” As for other ambitions and expectations, she’s been doing this long enough to know not to place your hopes in things you can’t control. “I don’t feel competitive with the industry anymore. I’ve been in the game for twenty years, and I’m in my own league now.”
Nearly twenty years into her ever-evolving career, London and LA-based, Brit award-winning singer, songwriter, actor and activist Kate Nash has seen it all. She’s achieved huge commercial success – 2007’s debut Made of Bricks, featuring the hit single Foundations, reached number 1 in the UK and spent seven months in the top 40 – seen the darker side of the industry after being dropped in 2012 following 2010’s Bernard Butler-assisted My Best Friend Is You, forged her own path as a successful independent artist via 2013’s punk-y Girl Talk and 2018’s Yesterday Was Forever, and starred in HBO’s hit wrestling drama, GLOW. She’s also been the subject of an award-winning documentary, Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl, and also co-created a musical, Only Gold, with Hamilton choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler. Oh, and she also starred in that too. Still only 36, Nash isn’t finished shape-shifting just yet; after signing with legendary label Kill Rock Stars, whose alumni include Nash favourites Elliott Smith and Sleater-Kinney, in early 2024, she’ll release her fifth album, 9 Sad Symphonies, in June.
Inspired by old Hollywood, vintage musicals and a desperate quest to find beauty in a rotten world, it’s another sonic shift following her “rage-y” recent output. “It needed to be cinematic and dreamy,” Nash says of the 10-track album (the title is both a joke and an ode to passing achievable goals when creativity crumbles). As for the sonic shifts, it’s just second nature: “I do things based on what I’m feeling at the time, and what I’m inspired by,” she explains.
That moment of the album’s creation was fuelled by two things; her work on Only Gold and a global pandemic that curtailed filming on the fourth season of GLOW and sent Nash – and everyone – into a tailspin. After a period of laying bed watching zombie movies, creativity started to arrive in the autumn and winter of 2020, with songs being worked on well into 2021. Having worked with Danish producer Frederick Thaae on her musical, they quickly reconnected to start work on 9 Sad Symphonies. “We were in this completely different landscape for writing songs [on the musical], which was completely freeing,” Nash explains. “I was writing for a story, I was writing about a King and a Queen and a proper story arc. In that world you need the audience to understand the songs immediately, it’s very direct, and it has lots of editing which I’d never done. It changed my outlook on songwriting. Also, we said at the beginning that we wanted to make something beautiful, nothing harsh. I’ve done a lot of harsh stuff before. We wanted loads of beautiful string arrangements.”
These melodic, bright-on-the-surface but deeply layered songs started to emerge out of creative scenarios that had been completely changed by the pandemic. “We were on Zoom, which was… challenging,” she laughs. “We discussed ideas and then we’d hang up on Zoom, go away for three hours, or Frederick would send me the small thing we’d started, then I’d start writing and doing melodies and lyrics, and he would do production, and then we’d meet up on Zoom later.” Slowly the songs started to evolve, their unusual creation adding intriguing problems to try and overcome. “We’d get stuck a lot but you just had to let the stress go and come back to it. It’s a different version of the album to the one we would have made normally.”
The album’s curtain raiser, Millions of Heartbeats, sets out the album’s lyrical themes perfectly. “It’s about that point in the pandemic where I had lost my spark for life,” she says. “And I’m a pretty sparky person, so it was really sad to me.” She references the lyric “the spark is lit at such a low flame” as a crucial moment. “I felt like I lost a part of myself. I didn’t know how to get it back.” As with all of the songs on the album, it’s not just about one thing, however. “I think it also sums up a lot of how I feel about how people act in the world right now. Am I a number or am I a person? What are we trying to be right now? I’m a human being. But we’re so quantifiable and packaged and everyone is a brand. We’re in this capitalist explosion and I feel the effect of it in a way I’ve never felt before.” But it’s also a song that, by its end, flickers with a light that can’t be completely put out. “At the end of the day, the world is beautiful, there are all these heartbeats out there, and there is hope,” she says with a smile. “We have to try! You can’t fucking give up. This song is a sign of what’s to come – there’s going to be darkness and depression but we’ll get to hope by the end.”
A rare guitar appears on Ray, which delves deeper into mental health struggles, detailing depression and anxiety. It’s a theme Nash is keen to share with her fans in a typically honest manner. “It’s natural for an artist to write about emotions and feelings and darkness,” Nash says. “Also a lot of my fans suffer from depression too and I noticed it more when I was doing my livestream chats over lockdown. Not talking about it is not the solution. Being open and creating that community within my fanbase is really important.” It’s one she’s fostered not only via the Kickstarter campaigns that funded Girl Talk and Yesterday Was Forever, but also her Patreon account which she used in the pandemic to connect with her loyal fans via livestreams.
That darkness also weaves through Misery, which marries a propulsive string arrangement and a buoyant beat to lyrics that try to outrun the emotion of its title, while the livid My Bile is an emotional exorcism married to beatific strings and crashing drums. “I guess that song is the little patience I have left to give to all the bullshit, all the shitty parts of the industry, the media, the way people talk to other human beings, me as a woman in the industry, all the things people say about you online,” she explains. “I’m done. I don’t have anything left to give to that. I’ve proved who I am with actions, which is more important. I just have bile left.” There’s love on the album too, specifically on Space Odyssey 2001, which recounts a first proper date with her now partner. On the surface it feels like a diss of the Kubrick classic, 2001: Space Odyssey, but is more about its poor choice given the context. “It’s the wrong film for a date,” she smiles, “but I love the film. I like making jokes in songs. I like that there’s this beautiful love song but it’s also complaining about this critically acclaimed film being too long. I don’t recommend it for a first date!”
While the album was finished at the end of 2021, Nash wasn’t sure what to do with it. Free from the typical record industry framework – no manager, no label, no booking agents – she did two things; went on tour in 2022, which was rejuvenating, and joined TikTok. Her first post was a timeline of her extraordinary career, which ended with her questioning the best way in which to release the new album (some of the songs, including Misery, Wasteman and Horsie, had already started to emerge without a label). That first post went viral, leading to an influx of offers from labels and managers, creating a scenario Nash had been in before; dealing with some of the industry’s shadier characters. One label, however, had been interested for a while. “Kill Rock Stars had been pursuing me for two years. They had been checking in for a while saying ‘we notice the album hasn’t come out, we really love it’.” Once Nash had secured an excellent new manager, the loose ends were tied up and the album was ready to go.
Recent one-off single, Change, released to coincide with the signing announcement, was an example of what having a label can give you. “I didn’t have to do anything,” she laughs. “I’ve been doing everything myself, alongside my band and my tour manager and my various managers, but I am always the driving force. But it’s like you’re driving a 16 wheeler – there’s so much you have to take responsibility for. What was so nice with this release was that I just did the creative bit and the stuff I’m good at. The label takes care of everything else.”
It’s been a refreshing change to be able to fully focus on the creative side. That creativity is also there in the artwork for 9 Sad Symphonies, which features Nash in front of an old school Hollywood backdrop that recalls British nature while also alluding to Nash’s on-off home of LA. That visual world will also extend to Nash’s always incredible live shows, which are a key goal for her in 2024. “You can always push things further and take it to a new place,” she says. “So with this album I want to play really quality shows.”
On 9 Sad Symphonies, Nash has taken another huge step towards cementing her place as one of Britain’s most unique and fearless talents. “I’ve climbed through the sewers of this industry and so my goal is to make good music I believe in, to have longevity, and have good live shows,” she states. “I make a living from my music, which is awesome.” As for other ambitions and expectations, she’s been doing this long enough to know not to place your hopes in things you can’t control. “I don’t feel competitive with the industry anymore. I’ve been in the game for twenty years, and I’m in my own league now.”
Nearly twenty years into her ever-evolving career, London and LA-based, Brit award-winning singer, songwriter, actor and activist Kate Nash has seen it all. She’s achieved huge commercial success – 2007’s debut Made of Bricks, featuring the hit single Foundations, reached number 1 in the UK and spent seven months in the top 40 – seen the darker side of the industry after being dropped in 2012 following 2010’s Bernard Butler-assisted My Best Friend Is You, forged her own path as a successful independent artist via 2013’s punk-y Girl Talk and 2018’s Yesterday Was Forever, and starred in HBO’s hit wrestling drama, GLOW. She’s also been the subject of an award-winning documentary, Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl, and also co-created a musical, Only Gold, with Hamilton choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler. Oh, and she also starred in that too. Still only 36, Nash isn’t finished shape-shifting just yet; after signing with legendary label Kill Rock Stars, whose alumni include Nash favourites Elliott Smith and Sleater-Kinney, in early 2024, she’ll release her fifth album, 9 Sad Symphonies, in June.
Inspired by old Hollywood, vintage musicals and a desperate quest to find beauty in a rotten world, it’s another sonic shift following her “rage-y” recent output. “It needed to be cinematic and dreamy,” Nash says of the 10-track album (the title is both a joke and an ode to passing achievable goals when creativity crumbles). As for the sonic shifts, it’s just second nature: “I do things based on what I’m feeling at the time, and what I’m inspired by,” she explains.
That moment of the album’s creation was fuelled by two things; her work on Only Gold and a global pandemic that curtailed filming on the fourth season of GLOW and sent Nash – and everyone – into a tailspin. After a period of laying bed watching zombie movies, creativity started to arrive in the autumn and winter of 2020, with songs being worked on well into 2021. Having worked with Danish producer Frederick Thaae on her musical, they quickly reconnected to start work on 9 Sad Symphonies. “We were in this completely different landscape for writing songs [on the musical], which was completely freeing,” Nash explains. “I was writing for a story, I was writing about a King and a Queen and a proper story arc. In that world you need the audience to understand the songs immediately, it’s very direct, and it has lots of editing which I’d never done. It changed my outlook on songwriting. Also, we said at the beginning that we wanted to make something beautiful, nothing harsh. I’ve done a lot of harsh stuff before. We wanted loads of beautiful string arrangements.”
These melodic, bright-on-the-surface but deeply layered songs started to emerge out of creative scenarios that had been completely changed by the pandemic. “We were on Zoom, which was… challenging,” she laughs. “We discussed ideas and then we’d hang up on Zoom, go away for three hours, or Frederick would send me the small thing we’d started, then I’d start writing and doing melodies and lyrics, and he would do production, and then we’d meet up on Zoom later.” Slowly the songs started to evolve, their unusual creation adding intriguing problems to try and overcome. “We’d get stuck a lot but you just had to let the stress go and come back to it. It’s a different version of the album to the one we would have made normally.”
The album’s curtain raiser, Millions of Heartbeats, sets out the album’s lyrical themes perfectly. “It’s about that point in the pandemic where I had lost my spark for life,” she says. “And I’m a pretty sparky person, so it was really sad to me.” She references the lyric “the spark is lit at such a low flame” as a crucial moment. “I felt like I lost a part of myself. I didn’t know how to get it back.” As with all of the songs on the album, it’s not just about one thing, however. “I think it also sums up a lot of how I feel about how people act in the world right now. Am I a number or am I a person? What are we trying to be right now? I’m a human being. But we’re so quantifiable and packaged and everyone is a brand. We’re in this capitalist explosion and I feel the effect of it in a way I’ve never felt before.” But it’s also a song that, by its end, flickers with a light that can’t be completely put out. “At the end of the day, the world is beautiful, there are all these heartbeats out there, and there is hope,” she says with a smile. “We have to try! You can’t fucking give up. This song is a sign of what’s to come – there’s going to be darkness and depression but we’ll get to hope by the end.”
A rare guitar appears on Ray, which delves deeper into mental health struggles, detailing depression and anxiety. It’s a theme Nash is keen to share with her fans in a typically honest manner. “It’s natural for an artist to write about emotions and feelings and darkness,” Nash says. “Also a lot of my fans suffer from depression too and I noticed it more when I was doing my livestream chats over lockdown. Not talking about it is not the solution. Being open and creating that community within my fanbase is really important.” It’s one she’s fostered not only via the Kickstarter campaigns that funded Girl Talk and Yesterday Was Forever, but also her Patreon account which she used in the pandemic to connect with her loyal fans via livestreams.
That darkness also weaves through Misery, which marries a propulsive string arrangement and a buoyant beat to lyrics that try to outrun the emotion of its title, while the livid My Bile is an emotional exorcism married to beatific strings and crashing drums. “I guess that song is the little patience I have left to give to all the bullshit, all the shitty parts of the industry, the media, the way people talk to other human beings, me as a woman in the industry, all the things people say about you online,” she explains. “I’m done. I don’t have anything left to give to that. I’ve proved who I am with actions, which is more important. I just have bile left.” There’s love on the album too, specifically on Space Odyssey 2001, which recounts a first proper date with her now partner. On the surface it feels like a diss of the Kubrick classic, 2001: Space Odyssey, but is more about its poor choice given the context. “It’s the wrong film for a date,” she smiles, “but I love the film. I like making jokes in songs. I like that there’s this beautiful love song but it’s also complaining about this critically acclaimed film being too long. I don’t recommend it for a first date!”
While the album was finished at the end of 2021, Nash wasn’t sure what to do with it. Free from the typical record industry framework – no manager, no label, no booking agents – she did two things; went on tour in 2022, which was rejuvenating, and joined TikTok. Her first post was a timeline of her extraordinary career, which ended with her questioning the best way in which to release the new album (some of the songs, including Misery, Wasteman and Horsie, had already started to emerge without a label). That first post went viral, leading to an influx of offers from labels and managers, creating a scenario Nash had been in before; dealing with some of the industry’s shadier characters. One label, however, had been interested for a while. “Kill Rock Stars had been pursuing me for two years. They had been checking in for a while saying ‘we notice the album hasn’t come out, we really love it’.” Once Nash had secured an excellent new manager, the loose ends were tied up and the album was ready to go.
Recent one-off single, Change, released to coincide with the signing announcement, was an example of what having a label can give you. “I didn’t have to do anything,” she laughs. “I’ve been doing everything myself, alongside my band and my tour manager and my various managers, but I am always the driving force. But it’s like you’re driving a 16 wheeler – there’s so much you have to take responsibility for. What was so nice with this release was that I just did the creative bit and the stuff I’m good at. The label takes care of everything else.”
It’s been a refreshing change to be able to fully focus on the creative side. That creativity is also there in the artwork for 9 Sad Symphonies, which features Nash in front of an old school Hollywood backdrop that recalls British nature while also alluding to Nash’s on-off home of LA. That visual world will also extend to Nash’s always incredible live shows, which are a key goal for her in 2024. “You can always push things further and take it to a new place,” she says. “So with this album I want to play really quality shows.”
On 9 Sad Symphonies, Nash has taken another huge step towards cementing her place as one of Britain’s most unique and fearless talents. “I’ve climbed through the sewers of this industry and so my goal is to make good music I believe in, to have longevity, and have good live shows,” she states. “I make a living from my music, which is awesome.” As for other ambitions and expectations, she’s been doing this long enough to know not to place your hopes in things you can’t control. “I don’t feel competitive with the industry anymore. I’ve been in the game for twenty years, and I’m in my own league now.”
Nearly twenty years into her ever-evolving career, London and LA-based, Brit award-winning singer, songwriter, actor and activist Kate Nash has seen it all. She’s achieved huge commercial success – 2007’s debut Made of Bricks, featuring the hit single Foundations, reached number 1 in the UK and spent seven months in the top 40 – seen the darker side of the industry after being dropped in 2012 following 2010’s Bernard Butler-assisted My Best Friend Is You, forged her own path as a successful independent artist via 2013’s punk-y Girl Talk and 2018’s Yesterday Was Forever, and starred in HBO’s hit wrestling drama, GLOW. She’s also been the subject of an award-winning documentary, Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl, and also co-created a musical, Only Gold, with Hamilton choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler. Oh, and she also starred in that too. Still only 36, Nash isn’t finished shape-shifting just yet; after signing with legendary label Kill Rock Stars, whose alumni include Nash favourites Elliott Smith and Sleater-Kinney, in early 2024, she’ll release her fifth album, 9 Sad Symphonies, in June.
Inspired by old Hollywood, vintage musicals and a desperate quest to find beauty in a rotten world, it’s another sonic shift following her “rage-y” recent output. “It needed to be cinematic and dreamy,” Nash says of the 10-track album (the title is both a joke and an ode to passing achievable goals when creativity crumbles). As for the sonic shifts, it’s just second nature: “I do things based on what I’m feeling at the time, and what I’m inspired by,” she explains.
That moment of the album’s creation was fuelled by two things; her work on Only Gold and a global pandemic that curtailed filming on the fourth season of GLOW and sent Nash – and everyone – into a tailspin. After a period of laying bed watching zombie movies, creativity started to arrive in the autumn and winter of 2020, with songs being worked on well into 2021. Having worked with Danish producer Frederick Thaae on her musical, they quickly reconnected to start work on 9 Sad Symphonies. “We were in this completely different landscape for writing songs [on the musical], which was completely freeing,” Nash explains. “I was writing for a story, I was writing about a King and a Queen and a proper story arc. In that world you need the audience to understand the songs immediately, it’s very direct, and it has lots of editing which I’d never done. It changed my outlook on songwriting. Also, we said at the beginning that we wanted to make something beautiful, nothing harsh. I’ve done a lot of harsh stuff before. We wanted loads of beautiful string arrangements.”
These melodic, bright-on-the-surface but deeply layered songs started to emerge out of creative scenarios that had been completely changed by the pandemic. “We were on Zoom, which was… challenging,” she laughs. “We discussed ideas and then we’d hang up on Zoom, go away for three hours, or Frederick would send me the small thing we’d started, then I’d start writing and doing melodies and lyrics, and he would do production, and then we’d meet up on Zoom later.” Slowly the songs started to evolve, their unusual creation adding intriguing problems to try and overcome. “We’d get stuck a lot but you just had to let the stress go and come back to it. It’s a different version of the album to the one we would have made normally.”
The album’s curtain raiser, Millions of Heartbeats, sets out the album’s lyrical themes perfectly. “It’s about that point in the pandemic where I had lost my spark for life,” she says. “And I’m a pretty sparky person, so it was really sad to me.” She references the lyric “the spark is lit at such a low flame” as a crucial moment. “I felt like I lost a part of myself. I didn’t know how to get it back.” As with all of the songs on the album, it’s not just about one thing, however. “I think it also sums up a lot of how I feel about how people act in the world right now. Am I a number or am I a person? What are we trying to be right now? I’m a human being. But we’re so quantifiable and packaged and everyone is a brand. We’re in this capitalist explosion and I feel the effect of it in a way I’ve never felt before.” But it’s also a song that, by its end, flickers with a light that can’t be completely put out. “At the end of the day, the world is beautiful, there are all these heartbeats out there, and there is hope,” she says with a smile. “We have to try! You can’t fucking give up. This song is a sign of what’s to come – there’s going to be darkness and depression but we’ll get to hope by the end.”
A rare guitar appears on Ray, which delves deeper into mental health struggles, detailing depression and anxiety. It’s a theme Nash is keen to share with her fans in a typically honest manner. “It’s natural for an artist to write about emotions and feelings and darkness,” Nash says. “Also a lot of my fans suffer from depression too and I noticed it more when I was doing my livestream chats over lockdown. Not talking about it is not the solution. Being open and creating that community within my fanbase is really important.” It’s one she’s fostered not only via the Kickstarter campaigns that funded Girl Talk and Yesterday Was Forever, but also her Patreon account which she used in the pandemic to connect with her loyal fans via livestreams.
That darkness also weaves through Misery, which marries a propulsive string arrangement and a buoyant beat to lyrics that try to outrun the emotion of its title, while the livid My Bile is an emotional exorcism married to beatific strings and crashing drums. “I guess that song is the little patience I have left to give to all the bullshit, all the shitty parts of the industry, the media, the way people talk to other human beings, me as a woman in the industry, all the things people say about you online,” she explains. “I’m done. I don’t have anything left to give to that. I’ve proved who I am with actions, which is more important. I just have bile left.” There’s love on the album too, specifically on Space Odyssey 2001, which recounts a first proper date with her now partner. On the surface it feels like a diss of the Kubrick classic, 2001: Space Odyssey, but is more about its poor choice given the context. “It’s the wrong film for a date,” she smiles, “but I love the film. I like making jokes in songs. I like that there’s this beautiful love song but it’s also complaining about this critically acclaimed film being too long. I don’t recommend it for a first date!”
While the album was finished at the end of 2021, Nash wasn’t sure what to do with it. Free from the typical record industry framework – no manager, no label, no booking agents – she did two things; went on tour in 2022, which was rejuvenating, and joined TikTok. Her first post was a timeline of her extraordinary career, which ended with her questioning the best way in which to release the new album (some of the songs, including Misery, Wasteman and Horsie, had already started to emerge without a label). That first post went viral, leading to an influx of offers from labels and managers, creating a scenario Nash had been in before; dealing with some of the industry’s shadier characters. One label, however, had been interested for a while. “Kill Rock Stars had been pursuing me for two years. They had been checking in for a while saying ‘we notice the album hasn’t come out, we really love it’.” Once Nash had secured an excellent new manager, the loose ends were tied up and the album was ready to go.
Recent one-off single, Change, released to coincide with the signing announcement, was an example of what having a label can give you. “I didn’t have to do anything,” she laughs. “I’ve been doing everything myself, alongside my band and my tour manager and my various managers, but I am always the driving force. But it’s like you’re driving a 16 wheeler – there’s so much you have to take responsibility for. What was so nice with this release was that I just did the creative bit and the stuff I’m good at. The label takes care of everything else.”
It’s been a refreshing change to be able to fully focus on the creative side. That creativity is also there in the artwork for 9 Sad Symphonies, which features Nash in front of an old school Hollywood backdrop that recalls British nature while also alluding to Nash’s on-off home of LA. That visual world will also extend to Nash’s always incredible live shows, which are a key goal for her in 2024. “You can always push things further and take it to a new place,” she says. “So with this album I want to play really quality shows.”
On 9 Sad Symphonies, Nash has taken another huge step towards cementing her place as one of Britain’s most unique and fearless talents. “I’ve climbed through the sewers of this industry and so my goal is to make good music I believe in, to have longevity, and have good live shows,” she states. “I make a living from my music, which is awesome.” As for other ambitions and expectations, she’s been doing this long enough to know not to place your hopes in things you can’t control. “I don’t feel competitive with the industry anymore. I’ve been in the game for twenty years, and I’m in my own league now.”
Nearly twenty years into her ever-evolving career, London and LA-based, Brit award-winning singer, songwriter, actor and activist Kate Nash has seen it all. She’s achieved huge commercial success – 2007’s debut Made of Bricks, featuring the hit single Foundations, reached number 1 in the UK and spent seven months in the top 40 – seen the darker side of the industry after being dropped in 2012 following 2010’s Bernard Butler-assisted My Best Friend Is You, forged her own path as a successful independent artist via 2013’s punk-y Girl Talk and 2018’s Yesterday Was Forever, and starred in HBO’s hit wrestling drama, GLOW. She’s also been the subject of an award-winning documentary, Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl, and also co-created a musical, Only Gold, with Hamilton choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler. Oh, and she also starred in that too. Still only 36, Nash isn’t finished shape-shifting just yet; after signing with legendary label Kill Rock Stars, whose alumni include Nash favourites Elliott Smith and Sleater-Kinney, in early 2024, she’ll release her fifth album, 9 Sad Symphonies, in June.
Inspired by old Hollywood, vintage musicals and a desperate quest to find beauty in a rotten world, it’s another sonic shift following her “rage-y” recent output. “It needed to be cinematic and dreamy,” Nash says of the 10-track album (the title is both a joke and an ode to passing achievable goals when creativity crumbles). As for the sonic shifts, it’s just second nature: “I do things based on what I’m feeling at the time, and what I’m inspired by,” she explains.
That moment of the album’s creation was fuelled by two things; her work on Only Gold and a global pandemic that curtailed filming on the fourth season of GLOW and sent Nash – and everyone – into a tailspin. After a period of laying bed watching zombie movies, creativity started to arrive in the autumn and winter of 2020, with songs being worked on well into 2021. Having worked with Danish producer Frederick Thaae on her musical, they quickly reconnected to start work on 9 Sad Symphonies. “We were in this completely different landscape for writing songs [on the musical], which was completely freeing,” Nash explains. “I was writing for a story, I was writing about a King and a Queen and a proper story arc. In that world you need the audience to understand the songs immediately, it’s very direct, and it has lots of editing which I’d never done. It changed my outlook on songwriting. Also, we said at the beginning that we wanted to make something beautiful, nothing harsh. I’ve done a lot of harsh stuff before. We wanted loads of beautiful string arrangements.”
These melodic, bright-on-the-surface but deeply layered songs started to emerge out of creative scenarios that had been completely changed by the pandemic. “We were on Zoom, which was… challenging,” she laughs. “We discussed ideas and then we’d hang up on Zoom, go away for three hours, or Frederick would send me the small thing we’d started, then I’d start writing and doing melodies and lyrics, and he would do production, and then we’d meet up on Zoom later.” Slowly the songs started to evolve, their unusual creation adding intriguing problems to try and overcome. “We’d get stuck a lot but you just had to let the stress go and come back to it. It’s a different version of the album to the one we would have made normally.”
The album’s curtain raiser, Millions of Heartbeats, sets out the album’s lyrical themes perfectly. “It’s about that point in the pandemic where I had lost my spark for life,” she says. “And I’m a pretty sparky person, so it was really sad to me.” She references the lyric “the spark is lit at such a low flame” as a crucial moment. “I felt like I lost a part of myself. I didn’t know how to get it back.” As with all of the songs on the album, it’s not just about one thing, however. “I think it also sums up a lot of how I feel about how people act in the world right now. Am I a number or am I a person? What are we trying to be right now? I’m a human being. But we’re so quantifiable and packaged and everyone is a brand. We’re in this capitalist explosion and I feel the effect of it in a way I’ve never felt before.” But it’s also a song that, by its end, flickers with a light that can’t be completely put out. “At the end of the day, the world is beautiful, there are all these heartbeats out there, and there is hope,” she says with a smile. “We have to try! You can’t fucking give up. This song is a sign of what’s to come – there’s going to be darkness and depression but we’ll get to hope by the end.”
A rare guitar appears on Ray, which delves deeper into mental health struggles, detailing depression and anxiety. It’s a theme Nash is keen to share with her fans in a typically honest manner. “It’s natural for an artist to write about emotions and feelings and darkness,” Nash says. “Also a lot of my fans suffer from depression too and I noticed it more when I was doing my livestream chats over lockdown. Not talking about it is not the solution. Being open and creating that community within my fanbase is really important.” It’s one she’s fostered not only via the Kickstarter campaigns that funded Girl Talk and Yesterday Was Forever, but also her Patreon account which she used in the pandemic to connect with her loyal fans via livestreams.
That darkness also weaves through Misery, which marries a propulsive string arrangement and a buoyant beat to lyrics that try to outrun the emotion of its title, while the livid My Bile is an emotional exorcism married to beatific strings and crashing drums. “I guess that song is the little patience I have left to give to all the bullshit, all the shitty parts of the industry, the media, the way people talk to other human beings, me as a woman in the industry, all the things people say about you online,” she explains. “I’m done. I don’t have anything left to give to that. I’ve proved who I am with actions, which is more important. I just have bile left.” There’s love on the album too, specifically on Space Odyssey 2001, which recounts a first proper date with her now partner. On the surface it feels like a diss of the Kubrick classic, 2001: Space Odyssey, but is more about its poor choice given the context. “It’s the wrong film for a date,” she smiles, “but I love the film. I like making jokes in songs. I like that there’s this beautiful love song but it’s also complaining about this critically acclaimed film being too long. I don’t recommend it for a first date!”
While the album was finished at the end of 2021, Nash wasn’t sure what to do with it. Free from the typical record industry framework – no manager, no label, no booking agents – she did two things; went on tour in 2022, which was rejuvenating, and joined TikTok. Her first post was a timeline of her extraordinary career, which ended with her questioning the best way in which to release the new album (some of the songs, including Misery, Wasteman and Horsie, had already started to emerge without a label). That first post went viral, leading to an influx of offers from labels and managers, creating a scenario Nash had been in before; dealing with some of the industry’s shadier characters. One label, however, had been interested for a while. “Kill Rock Stars had been pursuing me for two years. They had been checking in for a while saying ‘we notice the album hasn’t come out, we really love it’.” Once Nash had secured an excellent new manager, the loose ends were tied up and the album was ready to go.
Recent one-off single, Change, released to coincide with the signing announcement, was an example of what having a label can give you. “I didn’t have to do anything,” she laughs. “I’ve been doing everything myself, alongside my band and my tour manager and my various managers, but I am always the driving force. But it’s like you’re driving a 16 wheeler – there’s so much you have to take responsibility for. What was so nice with this release was that I just did the creative bit and the stuff I’m good at. The label takes care of everything else.”
It’s been a refreshing change to be able to fully focus on the creative side. That creativity is also there in the artwork for 9 Sad Symphonies, which features Nash in front of an old school Hollywood backdrop that recalls British nature while also alluding to Nash’s on-off home of LA. That visual world will also extend to Nash’s always incredible live shows, which are a key goal for her in 2024. “You can always push things further and take it to a new place,” she says. “So with this album I want to play really quality shows.”
On 9 Sad Symphonies, Nash has taken another huge step towards cementing her place as one of Britain’s most unique and fearless talents. “I’ve climbed through the sewers of this industry and so my goal is to make good music I believe in, to have longevity, and have good live shows,” she states. “I make a living from my music, which is awesome.” As for other ambitions and expectations, she’s been doing this long enough to know not to place your hopes in things you can’t control. “I don’t feel competitive with the industry anymore. I’ve been in the game for twenty years, and I’m in my own league now.”
Nearly twenty years into her ever-evolving career, London and LA-based, Brit award-winning singer, songwriter, actor and activist Kate Nash has seen it all. She’s achieved huge commercial success – 2007’s debut Made of Bricks, featuring the hit single Foundations, reached number 1 in the UK and spent seven months in the top 40 – seen the darker side of the industry after being dropped in 2012 following 2010’s Bernard Butler-assisted My Best Friend Is You, forged her own path as a successful independent artist via 2013’s punk-y Girl Talk and 2018’s Yesterday Was Forever, and starred in HBO’s hit wrestling drama, GLOW. She’s also been the subject of an award-winning documentary, Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl, and also co-created a musical, Only Gold, with Hamilton choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler. Oh, and she also starred in that too. Still only 36, Nash isn’t finished shape-shifting just yet; after signing with legendary label Kill Rock Stars, whose alumni include Nash favourites Elliott Smith and Sleater-Kinney, in early 2024, she’ll release her fifth album, 9 Sad Symphonies, in June.
Inspired by old Hollywood, vintage musicals and a desperate quest to find beauty in a rotten world, it’s another sonic shift following her “rage-y” recent output. “It needed to be cinematic and dreamy,” Nash says of the 10-track album (the title is both a joke and an ode to passing achievable goals when creativity crumbles). As for the sonic shifts, it’s just second nature: “I do things based on what I’m feeling at the time, and what I’m inspired by,” she explains.
That moment of the album’s creation was fuelled by two things; her work on Only Gold and a global pandemic that curtailed filming on the fourth season of GLOW and sent Nash – and everyone – into a tailspin. After a period of laying bed watching zombie movies, creativity started to arrive in the autumn and winter of 2020, with songs being worked on well into 2021. Having worked with Danish producer Frederick Thaae on her musical, they quickly reconnected to start work on 9 Sad Symphonies. “We were in this completely different landscape for writing songs [on the musical], which was completely freeing,” Nash explains. “I was writing for a story, I was writing about a King and a Queen and a proper story arc. In that world you need the audience to understand the songs immediately, it’s very direct, and it has lots of editing which I’d never done. It changed my outlook on songwriting. Also, we said at the beginning that we wanted to make something beautiful, nothing harsh. I’ve done a lot of harsh stuff before. We wanted loads of beautiful string arrangements.”
These melodic, bright-on-the-surface but deeply layered songs started to emerge out of creative scenarios that had been completely changed by the pandemic. “We were on Zoom, which was… challenging,” she laughs. “We discussed ideas and then we’d hang up on Zoom, go away for three hours, or Frederick would send me the small thing we’d started, then I’d start writing and doing melodies and lyrics, and he would do production, and then we’d meet up on Zoom later.” Slowly the songs started to evolve, their unusual creation adding intriguing problems to try and overcome. “We’d get stuck a lot but you just had to let the stress go and come back to it. It’s a different version of the album to the one we would have made normally.”
The album’s curtain raiser, Millions of Heartbeats, sets out the album’s lyrical themes perfectly. “It’s about that point in the pandemic where I had lost my spark for life,” she says. “And I’m a pretty sparky person, so it was really sad to me.” She references the lyric “the spark is lit at such a low flame” as a crucial moment. “I felt like I lost a part of myself. I didn’t know how to get it back.” As with all of the songs on the album, it’s not just about one thing, however. “I think it also sums up a lot of how I feel about how people act in the world right now. Am I a number or am I a person? What are we trying to be right now? I’m a human being. But we’re so quantifiable and packaged and everyone is a brand. We’re in this capitalist explosion and I feel the effect of it in a way I’ve never felt before.” But it’s also a song that, by its end, flickers with a light that can’t be completely put out. “At the end of the day, the world is beautiful, there are all these heartbeats out there, and there is hope,” she says with a smile. “We have to try! You can’t fucking give up. This song is a sign of what’s to come – there’s going to be darkness and depression but we’ll get to hope by the end.”
A rare guitar appears on Ray, which delves deeper into mental health struggles, detailing depression and anxiety. It’s a theme Nash is keen to share with her fans in a typically honest manner. “It’s natural for an artist to write about emotions and feelings and darkness,” Nash says. “Also a lot of my fans suffer from depression too and I noticed it more when I was doing my livestream chats over lockdown. Not talking about it is not the solution. Being open and creating that community within my fanbase is really important.” It’s one she’s fostered not only via the Kickstarter campaigns that funded Girl Talk and Yesterday Was Forever, but also her Patreon account which she used in the pandemic to connect with her loyal fans via livestreams.
That darkness also weaves through Misery, which marries a propulsive string arrangement and a buoyant beat to lyrics that try to outrun the emotion of its title, while the livid My Bile is an emotional exorcism married to beatific strings and crashing drums. “I guess that song is the little patience I have left to give to all the bullshit, all the shitty parts of the industry, the media, the way people talk to other human beings, me as a woman in the industry, all the things people say about you online,” she explains. “I’m done. I don’t have anything left to give to that. I’ve proved who I am with actions, which is more important. I just have bile left.” There’s love on the album too, specifically on Space Odyssey 2001, which recounts a first proper date with her now partner. On the surface it feels like a diss of the Kubrick classic, 2001: Space Odyssey, but is more about its poor choice given the context. “It’s the wrong film for a date,” she smiles, “but I love the film. I like making jokes in songs. I like that there’s this beautiful love song but it’s also complaining about this critically acclaimed film being too long. I don’t recommend it for a first date!”
While the album was finished at the end of 2021, Nash wasn’t sure what to do with it. Free from the typical record industry framework – no manager, no label, no booking agents – she did two things; went on tour in 2022, which was rejuvenating, and joined TikTok. Her first post was a timeline of her extraordinary career, which ended with her questioning the best way in which to release the new album (some of the songs, including Misery, Wasteman and Horsie, had already started to emerge without a label). That first post went viral, leading to an influx of offers from labels and managers, creating a scenario Nash had been in before; dealing with some of the industry’s shadier characters. One label, however, had been interested for a while. “Kill Rock Stars had been pursuing me for two years. They had been checking in for a while saying ‘we notice the album hasn’t come out, we really love it’.” Once Nash had secured an excellent new manager, the loose ends were tied up and the album was ready to go.
Recent one-off single, Change, released to coincide with the signing announcement, was an example of what having a label can give you. “I didn’t have to do anything,” she laughs. “I’ve been doing everything myself, alongside my band and my tour manager and my various managers, but I am always the driving force. But it’s like you’re driving a 16 wheeler – there’s so much you have to take responsibility for. What was so nice with this release was that I just did the creative bit and the stuff I’m good at. The label takes care of everything else.”
It’s been a refreshing change to be able to fully focus on the creative side. That creativity is also there in the artwork for 9 Sad Symphonies, which features Nash in front of an old school Hollywood backdrop that recalls British nature while also alluding to Nash’s on-off home of LA. That visual world will also extend to Nash’s always incredible live shows, which are a key goal for her in 2024. “You can always push things further and take it to a new place,” she says. “So with this album I want to play really quality shows.”
On 9 Sad Symphonies, Nash has taken another huge step towards cementing her place as one of Britain’s most unique and fearless talents. “I’ve climbed through the sewers of this industry and so my goal is to make good music I believe in, to have longevity, and have good live shows,” she states. “I make a living from my music, which is awesome.” As for other ambitions and expectations, she’s been doing this long enough to know not to place your hopes in things you can’t control. “I don’t feel competitive with the industry anymore. I’ve been in the game for twenty years, and I’m in my own league now.”
Nearly twenty years into her ever-evolving career, London and LA-based, Brit award-winning singer, songwriter, actor and activist Kate Nash has seen it all. She’s achieved huge commercial success – 2007’s debut Made of Bricks, featuring the hit single Foundations, reached number 1 in the UK and spent seven months in the top 40 – seen the darker side of the industry after being dropped in 2012 following 2010’s Bernard Butler-assisted My Best Friend Is You, forged her own path as a successful independent artist via 2013’s punk-y Girl Talk and 2018’s Yesterday Was Forever, and starred in HBO’s hit wrestling drama, GLOW. She’s also been the subject of an award-winning documentary, Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl, and also co-created a musical, Only Gold, with Hamilton choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler. Oh, and she also starred in that too. Still only 36, Nash isn’t finished shape-shifting just yet; after signing with legendary label Kill Rock Stars, whose alumni include Nash favourites Elliott Smith and Sleater-Kinney, in early 2024, she’ll release her fifth album, 9 Sad Symphonies, in June.
Inspired by old Hollywood, vintage musicals and a desperate quest to find beauty in a rotten world, it’s another sonic shift following her “rage-y” recent output. “It needed to be cinematic and dreamy,” Nash says of the 10-track album (the title is both a joke and an ode to passing achievable goals when creativity crumbles). As for the sonic shifts, it’s just second nature: “I do things based on what I’m feeling at the time, and what I’m inspired by,” she explains.
That moment of the album’s creation was fuelled by two things; her work on Only Gold and a global pandemic that curtailed filming on the fourth season of GLOW and sent Nash – and everyone – into a tailspin. After a period of laying bed watching zombie movies, creativity started to arrive in the autumn and winter of 2020, with songs being worked on well into 2021. Having worked with Danish producer Frederick Thaae on her musical, they quickly reconnected to start work on 9 Sad Symphonies. “We were in this completely different landscape for writing songs [on the musical], which was completely freeing,” Nash explains. “I was writing for a story, I was writing about a King and a Queen and a proper story arc. In that world you need the audience to understand the songs immediately, it’s very direct, and it has lots of editing which I’d never done. It changed my outlook on songwriting. Also, we said at the beginning that we wanted to make something beautiful, nothing harsh. I’ve done a lot of harsh stuff before. We wanted loads of beautiful string arrangements.”
These melodic, bright-on-the-surface but deeply layered songs started to emerge out of creative scenarios that had been completely changed by the pandemic. “We were on Zoom, which was… challenging,” she laughs. “We discussed ideas and then we’d hang up on Zoom, go away for three hours, or Frederick would send me the small thing we’d started, then I’d start writing and doing melodies and lyrics, and he would do production, and then we’d meet up on Zoom later.” Slowly the songs started to evolve, their unusual creation adding intriguing problems to try and overcome. “We’d get stuck a lot but you just had to let the stress go and come back to it. It’s a different version of the album to the one we would have made normally.”
The album’s curtain raiser, Millions of Heartbeats, sets out the album’s lyrical themes perfectly. “It’s about that point in the pandemic where I had lost my spark for life,” she says. “And I’m a pretty sparky person, so it was really sad to me.” She references the lyric “the spark is lit at such a low flame” as a crucial moment. “I felt like I lost a part of myself. I didn’t know how to get it back.” As with all of the songs on the album, it’s not just about one thing, however. “I think it also sums up a lot of how I feel about how people act in the world right now. Am I a number or am I a person? What are we trying to be right now? I’m a human being. But we’re so quantifiable and packaged and everyone is a brand. We’re in this capitalist explosion and I feel the effect of it in a way I’ve never felt before.” But it’s also a song that, by its end, flickers with a light that can’t be completely put out. “At the end of the day, the world is beautiful, there are all these heartbeats out there, and there is hope,” she says with a smile. “We have to try! You can’t fucking give up. This song is a sign of what’s to come – there’s going to be darkness and depression but we’ll get to hope by the end.”
A rare guitar appears on Ray, which delves deeper into mental health struggles, detailing depression and anxiety. It’s a theme Nash is keen to share with her fans in a typically honest manner. “It’s natural for an artist to write about emotions and feelings and darkness,” Nash says. “Also a lot of my fans suffer from depression too and I noticed it more when I was doing my livestream chats over lockdown. Not talking about it is not the solution. Being open and creating that community within my fanbase is really important.” It’s one she’s fostered not only via the Kickstarter campaigns that funded Girl Talk and Yesterday Was Forever, but also her Patreon account which she used in the pandemic to connect with her loyal fans via livestreams.
That darkness also weaves through Misery, which marries a propulsive string arrangement and a buoyant beat to lyrics that try to outrun the emotion of its title, while the livid My Bile is an emotional exorcism married to beatific strings and crashing drums. “I guess that song is the little patience I have left to give to all the bullshit, all the shitty parts of the industry, the media, the way people talk to other human beings, me as a woman in the industry, all the things people say about you online,” she explains. “I’m done. I don’t have anything left to give to that. I’ve proved who I am with actions, which is more important. I just have bile left.” There’s love on the album too, specifically on Space Odyssey 2001, which recounts a first proper date with her now partner. On the surface it feels like a diss of the Kubrick classic, 2001: Space Odyssey, but is more about its poor choice given the context. “It’s the wrong film for a date,” she smiles, “but I love the film. I like making jokes in songs. I like that there’s this beautiful love song but it’s also complaining about this critically acclaimed film being too long. I don’t recommend it for a first date!”
While the album was finished at the end of 2021, Nash wasn’t sure what to do with it. Free from the typical record industry framework – no manager, no label, no booking agents – she did two things; went on tour in 2022, which was rejuvenating, and joined TikTok. Her first post was a timeline of her extraordinary career, which ended with her questioning the best way in which to release the new album (some of the songs, including Misery, Wasteman and Horsie, had already started to emerge without a label). That first post went viral, leading to an influx of offers from labels and managers, creating a scenario Nash had been in before; dealing with some of the industry’s shadier characters. One label, however, had been interested for a while. “Kill Rock Stars had been pursuing me for two years. They had been checking in for a while saying ‘we notice the album hasn’t come out, we really love it’.” Once Nash had secured an excellent new manager, the loose ends were tied up and the album was ready to go.
Recent one-off single, Change, released to coincide with the signing announcement, was an example of what having a label can give you. “I didn’t have to do anything,” she laughs. “I’ve been doing everything myself, alongside my band and my tour manager and my various managers, but I am always the driving force. But it’s like you’re driving a 16 wheeler – there’s so much you have to take responsibility for. What was so nice with this release was that I just did the creative bit and the stuff I’m good at. The label takes care of everything else.”
It’s been a refreshing change to be able to fully focus on the creative side. That creativity is also there in the artwork for 9 Sad Symphonies, which features Nash in front of an old school Hollywood backdrop that recalls British nature while also alluding to Nash’s on-off home of LA. That visual world will also extend to Nash’s always incredible live shows, which are a key goal for her in 2024. “You can always push things further and take it to a new place,” she says. “So with this album I want to play really quality shows.”
On 9 Sad Symphonies, Nash has taken another huge step towards cementing her place as one of Britain’s most unique and fearless talents. “I’ve climbed through the sewers of this industry and so my goal is to make good music I believe in, to have longevity, and have good live shows,” she states. “I make a living from my music, which is awesome.” As for other ambitions and expectations, she’s been doing this long enough to know not to place your hopes in things you can’t control. “I don’t feel competitive with the industry anymore. I’ve been in the game for twenty years, and I’m in my own league now.”
Nearly twenty years into her ever-evolving career, London and LA-based, Brit award-winning singer, songwriter, actor and activist Kate Nash has seen it all. She’s achieved huge commercial success – 2007’s debut Made of Bricks, featuring the hit single Foundations, reached number 1 in the UK and spent seven months in the top 40 – seen the darker side of the industry after being dropped in 2012 following 2010’s Bernard Butler-assisted My Best Friend Is You, forged her own path as a successful independent artist via 2013’s punk-y Girl Talk and 2018’s Yesterday Was Forever, and starred in HBO’s hit wrestling drama, GLOW. She’s also been the subject of an award-winning documentary, Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl, and also co-created a musical, Only Gold, with Hamilton choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler. Oh, and she also starred in that too. Still only 36, Nash isn’t finished shape-shifting just yet; after signing with legendary label Kill Rock Stars, whose alumni include Nash favourites Elliott Smith and Sleater-Kinney, in early 2024, she’ll release her fifth album, 9 Sad Symphonies, in June.
Inspired by old Hollywood, vintage musicals and a desperate quest to find beauty in a rotten world, it’s another sonic shift following her “rage-y” recent output. “It needed to be cinematic and dreamy,” Nash says of the 10-track album (the title is both a joke and an ode to passing achievable goals when creativity crumbles). As for the sonic shifts, it’s just second nature: “I do things based on what I’m feeling at the time, and what I’m inspired by,” she explains.
That moment of the album’s creation was fuelled by two things; her work on Only Gold and a global pandemic that curtailed filming on the fourth season of GLOW and sent Nash – and everyone – into a tailspin. After a period of laying bed watching zombie movies, creativity started to arrive in the autumn and winter of 2020, with songs being worked on well into 2021. Having worked with Danish producer Frederick Thaae on her musical, they quickly reconnected to start work on 9 Sad Symphonies. “We were in this completely different landscape for writing songs [on the musical], which was completely freeing,” Nash explains. “I was writing for a story, I was writing about a King and a Queen and a proper story arc. In that world you need the audience to understand the songs immediately, it’s very direct, and it has lots of editing which I’d never done. It changed my outlook on songwriting. Also, we said at the beginning that we wanted to make something beautiful, nothing harsh. I’ve done a lot of harsh stuff before. We wanted loads of beautiful string arrangements.”
These melodic, bright-on-the-surface but deeply layered songs started to emerge out of creative scenarios that had been completely changed by the pandemic. “We were on Zoom, which was… challenging,” she laughs. “We discussed ideas and then we’d hang up on Zoom, go away for three hours, or Frederick would send me the small thing we’d started, then I’d start writing and doing melodies and lyrics, and he would do production, and then we’d meet up on Zoom later.” Slowly the songs started to evolve, their unusual creation adding intriguing problems to try and overcome. “We’d get stuck a lot but you just had to let the stress go and come back to it. It’s a different version of the album to the one we would have made normally.”
The album’s curtain raiser, Millions of Heartbeats, sets out the album’s lyrical themes perfectly. “It’s about that point in the pandemic where I had lost my spark for life,” she says. “And I’m a pretty sparky person, so it was really sad to me.” She references the lyric “the spark is lit at such a low flame” as a crucial moment. “I felt like I lost a part of myself. I didn’t know how to get it back.” As with all of the songs on the album, it’s not just about one thing, however. “I think it also sums up a lot of how I feel about how people act in the world right now. Am I a number or am I a person? What are we trying to be right now? I’m a human being. But we’re so quantifiable and packaged and everyone is a brand. We’re in this capitalist explosion and I feel the effect of it in a way I’ve never felt before.” But it’s also a song that, by its end, flickers with a light that can’t be completely put out. “At the end of the day, the world is beautiful, there are all these heartbeats out there, and there is hope,” she says with a smile. “We have to try! You can’t fucking give up. This song is a sign of what’s to come – there’s going to be darkness and depression but we’ll get to hope by the end.”
A rare guitar appears on Ray, which delves deeper into mental health struggles, detailing depression and anxiety. It’s a theme Nash is keen to share with her fans in a typically honest manner. “It’s natural for an artist to write about emotions and feelings and darkness,” Nash says. “Also a lot of my fans suffer from depression too and I noticed it more when I was doing my livestream chats over lockdown. Not talking about it is not the solution. Being open and creating that community within my fanbase is really important.” It’s one she’s fostered not only via the Kickstarter campaigns that funded Girl Talk and Yesterday Was Forever, but also her Patreon account which she used in the pandemic to connect with her loyal fans via livestreams.
That darkness also weaves through Misery, which marries a propulsive string arrangement and a buoyant beat to lyrics that try to outrun the emotion of its title, while the livid My Bile is an emotional exorcism married to beatific strings and crashing drums. “I guess that song is the little patience I have left to give to all the bullshit, all the shitty parts of the industry, the media, the way people talk to other human beings, me as a woman in the industry, all the things people say about you online,” she explains. “I’m done. I don’t have anything left to give to that. I’ve proved who I am with actions, which is more important. I just have bile left.” There’s love on the album too, specifically on Space Odyssey 2001, which recounts a first proper date with her now partner. On the surface it feels like a diss of the Kubrick classic, 2001: Space Odyssey, but is more about its poor choice given the context. “It’s the wrong film for a date,” she smiles, “but I love the film. I like making jokes in songs. I like that there’s this beautiful love song but it’s also complaining about this critically acclaimed film being too long. I don’t recommend it for a first date!”
While the album was finished at the end of 2021, Nash wasn’t sure what to do with it. Free from the typical record industry framework – no manager, no label, no booking agents – she did two things; went on tour in 2022, which was rejuvenating, and joined TikTok. Her first post was a timeline of her extraordinary career, which ended with her questioning the best way in which to release the new album (some of the songs, including Misery, Wasteman and Horsie, had already started to emerge without a label). That first post went viral, leading to an influx of offers from labels and managers, creating a scenario Nash had been in before; dealing with some of the industry’s shadier characters. One label, however, had been interested for a while. “Kill Rock Stars had been pursuing me for two years. They had been checking in for a while saying ‘we notice the album hasn’t come out, we really love it’.” Once Nash had secured an excellent new manager, the loose ends were tied up and the album was ready to go.
Recent one-off single, Change, released to coincide with the signing announcement, was an example of what having a label can give you. “I didn’t have to do anything,” she laughs. “I’ve been doing everything myself, alongside my band and my tour manager and my various managers, but I am always the driving force. But it’s like you’re driving a 16 wheeler – there’s so much you have to take responsibility for. What was so nice with this release was that I just did the creative bit and the stuff I’m good at. The label takes care of everything else.”
It’s been a refreshing change to be able to fully focus on the creative side. That creativity is also there in the artwork for 9 Sad Symphonies, which features Nash in front of an old school Hollywood backdrop that recalls British nature while also alluding to Nash’s on-off home of LA. That visual world will also extend to Nash’s always incredible live shows, which are a key goal for her in 2024. “You can always push things further and take it to a new place,” she says. “So with this album I want to play really quality shows.”
On 9 Sad Symphonies, Nash has taken another huge step towards cementing her place as one of Britain’s most unique and fearless talents. “I’ve climbed through the sewers of this industry and so my goal is to make good music I believe in, to have longevity, and have good live shows,” she states. “I make a living from my music, which is awesome.” As for other ambitions and expectations, she’s been doing this long enough to know not to place your hopes in things you can’t control. “I don’t feel competitive with the industry anymore. I’ve been in the game for twenty years, and I’m in my own league now.”
Nearly twenty years into her ever-evolving career, London and LA-based, Brit award-winning singer, songwriter, actor and activist Kate Nash has seen it all. She’s achieved huge commercial success – 2007’s debut Made of Bricks, featuring the hit single Foundations, reached number 1 in the UK and spent seven months in the top 40 – seen the darker side of the industry after being dropped in 2012 following 2010’s Bernard Butler-assisted My Best Friend Is You, forged her own path as a successful independent artist via 2013’s punk-y Girl Talk and 2018’s Yesterday Was Forever, and starred in HBO’s hit wrestling drama, GLOW. She’s also been the subject of an award-winning documentary, Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl, and also co-created a musical, Only Gold, with Hamilton choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler. Oh, and she also starred in that too. Still only 36, Nash isn’t finished shape-shifting just yet; after signing with legendary label Kill Rock Stars, whose alumni include Nash favourites Elliott Smith and Sleater-Kinney, in early 2024, she’ll release her fifth album, 9 Sad Symphonies, in June.
Inspired by old Hollywood, vintage musicals and a desperate quest to find beauty in a rotten world, it’s another sonic shift following her “rage-y” recent output. “It needed to be cinematic and dreamy,” Nash says of the 10-track album (the title is both a joke and an ode to passing achievable goals when creativity crumbles). As for the sonic shifts, it’s just second nature: “I do things based on what I’m feeling at the time, and what I’m inspired by,” she explains.
That moment of the album’s creation was fuelled by two things; her work on Only Gold and a global pandemic that curtailed filming on the fourth season of GLOW and sent Nash – and everyone – into a tailspin. After a period of laying bed watching zombie movies, creativity started to arrive in the autumn and winter of 2020, with songs being worked on well into 2021. Having worked with Danish producer Frederick Thaae on her musical, they quickly reconnected to start work on 9 Sad Symphonies. “We were in this completely different landscape for writing songs [on the musical], which was completely freeing,” Nash explains. “I was writing for a story, I was writing about a King and a Queen and a proper story arc. In that world you need the audience to understand the songs immediately, it’s very direct, and it has lots of editing which I’d never done. It changed my outlook on songwriting. Also, we said at the beginning that we wanted to make something beautiful, nothing harsh. I’ve done a lot of harsh stuff before. We wanted loads of beautiful string arrangements.”
These melodic, bright-on-the-surface but deeply layered songs started to emerge out of creative scenarios that had been completely changed by the pandemic. “We were on Zoom, which was… challenging,” she laughs. “We discussed ideas and then we’d hang up on Zoom, go away for three hours, or Frederick would send me the small thing we’d started, then I’d start writing and doing melodies and lyrics, and he would do production, and then we’d meet up on Zoom later.” Slowly the songs started to evolve, their unusual creation adding intriguing problems to try and overcome. “We’d get stuck a lot but you just had to let the stress go and come back to it. It’s a different version of the album to the one we would have made normally.”
The album’s curtain raiser, Millions of Heartbeats, sets out the album’s lyrical themes perfectly. “It’s about that point in the pandemic where I had lost my spark for life,” she says. “And I’m a pretty sparky person, so it was really sad to me.” She references the lyric “the spark is lit at such a low flame” as a crucial moment. “I felt like I lost a part of myself. I didn’t know how to get it back.” As with all of the songs on the album, it’s not just about one thing, however. “I think it also sums up a lot of how I feel about how people act in the world right now. Am I a number or am I a person? What are we trying to be right now? I’m a human being. But we’re so quantifiable and packaged and everyone is a brand. We’re in this capitalist explosion and I feel the effect of it in a way I’ve never felt before.” But it’s also a song that, by its end, flickers with a light that can’t be completely put out. “At the end of the day, the world is beautiful, there are all these heartbeats out there, and there is hope,” she says with a smile. “We have to try! You can’t fucking give up. This song is a sign of what’s to come – there’s going to be darkness and depression but we’ll get to hope by the end.”
A rare guitar appears on Ray, which delves deeper into mental health struggles, detailing depression and anxiety. It’s a theme Nash is keen to share with her fans in a typically honest manner. “It’s natural for an artist to write about emotions and feelings and darkness,” Nash says. “Also a lot of my fans suffer from depression too and I noticed it more when I was doing my livestream chats over lockdown. Not talking about it is not the solution. Being open and creating that community within my fanbase is really important.” It’s one she’s fostered not only via the Kickstarter campaigns that funded Girl Talk and Yesterday Was Forever, but also her Patreon account which she used in the pandemic to connect with her loyal fans via livestreams.
That darkness also weaves through Misery, which marries a propulsive string arrangement and a buoyant beat to lyrics that try to outrun the emotion of its title, while the livid My Bile is an emotional exorcism married to beatific strings and crashing drums. “I guess that song is the little patience I have left to give to all the bullshit, all the shitty parts of the industry, the media, the way people talk to other human beings, me as a woman in the industry, all the things people say about you online,” she explains. “I’m done. I don’t have anything left to give to that. I’ve proved who I am with actions, which is more important. I just have bile left.” There’s love on the album too, specifically on Space Odyssey 2001, which recounts a first proper date with her now partner. On the surface it feels like a diss of the Kubrick classic, 2001: Space Odyssey, but is more about its poor choice given the context. “It’s the wrong film for a date,” she smiles, “but I love the film. I like making jokes in songs. I like that there’s this beautiful love song but it’s also complaining about this critically acclaimed film being too long. I don’t recommend it for a first date!”
While the album was finished at the end of 2021, Nash wasn’t sure what to do with it. Free from the typical record industry framework – no manager, no label, no booking agents – she did two things; went on tour in 2022, which was rejuvenating, and joined TikTok. Her first post was a timeline of her extraordinary career, which ended with her questioning the best way in which to release the new album (some of the songs, including Misery, Wasteman and Horsie, had already started to emerge without a label). That first post went viral, leading to an influx of offers from labels and managers, creating a scenario Nash had been in before; dealing with some of the industry’s shadier characters. One label, however, had been interested for a while. “Kill Rock Stars had been pursuing me for two years. They had been checking in for a while saying ‘we notice the album hasn’t come out, we really love it’.” Once Nash had secured an excellent new manager, the loose ends were tied up and the album was ready to go.
Recent one-off single, Change, released to coincide with the signing announcement, was an example of what having a label can give you. “I didn’t have to do anything,” she laughs. “I’ve been doing everything myself, alongside my band and my tour manager and my various managers, but I am always the driving force. But it’s like you’re driving a 16 wheeler – there’s so much you have to take responsibility for. What was so nice with this release was that I just did the creative bit and the stuff I’m good at. The label takes care of everything else.”
It’s been a refreshing change to be able to fully focus on the creative side. That creativity is also there in the artwork for 9 Sad Symphonies, which features Nash in front of an old school Hollywood backdrop that recalls British nature while also alluding to Nash’s on-off home of LA. That visual world will also extend to Nash’s always incredible live shows, which are a key goal for her in 2024. “You can always push things further and take it to a new place,” she says. “So with this album I want to play really quality shows.”
On 9 Sad Symphonies, Nash has taken another huge step towards cementing her place as one of Britain’s most unique and fearless talents. “I’ve climbed through the sewers of this industry and so my goal is to make good music I believe in, to have longevity, and have good live shows,” she states. “I make a living from my music, which is awesome.” As for other ambitions and expectations, she’s been doing this long enough to know not to place your hopes in things you can’t control. “I don’t feel competitive with the industry anymore. I’ve been in the game for twenty years, and I’m in my own league now.”
Nearly twenty years into her ever-evolving career, London and LA-based, Brit award-winning singer, songwriter, actor and activist Kate Nash has seen it all. She’s achieved huge commercial success – 2007’s debut Made of Bricks, featuring the hit single Foundations, reached number 1 in the UK and spent seven months in the top 40 – seen the darker side of the industry after being dropped in 2012 following 2010’s Bernard Butler-assisted My Best Friend Is You, forged her own path as a successful independent artist via 2013’s punk-y Girl Talk and 2018’s Yesterday Was Forever, and starred in HBO’s hit wrestling drama, GLOW. She’s also been the subject of an award-winning documentary, Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl, and also co-created a musical, Only Gold, with Hamilton choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler. Oh, and she also starred in that too. Still only 36, Nash isn’t finished shape-shifting just yet; after signing with legendary label Kill Rock Stars, whose alumni include Nash favourites Elliott Smith and Sleater-Kinney, in early 2024, she’ll release her fifth album, 9 Sad Symphonies, in June.
Inspired by old Hollywood, vintage musicals and a desperate quest to find beauty in a rotten world, it’s another sonic shift following her “rage-y” recent output. “It needed to be cinematic and dreamy,” Nash says of the 10-track album (the title is both a joke and an ode to passing achievable goals when creativity crumbles). As for the sonic shifts, it’s just second nature: “I do things based on what I’m feeling at the time, and what I’m inspired by,” she explains.
That moment of the album’s creation was fuelled by two things; her work on Only Gold and a global pandemic that curtailed filming on the fourth season of GLOW and sent Nash – and everyone – into a tailspin. After a period of laying bed watching zombie movies, creativity started to arrive in the autumn and winter of 2020, with songs being worked on well into 2021. Having worked with Danish producer Frederick Thaae on her musical, they quickly reconnected to start work on 9 Sad Symphonies. “We were in this completely different landscape for writing songs [on the musical], which was completely freeing,” Nash explains. “I was writing for a story, I was writing about a King and a Queen and a proper story arc. In that world you need the audience to understand the songs immediately, it’s very direct, and it has lots of editing which I’d never done. It changed my outlook on songwriting. Also, we said at the beginning that we wanted to make something beautiful, nothing harsh. I’ve done a lot of harsh stuff before. We wanted loads of beautiful string arrangements.”
These melodic, bright-on-the-surface but deeply layered songs started to emerge out of creative scenarios that had been completely changed by the pandemic. “We were on Zoom, which was… challenging,” she laughs. “We discussed ideas and then we’d hang up on Zoom, go away for three hours, or Frederick would send me the small thing we’d started, then I’d start writing and doing melodies and lyrics, and he would do production, and then we’d meet up on Zoom later.” Slowly the songs started to evolve, their unusual creation adding intriguing problems to try and overcome. “We’d get stuck a lot but you just had to let the stress go and come back to it. It’s a different version of the album to the one we would have made normally.”
The album’s curtain raiser, Millions of Heartbeats, sets out the album’s lyrical themes perfectly. “It’s about that point in the pandemic where I had lost my spark for life,” she says. “And I’m a pretty sparky person, so it was really sad to me.” She references the lyric “the spark is lit at such a low flame” as a crucial moment. “I felt like I lost a part of myself. I didn’t know how to get it back.” As with all of the songs on the album, it’s not just about one thing, however. “I think it also sums up a lot of how I feel about how people act in the world right now. Am I a number or am I a person? What are we trying to be right now? I’m a human being. But we’re so quantifiable and packaged and everyone is a brand. We’re in this capitalist explosion and I feel the effect of it in a way I’ve never felt before.” But it’s also a song that, by its end, flickers with a light that can’t be completely put out. “At the end of the day, the world is beautiful, there are all these heartbeats out there, and there is hope,” she says with a smile. “We have to try! You can’t fucking give up. This song is a sign of what’s to come – there’s going to be darkness and depression but we’ll get to hope by the end.”
A rare guitar appears on Ray, which delves deeper into mental health struggles, detailing depression and anxiety. It’s a theme Nash is keen to share with her fans in a typically honest manner. “It’s natural for an artist to write about emotions and feelings and darkness,” Nash says. “Also a lot of my fans suffer from depression too and I noticed it more when I was doing my livestream chats over lockdown. Not talking about it is not the solution. Being open and creating that community within my fanbase is really important.” It’s one she’s fostered not only via the Kickstarter campaigns that funded Girl Talk and Yesterday Was Forever, but also her Patreon account which she used in the pandemic to connect with her loyal fans via livestreams.
That darkness also weaves through Misery, which marries a propulsive string arrangement and a buoyant beat to lyrics that try to outrun the emotion of its title, while the livid My Bile is an emotional exorcism married to beatific strings and crashing drums. “I guess that song is the little patience I have left to give to all the bullshit, all the shitty parts of the industry, the media, the way people talk to other human beings, me as a woman in the industry, all the things people say about you online,” she explains. “I’m done. I don’t have anything left to give to that. I’ve proved who I am with actions, which is more important. I just have bile left.” There’s love on the album too, specifically on Space Odyssey 2001, which recounts a first proper date with her now partner. On the surface it feels like a diss of the Kubrick classic, 2001: Space Odyssey, but is more about its poor choice given the context. “It’s the wrong film for a date,” she smiles, “but I love the film. I like making jokes in songs. I like that there’s this beautiful love song but it’s also complaining about this critically acclaimed film being too long. I don’t recommend it for a first date!”
While the album was finished at the end of 2021, Nash wasn’t sure what to do with it. Free from the typical record industry framework – no manager, no label, no booking agents – she did two things; went on tour in 2022, which was rejuvenating, and joined TikTok. Her first post was a timeline of her extraordinary career, which ended with her questioning the best way in which to release the new album (some of the songs, including Misery, Wasteman and Horsie, had already started to emerge without a label). That first post went viral, leading to an influx of offers from labels and managers, creating a scenario Nash had been in before; dealing with some of the industry’s shadier characters. One label, however, had been interested for a while. “Kill Rock Stars had been pursuing me for two years. They had been checking in for a while saying ‘we notice the album hasn’t come out, we really love it’.” Once Nash had secured an excellent new manager, the loose ends were tied up and the album was ready to go.
Recent one-off single, Change, released to coincide with the signing announcement, was an example of what having a label can give you. “I didn’t have to do anything,” she laughs. “I’ve been doing everything myself, alongside my band and my tour manager and my various managers, but I am always the driving force. But it’s like you’re driving a 16 wheeler – there’s so much you have to take responsibility for. What was so nice with this release was that I just did the creative bit and the stuff I’m good at. The label takes care of everything else.”
It’s been a refreshing change to be able to fully focus on the creative side. That creativity is also there in the artwork for 9 Sad Symphonies, which features Nash in front of an old school Hollywood backdrop that recalls British nature while also alluding to Nash’s on-off home of LA. That visual world will also extend to Nash’s always incredible live shows, which are a key goal for her in 2024. “You can always push things further and take it to a new place,” she says. “So with this album I want to play really quality shows.”
On 9 Sad Symphonies, Nash has taken another huge step towards cementing her place as one of Britain’s most unique and fearless talents. “I’ve climbed through the sewers of this industry and so my goal is to make good music I believe in, to have longevity, and have good live shows,” she states. “I make a living from my music, which is awesome.” As for other ambitions and expectations, she’s been doing this long enough to know not to place your hopes in things you can’t control. “I don’t feel competitive with the industry anymore. I’ve been in the game for twenty years, and I’m in my own league now.”
Nearly twenty years into her ever-evolving career, London and LA-based, Brit award-winning singer, songwriter, actor and activist Kate Nash has seen it all. She’s achieved huge commercial success – 2007’s debut Made of Bricks, featuring the hit single Foundations, reached number 1 in the UK and spent seven months in the top 40 – seen the darker side of the industry after being dropped in 2012 following 2010’s Bernard Butler-assisted My Best Friend Is You, forged her own path as a successful independent artist via 2013’s punk-y Girl Talk and 2018’s Yesterday Was Forever, and starred in HBO’s hit wrestling drama, GLOW. She’s also been the subject of an award-winning documentary, Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl, and also co-created a musical, Only Gold, with Hamilton choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler. Oh, and she also starred in that too. Still only 36, Nash isn’t finished shape-shifting just yet; after signing with legendary label Kill Rock Stars, whose alumni include Nash favourites Elliott Smith and Sleater-Kinney, in early 2024, she’ll release her fifth album, 9 Sad Symphonies, in June.
Inspired by old Hollywood, vintage musicals and a desperate quest to find beauty in a rotten world, it’s another sonic shift following her “rage-y” recent output. “It needed to be cinematic and dreamy,” Nash says of the 10-track album (the title is both a joke and an ode to passing achievable goals when creativity crumbles). As for the sonic shifts, it’s just second nature: “I do things based on what I’m feeling at the time, and what I’m inspired by,” she explains.
That moment of the album’s creation was fuelled by two things; her work on Only Gold and a global pandemic that curtailed filming on the fourth season of GLOW and sent Nash – and everyone – into a tailspin. After a period of laying bed watching zombie movies, creativity started to arrive in the autumn and winter of 2020, with songs being worked on well into 2021. Having worked with Danish producer Frederick Thaae on her musical, they quickly reconnected to start work on 9 Sad Symphonies. “We were in this completely different landscape for writing songs [on the musical], which was completely freeing,” Nash explains. “I was writing for a story, I was writing about a King and a Queen and a proper story arc. In that world you need the audience to understand the songs immediately, it’s very direct, and it has lots of editing which I’d never done. It changed my outlook on songwriting. Also, we said at the beginning that we wanted to make something beautiful, nothing harsh. I’ve done a lot of harsh stuff before. We wanted loads of beautiful string arrangements.”
These melodic, bright-on-the-surface but deeply layered songs started to emerge out of creative scenarios that had been completely changed by the pandemic. “We were on Zoom, which was… challenging,” she laughs. “We discussed ideas and then we’d hang up on Zoom, go away for three hours, or Frederick would send me the small thing we’d started, then I’d start writing and doing melodies and lyrics, and he would do production, and then we’d meet up on Zoom later.” Slowly the songs started to evolve, their unusual creation adding intriguing problems to try and overcome. “We’d get stuck a lot but you just had to let the stress go and come back to it. It’s a different version of the album to the one we would have made normally.”
The album’s curtain raiser, Millions of Heartbeats, sets out the album’s lyrical themes perfectly. “It’s about that point in the pandemic where I had lost my spark for life,” she says. “And I’m a pretty sparky person, so it was really sad to me.” She references the lyric “the spark is lit at such a low flame” as a crucial moment. “I felt like I lost a part of myself. I didn’t know how to get it back.” As with all of the songs on the album, it’s not just about one thing, however. “I think it also sums up a lot of how I feel about how people act in the world right now. Am I a number or am I a person? What are we trying to be right now? I’m a human being. But we’re so quantifiable and packaged and everyone is a brand. We’re in this capitalist explosion and I feel the effect of it in a way I’ve never felt before.” But it’s also a song that, by its end, flickers with a light that can’t be completely put out. “At the end of the day, the world is beautiful, there are all these heartbeats out there, and there is hope,” she says with a smile. “We have to try! You can’t fucking give up. This song is a sign of what’s to come – there’s going to be darkness and depression but we’ll get to hope by the end.”
A rare guitar appears on Ray, which delves deeper into mental health struggles, detailing depression and anxiety. It’s a theme Nash is keen to share with her fans in a typically honest manner. “It’s natural for an artist to write about emotions and feelings and darkness,” Nash says. “Also a lot of my fans suffer from depression too and I noticed it more when I was doing my livestream chats over lockdown. Not talking about it is not the solution. Being open and creating that community within my fanbase is really important.” It’s one she’s fostered not only via the Kickstarter campaigns that funded Girl Talk and Yesterday Was Forever, but also her Patreon account which she used in the pandemic to connect with her loyal fans via livestreams.
That darkness also weaves through Misery, which marries a propulsive string arrangement and a buoyant beat to lyrics that try to outrun the emotion of its title, while the livid My Bile is an emotional exorcism married to beatific strings and crashing drums. “I guess that song is the little patience I have left to give to all the bullshit, all the shitty parts of the industry, the media, the way people talk to other human beings, me as a woman in the industry, all the things people say about you online,” she explains. “I’m done. I don’t have anything left to give to that. I’ve proved who I am with actions, which is more important. I just have bile left.” There’s love on the album too, specifically on Space Odyssey 2001, which recounts a first proper date with her now partner. On the surface it feels like a diss of the Kubrick classic, 2001: Space Odyssey, but is more about its poor choice given the context. “It’s the wrong film for a date,” she smiles, “but I love the film. I like making jokes in songs. I like that there’s this beautiful love song but it’s also complaining about this critically acclaimed film being too long. I don’t recommend it for a first date!”
While the album was finished at the end of 2021, Nash wasn’t sure what to do with it. Free from the typical record industry framework – no manager, no label, no booking agents – she did two things; went on tour in 2022, which was rejuvenating, and joined TikTok. Her first post was a timeline of her extraordinary career, which ended with her questioning the best way in which to release the new album (some of the songs, including Misery, Wasteman and Horsie, had already started to emerge without a label). That first post went viral, leading to an influx of offers from labels and managers, creating a scenario Nash had been in before; dealing with some of the industry’s shadier characters. One label, however, had been interested for a while. “Kill Rock Stars had been pursuing me for two years. They had been checking in for a while saying ‘we notice the album hasn’t come out, we really love it’.” Once Nash had secured an excellent new manager, the loose ends were tied up and the album was ready to go.
Recent one-off single, Change, released to coincide with the signing announcement, was an example of what having a label can give you. “I didn’t have to do anything,” she laughs. “I’ve been doing everything myself, alongside my band and my tour manager and my various managers, but I am always the driving force. But it’s like you’re driving a 16 wheeler – there’s so much you have to take responsibility for. What was so nice with this release was that I just did the creative bit and the stuff I’m good at. The label takes care of everything else.”
It’s been a refreshing change to be able to fully focus on the creative side. That creativity is also there in the artwork for 9 Sad Symphonies, which features Nash in front of an old school Hollywood backdrop that recalls British nature while also alluding to Nash’s on-off home of LA. That visual world will also extend to Nash’s always incredible live shows, which are a key goal for her in 2024. “You can always push things further and take it to a new place,” she says. “So with this album I want to play really quality shows.”
On 9 Sad Symphonies, Nash has taken another huge step towards cementing her place as one of Britain’s most unique and fearless talents. “I’ve climbed through the sewers of this industry and so my goal is to make good music I believe in, to have longevity, and have good live shows,” she states. “I make a living from my music, which is awesome.” As for other ambitions and expectations, she’s been doing this long enough to know not to place your hopes in things you can’t control. “I don’t feel competitive with the industry anymore. I’ve been in the game for twenty years, and I’m in my own league now.”
Nearly twenty years into her ever-evolving career, London and LA-based, Brit award-winning singer, songwriter, actor and activist Kate Nash has seen it all. She’s achieved huge commercial success – 2007’s debut Made of Bricks, featuring the hit single Foundations, reached number 1 in the UK and spent seven months in the top 40 – seen the darker side of the industry after being dropped in 2012 following 2010’s Bernard Butler-assisted My Best Friend Is You, forged her own path as a successful independent artist via 2013’s punk-y Girl Talk and 2018’s Yesterday Was Forever, and starred in HBO’s hit wrestling drama, GLOW. She’s also been the subject of an award-winning documentary, Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl, and also co-created a musical, Only Gold, with Hamilton choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler. Oh, and she also starred in that too. Still only 36, Nash isn’t finished shape-shifting just yet; after signing with legendary label Kill Rock Stars, whose alumni include Nash favourites Elliott Smith and Sleater-Kinney, in early 2024, she’ll release her fifth album, 9 Sad Symphonies, in June.
Inspired by old Hollywood, vintage musicals and a desperate quest to find beauty in a rotten world, it’s another sonic shift following her “rage-y” recent output. “It needed to be cinematic and dreamy,” Nash says of the 10-track album (the title is both a joke and an ode to passing achievable goals when creativity crumbles). As for the sonic shifts, it’s just second nature: “I do things based on what I’m feeling at the time, and what I’m inspired by,” she explains.
That moment of the album’s creation was fuelled by two things; her work on Only Gold and a global pandemic that curtailed filming on the fourth season of GLOW and sent Nash – and everyone – into a tailspin. After a period of laying bed watching zombie movies, creativity started to arrive in the autumn and winter of 2020, with songs being worked on well into 2021. Having worked with Danish producer Frederick Thaae on her musical, they quickly reconnected to start work on 9 Sad Symphonies. “We were in this completely different landscape for writing songs [on the musical], which was completely freeing,” Nash explains. “I was writing for a story, I was writing about a King and a Queen and a proper story arc. In that world you need the audience to understand the songs immediately, it’s very direct, and it has lots of editing which I’d never done. It changed my outlook on songwriting. Also, we said at the beginning that we wanted to make something beautiful, nothing harsh. I’ve done a lot of harsh stuff before. We wanted loads of beautiful string arrangements.”
These melodic, bright-on-the-surface but deeply layered songs started to emerge out of creative scenarios that had been completely changed by the pandemic. “We were on Zoom, which was… challenging,” she laughs. “We discussed ideas and then we’d hang up on Zoom, go away for three hours, or Frederick would send me the small thing we’d started, then I’d start writing and doing melodies and lyrics, and he would do production, and then we’d meet up on Zoom later.” Slowly the songs started to evolve, their unusual creation adding intriguing problems to try and overcome. “We’d get stuck a lot but you just had to let the stress go and come back to it. It’s a different version of the album to the one we would have made normally.”
The album’s curtain raiser, Millions of Heartbeats, sets out the album’s lyrical themes perfectly. “It’s about that point in the pandemic where I had lost my spark for life,” she says. “And I’m a pretty sparky person, so it was really sad to me.” She references the lyric “the spark is lit at such a low flame” as a crucial moment. “I felt like I lost a part of myself. I didn’t know how to get it back.” As with all of the songs on the album, it’s not just about one thing, however. “I think it also sums up a lot of how I feel about how people act in the world right now. Am I a number or am I a person? What are we trying to be right now? I’m a human being. But we’re so quantifiable and packaged and everyone is a brand. We’re in this capitalist explosion and I feel the effect of it in a way I’ve never felt before.” But it’s also a song that, by its end, flickers with a light that can’t be completely put out. “At the end of the day, the world is beautiful, there are all these heartbeats out there, and there is hope,” she says with a smile. “We have to try! You can’t fucking give up. This song is a sign of what’s to come – there’s going to be darkness and depression but we’ll get to hope by the end.”
A rare guitar appears on Ray, which delves deeper into mental health struggles, detailing depression and anxiety. It’s a theme Nash is keen to share with her fans in a typically honest manner. “It’s natural for an artist to write about emotions and feelings and darkness,” Nash says. “Also a lot of my fans suffer from depression too and I noticed it more when I was doing my livestream chats over lockdown. Not talking about it is not the solution. Being open and creating that community within my fanbase is really important.” It’s one she’s fostered not only via the Kickstarter campaigns that funded Girl Talk and Yesterday Was Forever, but also her Patreon account which she used in the pandemic to connect with her loyal fans via livestreams.
That darkness also weaves through Misery, which marries a propulsive string arrangement and a buoyant beat to lyrics that try to outrun the emotion of its title, while the livid My Bile is an emotional exorcism married to beatific strings and crashing drums. “I guess that song is the little patience I have left to give to all the bullshit, all the shitty parts of the industry, the media, the way people talk to other human beings, me as a woman in the industry, all the things people say about you online,” she explains. “I’m done. I don’t have anything left to give to that. I’ve proved who I am with actions, which is more important. I just have bile left.” There’s love on the album too, specifically on Space Odyssey 2001, which recounts a first proper date with her now partner. On the surface it feels like a diss of the Kubrick classic, 2001: Space Odyssey, but is more about its poor choice given the context. “It’s the wrong film for a date,” she smiles, “but I love the film. I like making jokes in songs. I like that there’s this beautiful love song but it’s also complaining about this critically acclaimed film being too long. I don’t recommend it for a first date!”
While the album was finished at the end of 2021, Nash wasn’t sure what to do with it. Free from the typical record industry framework – no manager, no label, no booking agents – she did two things; went on tour in 2022, which was rejuvenating, and joined TikTok. Her first post was a timeline of her extraordinary career, which ended with her questioning the best way in which to release the new album (some of the songs, including Misery, Wasteman and Horsie, had already started to emerge without a label). That first post went viral, leading to an influx of offers from labels and managers, creating a scenario Nash had been in before; dealing with some of the industry’s shadier characters. One label, however, had been interested for a while. “Kill Rock Stars had been pursuing me for two years. They had been checking in for a while saying ‘we notice the album hasn’t come out, we really love it’.” Once Nash had secured an excellent new manager, the loose ends were tied up and the album was ready to go.
Recent one-off single, Change, released to coincide with the signing announcement, was an example of what having a label can give you. “I didn’t have to do anything,” she laughs. “I’ve been doing everything myself, alongside my band and my tour manager and my various managers, but I am always the driving force. But it’s like you’re driving a 16 wheeler – there’s so much you have to take responsibility for. What was so nice with this release was that I just did the creative bit and the stuff I’m good at. The label takes care of everything else.”
It’s been a refreshing change to be able to fully focus on the creative side. That creativity is also there in the artwork for 9 Sad Symphonies, which features Nash in front of an old school Hollywood backdrop that recalls British nature while also alluding to Nash’s on-off home of LA. That visual world will also extend to Nash’s always incredible live shows, which are a key goal for her in 2024. “You can always push things further and take it to a new place,” she says. “So with this album I want to play really quality shows.”
On 9 Sad Symphonies, Nash has taken another huge step towards cementing her place as one of Britain’s most unique and fearless talents. “I’ve climbed through the sewers of this industry and so my goal is to make good music I believe in, to have longevity, and have good live shows,” she states. “I make a living from my music, which is awesome.” As for other ambitions and expectations, she’s been doing this long enough to know not to place your hopes in things you can’t control. “I don’t feel competitive with the industry anymore. I’ve been in the game for twenty years, and I’m in my own league now.”
Nearly twenty years into her ever-evolving career, London and LA-based, Brit award-winning singer, songwriter, actor and activist Kate Nash has seen it all. She’s achieved huge commercial success – 2007’s debut Made of Bricks, featuring the hit single Foundations, reached number 1 in the UK and spent seven months in the top 40 – seen the darker side of the industry after being dropped in 2012 following 2010’s Bernard Butler-assisted My Best Friend Is You, forged her own path as a successful independent artist via 2013’s punk-y Girl Talk and 2018’s Yesterday Was Forever, and starred in HBO’s hit wrestling drama, GLOW. She’s also been the subject of an award-winning documentary, Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl, and also co-created a musical, Only Gold, with Hamilton choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler. Oh, and she also starred in that too. Still only 36, Nash isn’t finished shape-shifting just yet; after signing with legendary label Kill Rock Stars, whose alumni include Nash favourites Elliott Smith and Sleater-Kinney, in early 2024, she’ll release her fifth album, 9 Sad Symphonies, in June.
Inspired by old Hollywood, vintage musicals and a desperate quest to find beauty in a rotten world, it’s another sonic shift following her “rage-y” recent output. “It needed to be cinematic and dreamy,” Nash says of the 10-track album (the title is both a joke and an ode to passing achievable goals when creativity crumbles). As for the sonic shifts, it’s just second nature: “I do things based on what I’m feeling at the time, and what I’m inspired by,” she explains.
That moment of the album’s creation was fuelled by two things; her work on Only Gold and a global pandemic that curtailed filming on the fourth season of GLOW and sent Nash – and everyone – into a tailspin. After a period of laying bed watching zombie movies, creativity started to arrive in the autumn and winter of 2020, with songs being worked on well into 2021. Having worked with Danish producer Frederick Thaae on her musical, they quickly reconnected to start work on 9 Sad Symphonies. “We were in this completely different landscape for writing songs [on the musical], which was completely freeing,” Nash explains. “I was writing for a story, I was writing about a King and a Queen and a proper story arc. In that world you need the audience to understand the songs immediately, it’s very direct, and it has lots of editing which I’d never done. It changed my outlook on songwriting. Also, we said at the beginning that we wanted to make something beautiful, nothing harsh. I’ve done a lot of harsh stuff before. We wanted loads of beautiful string arrangements.”
These melodic, bright-on-the-surface but deeply layered songs started to emerge out of creative scenarios that had been completely changed by the pandemic. “We were on Zoom, which was… challenging,” she laughs. “We discussed ideas and then we’d hang up on Zoom, go away for three hours, or Frederick would send me the small thing we’d started, then I’d start writing and doing melodies and lyrics, and he would do production, and then we’d meet up on Zoom later.” Slowly the songs started to evolve, their unusual creation adding intriguing problems to try and overcome. “We’d get stuck a lot but you just had to let the stress go and come back to it. It’s a different version of the album to the one we would have made normally.”
The album’s curtain raiser, Millions of Heartbeats, sets out the album’s lyrical themes perfectly. “It’s about that point in the pandemic where I had lost my spark for life,” she says. “And I’m a pretty sparky person, so it was really sad to me.” She references the lyric “the spark is lit at such a low flame” as a crucial moment. “I felt like I lost a part of myself. I didn’t know how to get it back.” As with all of the songs on the album, it’s not just about one thing, however. “I think it also sums up a lot of how I feel about how people act in the world right now. Am I a number or am I a person? What are we trying to be right now? I’m a human being. But we’re so quantifiable and packaged and everyone is a brand. We’re in this capitalist explosion and I feel the effect of it in a way I’ve never felt before.” But it’s also a song that, by its end, flickers with a light that can’t be completely put out. “At the end of the day, the world is beautiful, there are all these heartbeats out there, and there is hope,” she says with a smile. “We have to try! You can’t fucking give up. This song is a sign of what’s to come – there’s going to be darkness and depression but we’ll get to hope by the end.”
A rare guitar appears on Ray, which delves deeper into mental health struggles, detailing depression and anxiety. It’s a theme Nash is keen to share with her fans in a typically honest manner. “It’s natural for an artist to write about emotions and feelings and darkness,” Nash says. “Also a lot of my fans suffer from depression too and I noticed it more when I was doing my livestream chats over lockdown. Not talking about it is not the solution. Being open and creating that community within my fanbase is really important.” It’s one she’s fostered not only via the Kickstarter campaigns that funded Girl Talk and Yesterday Was Forever, but also her Patreon account which she used in the pandemic to connect with her loyal fans via livestreams.
That darkness also weaves through Misery, which marries a propulsive string arrangement and a buoyant beat to lyrics that try to outrun the emotion of its title, while the livid My Bile is an emotional exorcism married to beatific strings and crashing drums. “I guess that song is the little patience I have left to give to all the bullshit, all the shitty parts of the industry, the media, the way people talk to other human beings, me as a woman in the industry, all the things people say about you online,” she explains. “I’m done. I don’t have anything left to give to that. I’ve proved who I am with actions, which is more important. I just have bile left.” There’s love on the album too, specifically on Space Odyssey 2001, which recounts a first proper date with her now partner. On the surface it feels like a diss of the Kubrick classic, 2001: Space Odyssey, but is more about its poor choice given the context. “It’s the wrong film for a date,” she smiles, “but I love the film. I like making jokes in songs. I like that there’s this beautiful love song but it’s also complaining about this critically acclaimed film being too long. I don’t recommend it for a first date!”
While the album was finished at the end of 2021, Nash wasn’t sure what to do with it. Free from the typical record industry framework – no manager, no label, no booking agents – she did two things; went on tour in 2022, which was rejuvenating, and joined TikTok. Her first post was a timeline of her extraordinary career, which ended with her questioning the best way in which to release the new album (some of the songs, including Misery, Wasteman and Horsie, had already started to emerge without a label). That first post went viral, leading to an influx of offers from labels and managers, creating a scenario Nash had been in before; dealing with some of the industry’s shadier characters. One label, however, had been interested for a while. “Kill Rock Stars had been pursuing me for two years. They had been checking in for a while saying ‘we notice the album hasn’t come out, we really love it’.” Once Nash had secured an excellent new manager, the loose ends were tied up and the album was ready to go.
Recent one-off single, Change, released to coincide with the signing announcement, was an example of what having a label can give you. “I didn’t have to do anything,” she laughs. “I’ve been doing everything myself, alongside my band and my tour manager and my various managers, but I am always the driving force. But it’s like you’re driving a 16 wheeler – there’s so much you have to take responsibility for. What was so nice with this release was that I just did the creative bit and the stuff I’m good at. The label takes care of everything else.”
It’s been a refreshing change to be able to fully focus on the creative side. That creativity is also there in the artwork for 9 Sad Symphonies, which features Nash in front of an old school Hollywood backdrop that recalls British nature while also alluding to Nash’s on-off home of LA. That visual world will also extend to Nash’s always incredible live shows, which are a key goal for her in 2024. “You can always push things further and take it to a new place,” she says. “So with this album I want to play really quality shows.”
On 9 Sad Symphonies, Nash has taken another huge step towards cementing her place as one of Britain’s most unique and fearless talents. “I’ve climbed through the sewers of this industry and so my goal is to make good music I believe in, to have longevity, and have good live shows,” she states. “I make a living from my music, which is awesome.” As for other ambitions and expectations, she’s been doing this long enough to know not to place your hopes in things you can’t control. “I don’t feel competitive with the industry anymore. I’ve been in the game for twenty years, and I’m in my own league now.”
Nearly twenty years into her ever-evolving career, London and LA-based, Brit award-winning singer, songwriter, actor and activist Kate Nash has seen it all. She’s achieved huge commercial success – 2007’s debut Made of Bricks, featuring the hit single Foundations, reached number 1 in the UK and spent seven months in the top 40 – seen the darker side of the industry after being dropped in 2012 following 2010’s Bernard Butler-assisted My Best Friend Is You, forged her own path as a successful independent artist via 2013’s punk-y Girl Talk and 2018’s Yesterday Was Forever, and starred in HBO’s hit wrestling drama, GLOW. She’s also been the subject of an award-winning documentary, Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl, and also co-created a musical, Only Gold, with Hamilton choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler. Oh, and she also starred in that too. Still only 36, Nash isn’t finished shape-shifting just yet; after signing with legendary label Kill Rock Stars, whose alumni include Nash favourites Elliott Smith and Sleater-Kinney, in early 2024, she’ll release her fifth album, 9 Sad Symphonies, in June.
Inspired by old Hollywood, vintage musicals and a desperate quest to find beauty in a rotten world, it’s another sonic shift following her “rage-y” recent output. “It needed to be cinematic and dreamy,” Nash says of the 10-track album (the title is both a joke and an ode to passing achievable goals when creativity crumbles). As for the sonic shifts, it’s just second nature: “I do things based on what I’m feeling at the time, and what I’m inspired by,” she explains.
That moment of the album’s creation was fuelled by two things; her work on Only Gold and a global pandemic that curtailed filming on the fourth season of GLOW and sent Nash – and everyone – into a tailspin. After a period of laying bed watching zombie movies, creativity started to arrive in the autumn and winter of 2020, with songs being worked on well into 2021. Having worked with Danish producer Frederick Thaae on her musical, they quickly reconnected to start work on 9 Sad Symphonies. “We were in this completely different landscape for writing songs [on the musical], which was completely freeing,” Nash explains. “I was writing for a story, I was writing about a King and a Queen and a proper story arc. In that world you need the audience to understand the songs immediately, it’s very direct, and it has lots of editing which I’d never done. It changed my outlook on songwriting. Also, we said at the beginning that we wanted to make something beautiful, nothing harsh. I’ve done a lot of harsh stuff before. We wanted loads of beautiful string arrangements.”
These melodic, bright-on-the-surface but deeply layered songs started to emerge out of creative scenarios that had been completely changed by the pandemic. “We were on Zoom, which was… challenging,” she laughs. “We discussed ideas and then we’d hang up on Zoom, go away for three hours, or Frederick would send me the small thing we’d started, then I’d start writing and doing melodies and lyrics, and he would do production, and then we’d meet up on Zoom later.” Slowly the songs started to evolve, their unusual creation adding intriguing problems to try and overcome. “We’d get stuck a lot but you just had to let the stress go and come back to it. It’s a different version of the album to the one we would have made normally.”
The album’s curtain raiser, Millions of Heartbeats, sets out the album’s lyrical themes perfectly. “It’s about that point in the pandemic where I had lost my spark for life,” she says. “And I’m a pretty sparky person, so it was really sad to me.” She references the lyric “the spark is lit at such a low flame” as a crucial moment. “I felt like I lost a part of myself. I didn’t know how to get it back.” As with all of the songs on the album, it’s not just about one thing, however. “I think it also sums up a lot of how I feel about how people act in the world right now. Am I a number or am I a person? What are we trying to be right now? I’m a human being. But we’re so quantifiable and packaged and everyone is a brand. We’re in this capitalist explosion and I feel the effect of it in a way I’ve never felt before.” But it’s also a song that, by its end, flickers with a light that can’t be completely put out. “At the end of the day, the world is beautiful, there are all these heartbeats out there, and there is hope,” she says with a smile. “We have to try! You can’t fucking give up. This song is a sign of what’s to come – there’s going to be darkness and depression but we’ll get to hope by the end.”
A rare guitar appears on Ray, which delves deeper into mental health struggles, detailing depression and anxiety. It’s a theme Nash is keen to share with her fans in a typically honest manner. “It’s natural for an artist to write about emotions and feelings and darkness,” Nash says. “Also a lot of my fans suffer from depression too and I noticed it more when I was doing my livestream chats over lockdown. Not talking about it is not the solution. Being open and creating that community within my fanbase is really important.” It’s one she’s fostered not only via the Kickstarter campaigns that funded Girl Talk and Yesterday Was Forever, but also her Patreon account which she used in the pandemic to connect with her loyal fans via livestreams.
That darkness also weaves through Misery, which marries a propulsive string arrangement and a buoyant beat to lyrics that try to outrun the emotion of its title, while the livid My Bile is an emotional exorcism married to beatific strings and crashing drums. “I guess that song is the little patience I have left to give to all the bullshit, all the shitty parts of the industry, the media, the way people talk to other human beings, me as a woman in the industry, all the things people say about you online,” she explains. “I’m done. I don’t have anything left to give to that. I’ve proved who I am with actions, which is more important. I just have bile left.” There’s love on the album too, specifically on Space Odyssey 2001, which recounts a first proper date with her now partner. On the surface it feels like a diss of the Kubrick classic, 2001: Space Odyssey, but is more about its poor choice given the context. “It’s the wrong film for a date,” she smiles, “but I love the film. I like making jokes in songs. I like that there’s this beautiful love song but it’s also complaining about this critically acclaimed film being too long. I don’t recommend it for a first date!”
While the album was finished at the end of 2021, Nash wasn’t sure what to do with it. Free from the typical record industry framework – no manager, no label, no booking agents – she did two things; went on tour in 2022, which was rejuvenating, and joined TikTok. Her first post was a timeline of her extraordinary career, which ended with her questioning the best way in which to release the new album (some of the songs, including Misery, Wasteman and Horsie, had already started to emerge without a label). That first post went viral, leading to an influx of offers from labels and managers, creating a scenario Nash had been in before; dealing with some of the industry’s shadier characters. One label, however, had been interested for a while. “Kill Rock Stars had been pursuing me for two years. They had been checking in for a while saying ‘we notice the album hasn’t come out, we really love it’.” Once Nash had secured an excellent new manager, the loose ends were tied up and the album was ready to go.
Recent one-off single, Change, released to coincide with the signing announcement, was an example of what having a label can give you. “I didn’t have to do anything,” she laughs. “I’ve been doing everything myself, alongside my band and my tour manager and my various managers, but I am always the driving force. But it’s like you’re driving a 16 wheeler – there’s so much you have to take responsibility for. What was so nice with this release was that I just did the creative bit and the stuff I’m good at. The label takes care of everything else.”
It’s been a refreshing change to be able to fully focus on the creative side. That creativity is also there in the artwork for 9 Sad Symphonies, which features Nash in front of an old school Hollywood backdrop that recalls British nature while also alluding to Nash’s on-off home of LA. That visual world will also extend to Nash’s always incredible live shows, which are a key goal for her in 2024. “You can always push things further and take it to a new place,” she says. “So with this album I want to play really quality shows.”
On 9 Sad Symphonies, Nash has taken another huge step towards cementing her place as one of Britain’s most unique and fearless talents. “I’ve climbed through the sewers of this industry and so my goal is to make good music I believe in, to have longevity, and have good live shows,” she states. “I make a living from my music, which is awesome.” As for other ambitions and expectations, she’s been doing this long enough to know not to place your hopes in things you can’t control. “I don’t feel competitive with the industry anymore. I’ve been in the game for twenty years, and I’m in my own league now.”
Nearly twenty years into her ever-evolving career, London and LA-based, Brit award-winning singer, songwriter, actor and activist Kate Nash has seen it all. She’s achieved huge commercial success – 2007’s debut Made of Bricks, featuring the hit single Foundations, reached number 1 in the UK and spent seven months in the top 40 – seen the darker side of the industry after being dropped in 2012 following 2010’s Bernard Butler-assisted My Best Friend Is You, forged her own path as a successful independent artist via 2013’s punk-y Girl Talk and 2018’s Yesterday Was Forever, and starred in HBO’s hit wrestling drama, GLOW. She’s also been the subject of an award-winning documentary, Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl, and also co-created a musical, Only Gold, with Hamilton choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler. Oh, and she also starred in that too. Still only 36, Nash isn’t finished shape-shifting just yet; after signing with legendary label Kill Rock Stars, whose alumni include Nash favourites Elliott Smith and Sleater-Kinney, in early 2024, she’ll release her fifth album, 9 Sad Symphonies, in June.
Inspired by old Hollywood, vintage musicals and a desperate quest to find beauty in a rotten world, it’s another sonic shift following her “rage-y” recent output. “It needed to be cinematic and dreamy,” Nash says of the 10-track album (the title is both a joke and an ode to passing achievable goals when creativity crumbles). As for the sonic shifts, it’s just second nature: “I do things based on what I’m feeling at the time, and what I’m inspired by,” she explains.
That moment of the album’s creation was fuelled by two things; her work on Only Gold and a global pandemic that curtailed filming on the fourth season of GLOW and sent Nash – and everyone – into a tailspin. After a period of laying bed watching zombie movies, creativity started to arrive in the autumn and winter of 2020, with songs being worked on well into 2021. Having worked with Danish producer Frederick Thaae on her musical, they quickly reconnected to start work on 9 Sad Symphonies. “We were in this completely different landscape for writing songs [on the musical], which was completely freeing,” Nash explains. “I was writing for a story, I was writing about a King and a Queen and a proper story arc. In that world you need the audience to understand the songs immediately, it’s very direct, and it has lots of editing which I’d never done. It changed my outlook on songwriting. Also, we said at the beginning that we wanted to make something beautiful, nothing harsh. I’ve done a lot of harsh stuff before. We wanted loads of beautiful string arrangements.”
These melodic, bright-on-the-surface but deeply layered songs started to emerge out of creative scenarios that had been completely changed by the pandemic. “We were on Zoom, which was… challenging,” she laughs. “We discussed ideas and then we’d hang up on Zoom, go away for three hours, or Frederick would send me the small thing we’d started, then I’d start writing and doing melodies and lyrics, and he would do production, and then we’d meet up on Zoom later.” Slowly the songs started to evolve, their unusual creation adding intriguing problems to try and overcome. “We’d get stuck a lot but you just had to let the stress go and come back to it. It’s a different version of the album to the one we would have made normally.”
The album’s curtain raiser, Millions of Heartbeats, sets out the album’s lyrical themes perfectly. “It’s about that point in the pandemic where I had lost my spark for life,” she says. “And I’m a pretty sparky person, so it was really sad to me.” She references the lyric “the spark is lit at such a low flame” as a crucial moment. “I felt like I lost a part of myself. I didn’t know how to get it back.” As with all of the songs on the album, it’s not just about one thing, however. “I think it also sums up a lot of how I feel about how people act in the world right now. Am I a number or am I a person? What are we trying to be right now? I’m a human being. But we’re so quantifiable and packaged and everyone is a brand. We’re in this capitalist explosion and I feel the effect of it in a way I’ve never felt before.” But it’s also a song that, by its end, flickers with a light that can’t be completely put out. “At the end of the day, the world is beautiful, there are all these heartbeats out there, and there is hope,” she says with a smile. “We have to try! You can’t fucking give up. This song is a sign of what’s to come – there’s going to be darkness and depression but we’ll get to hope by the end.”
A rare guitar appears on Ray, which delves deeper into mental health struggles, detailing depression and anxiety. It’s a theme Nash is keen to share with her fans in a typically honest manner. “It’s natural for an artist to write about emotions and feelings and darkness,” Nash says. “Also a lot of my fans suffer from depression too and I noticed it more when I was doing my livestream chats over lockdown. Not talking about it is not the solution. Being open and creating that community within my fanbase is really important.” It’s one she’s fostered not only via the Kickstarter campaigns that funded Girl Talk and Yesterday Was Forever, but also her Patreon account which she used in the pandemic to connect with her loyal fans via livestreams.
That darkness also weaves through Misery, which marries a propulsive string arrangement and a buoyant beat to lyrics that try to outrun the emotion of its title, while the livid My Bile is an emotional exorcism married to beatific strings and crashing drums. “I guess that song is the little patience I have left to give to all the bullshit, all the shitty parts of the industry, the media, the way people talk to other human beings, me as a woman in the industry, all the things people say about you online,” she explains. “I’m done. I don’t have anything left to give to that. I’ve proved who I am with actions, which is more important. I just have bile left.” There’s love on the album too, specifically on Space Odyssey 2001, which recounts a first proper date with her now partner. On the surface it feels like a diss of the Kubrick classic, 2001: Space Odyssey, but is more about its poor choice given the context. “It’s the wrong film for a date,” she smiles, “but I love the film. I like making jokes in songs. I like that there’s this beautiful love song but it’s also complaining about this critically acclaimed film being too long. I don’t recommend it for a first date!”
While the album was finished at the end of 2021, Nash wasn’t sure what to do with it. Free from the typical record industry framework – no manager, no label, no booking agents – she did two things; went on tour in 2022, which was rejuvenating, and joined TikTok. Her first post was a timeline of her extraordinary career, which ended with her questioning the best way in which to release the new album (some of the songs, including Misery, Wasteman and Horsie, had already started to emerge without a label). That first post went viral, leading to an influx of offers from labels and managers, creating a scenario Nash had been in before; dealing with some of the industry’s shadier characters. One label, however, had been interested for a while. “Kill Rock Stars had been pursuing me for two years. They had been checking in for a while saying ‘we notice the album hasn’t come out, we really love it’.” Once Nash had secured an excellent new manager, the loose ends were tied up and the album was ready to go.
Recent one-off single, Change, released to coincide with the signing announcement, was an example of what having a label can give you. “I didn’t have to do anything,” she laughs. “I’ve been doing everything myself, alongside my band and my tour manager and my various managers, but I am always the driving force. But it’s like you’re driving a 16 wheeler – there’s so much you have to take responsibility for. What was so nice with this release was that I just did the creative bit and the stuff I’m good at. The label takes care of everything else.”
It’s been a refreshing change to be able to fully focus on the creative side. That creativity is also there in the artwork for 9 Sad Symphonies, which features Nash in front of an old school Hollywood backdrop that recalls British nature while also alluding to Nash’s on-off home of LA. That visual world will also extend to Nash’s always incredible live shows, which are a key goal for her in 2024. “You can always push things further and take it to a new place,” she says. “So with this album I want to play really quality shows.”
On 9 Sad Symphonies, Nash has taken another huge step towards cementing her place as one of Britain’s most unique and fearless talents. “I’ve climbed through the sewers of this industry and so my goal is to make good music I believe in, to have longevity, and have good live shows,” she states. “I make a living from my music, which is awesome.” As for other ambitions and expectations, she’s been doing this long enough to know not to place your hopes in things you can’t control. “I don’t feel competitive with the industry anymore. I’ve been in the game for twenty years, and I’m in my own league now.”
Nearly twenty years into her ever-evolving career, London and LA-based, Brit award-winning singer, songwriter, actor and activist Kate Nash has seen it all. She’s achieved huge commercial success – 2007’s debut Made of Bricks, featuring the hit single Foundations, reached number 1 in the UK and spent seven months in the top 40 – seen the darker side of the industry after being dropped in 2012 following 2010’s Bernard Butler-assisted My Best Friend Is You, forged her own path as a successful independent artist via 2013’s punk-y Girl Talk and 2018’s Yesterday Was Forever, and starred in HBO’s hit wrestling drama, GLOW. She’s also been the subject of an award-winning documentary, Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl, and also co-created a musical, Only Gold, with Hamilton choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler. Oh, and she also starred in that too. Still only 36, Nash isn’t finished shape-shifting just yet; after signing with legendary label Kill Rock Stars, whose alumni include Nash favourites Elliott Smith and Sleater-Kinney, in early 2024, she’ll release her fifth album, 9 Sad Symphonies, in June.
Inspired by old Hollywood, vintage musicals and a desperate quest to find beauty in a rotten world, it’s another sonic shift following her “rage-y” recent output. “It needed to be cinematic and dreamy,” Nash says of the 10-track album (the title is both a joke and an ode to passing achievable goals when creativity crumbles). As for the sonic shifts, it’s just second nature: “I do things based on what I’m feeling at the time, and what I’m inspired by,” she explains.
That moment of the album’s creation was fuelled by two things; her work on Only Gold and a global pandemic that curtailed filming on the fourth season of GLOW and sent Nash – and everyone – into a tailspin. After a period of laying bed watching zombie movies, creativity started to arrive in the autumn and winter of 2020, with songs being worked on well into 2021. Having worked with Danish producer Frederick Thaae on her musical, they quickly reconnected to start work on 9 Sad Symphonies. “We were in this completely different landscape for writing songs [on the musical], which was completely freeing,” Nash explains. “I was writing for a story, I was writing about a King and a Queen and a proper story arc. In that world you need the audience to understand the songs immediately, it’s very direct, and it has lots of editing which I’d never done. It changed my outlook on songwriting. Also, we said at the beginning that we wanted to make something beautiful, nothing harsh. I’ve done a lot of harsh stuff before. We wanted loads of beautiful string arrangements.”
These melodic, bright-on-the-surface but deeply layered songs started to emerge out of creative scenarios that had been completely changed by the pandemic. “We were on Zoom, which was… challenging,” she laughs. “We discussed ideas and then we’d hang up on Zoom, go away for three hours, or Frederick would send me the small thing we’d started, then I’d start writing and doing melodies and lyrics, and he would do production, and then we’d meet up on Zoom later.” Slowly the songs started to evolve, their unusual creation adding intriguing problems to try and overcome. “We’d get stuck a lot but you just had to let the stress go and come back to it. It’s a different version of the album to the one we would have made normally.”
The album’s curtain raiser, Millions of Heartbeats, sets out the album’s lyrical themes perfectly. “It’s about that point in the pandemic where I had lost my spark for life,” she says. “And I’m a pretty sparky person, so it was really sad to me.” She references the lyric “the spark is lit at such a low flame” as a crucial moment. “I felt like I lost a part of myself. I didn’t know how to get it back.” As with all of the songs on the album, it’s not just about one thing, however. “I think it also sums up a lot of how I feel about how people act in the world right now. Am I a number or am I a person? What are we trying to be right now? I’m a human being. But we’re so quantifiable and packaged and everyone is a brand. We’re in this capitalist explosion and I feel the effect of it in a way I’ve never felt before.” But it’s also a song that, by its end, flickers with a light that can’t be completely put out. “At the end of the day, the world is beautiful, there are all these heartbeats out there, and there is hope,” she says with a smile. “We have to try! You can’t fucking give up. This song is a sign of what’s to come – there’s going to be darkness and depression but we’ll get to hope by the end.”
A rare guitar appears on Ray, which delves deeper into mental health struggles, detailing depression and anxiety. It’s a theme Nash is keen to share with her fans in a typically honest manner. “It’s natural for an artist to write about emotions and feelings and darkness,” Nash says. “Also a lot of my fans suffer from depression too and I noticed it more when I was doing my livestream chats over lockdown. Not talking about it is not the solution. Being open and creating that community within my fanbase is really important.” It’s one she’s fostered not only via the Kickstarter campaigns that funded Girl Talk and Yesterday Was Forever, but also her Patreon account which she used in the pandemic to connect with her loyal fans via livestreams.
That darkness also weaves through Misery, which marries a propulsive string arrangement and a buoyant beat to lyrics that try to outrun the emotion of its title, while the livid My Bile is an emotional exorcism married to beatific strings and crashing drums. “I guess that song is the little patience I have left to give to all the bullshit, all the shitty parts of the industry, the media, the way people talk to other human beings, me as a woman in the industry, all the things people say about you online,” she explains. “I’m done. I don’t have anything left to give to that. I’ve proved who I am with actions, which is more important. I just have bile left.” There’s love on the album too, specifically on Space Odyssey 2001, which recounts a first proper date with her now partner. On the surface it feels like a diss of the Kubrick classic, 2001: Space Odyssey, but is more about its poor choice given the context. “It’s the wrong film for a date,” she smiles, “but I love the film. I like making jokes in songs. I like that there’s this beautiful love song but it’s also complaining about this critically acclaimed film being too long. I don’t recommend it for a first date!”
While the album was finished at the end of 2021, Nash wasn’t sure what to do with it. Free from the typical record industry framework – no manager, no label, no booking agents – she did two things; went on tour in 2022, which was rejuvenating, and joined TikTok. Her first post was a timeline of her extraordinary career, which ended with her questioning the best way in which to release the new album (some of the songs, including Misery, Wasteman and Horsie, had already started to emerge without a label). That first post went viral, leading to an influx of offers from labels and managers, creating a scenario Nash had been in before; dealing with some of the industry’s shadier characters. One label, however, had been interested for a while. “Kill Rock Stars had been pursuing me for two years. They had been checking in for a while saying ‘we notice the album hasn’t come out, we really love it’.” Once Nash had secured an excellent new manager, the loose ends were tied up and the album was ready to go.
Recent one-off single, Change, released to coincide with the signing announcement, was an example of what having a label can give you. “I didn’t have to do anything,” she laughs. “I’ve been doing everything myself, alongside my band and my tour manager and my various managers, but I am always the driving force. But it’s like you’re driving a 16 wheeler – there’s so much you have to take responsibility for. What was so nice with this release was that I just did the creative bit and the stuff I’m good at. The label takes care of everything else.”
It’s been a refreshing change to be able to fully focus on the creative side. That creativity is also there in the artwork for 9 Sad Symphonies, which features Nash in front of an old school Hollywood backdrop that recalls British nature while also alluding to Nash’s on-off home of LA. That visual world will also extend to Nash’s always incredible live shows, which are a key goal for her in 2024. “You can always push things further and take it to a new place,” she says. “So with this album I want to play really quality shows.”
On 9 Sad Symphonies, Nash has taken another huge step towards cementing her place as one of Britain’s most unique and fearless talents. “I’ve climbed through the sewers of this industry and so my goal is to make good music I believe in, to have longevity, and have good live shows,” she states. “I make a living from my music, which is awesome.” As for other ambitions and expectations, she’s been doing this long enough to know not to place your hopes in things you can’t control. “I don’t feel competitive with the industry anymore. I’ve been in the game for twenty years, and I’m in my own league now.”
Nearly twenty years into her ever-evolving career, London and LA-based, Brit award-winning singer, songwriter, actor and activist Kate Nash has seen it all. She’s achieved huge commercial success – 2007’s debut Made of Bricks, featuring the hit single Foundations, reached number 1 in the UK and spent seven months in the top 40 – seen the darker side of the industry after being dropped in 2012 following 2010’s Bernard Butler-assisted My Best Friend Is You, forged her own path as a successful independent artist via 2013’s punk-y Girl Talk and 2018’s Yesterday Was Forever, and starred in HBO’s hit wrestling drama, GLOW. She’s also been the subject of an award-winning documentary, Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl, and also co-created a musical, Only Gold, with Hamilton choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler. Oh, and she also starred in that too. Still only 36, Nash isn’t finished shape-shifting just yet; after signing with legendary label Kill Rock Stars, whose alumni include Nash favourites Elliott Smith and Sleater-Kinney, in early 2024, she’ll release her fifth album, 9 Sad Symphonies, in June.
Inspired by old Hollywood, vintage musicals and a desperate quest to find beauty in a rotten world, it’s another sonic shift following her “rage-y” recent output. “It needed to be cinematic and dreamy,” Nash says of the 10-track album (the title is both a joke and an ode to passing achievable goals when creativity crumbles). As for the sonic shifts, it’s just second nature: “I do things based on what I’m feeling at the time, and what I’m inspired by,” she explains.
That moment of the album’s creation was fuelled by two things; her work on Only Gold and a global pandemic that curtailed filming on the fourth season of GLOW and sent Nash – and everyone – into a tailspin. After a period of laying bed watching zombie movies, creativity started to arrive in the autumn and winter of 2020, with songs being worked on well into 2021. Having worked with Danish producer Frederick Thaae on her musical, they quickly reconnected to start work on 9 Sad Symphonies. “We were in this completely different landscape for writing songs [on the musical], which was completely freeing,” Nash explains. “I was writing for a story, I was writing about a King and a Queen and a proper story arc. In that world you need the audience to understand the songs immediately, it’s very direct, and it has lots of editing which I’d never done. It changed my outlook on songwriting. Also, we said at the beginning that we wanted to make something beautiful, nothing harsh. I’ve done a lot of harsh stuff before. We wanted loads of beautiful string arrangements.”
These melodic, bright-on-the-surface but deeply layered songs started to emerge out of creative scenarios that had been completely changed by the pandemic. “We were on Zoom, which was… challenging,” she laughs. “We discussed ideas and then we’d hang up on Zoom, go away for three hours, or Frederick would send me the small thing we’d started, then I’d start writing and doing melodies and lyrics, and he would do production, and then we’d meet up on Zoom later.” Slowly the songs started to evolve, their unusual creation adding intriguing problems to try and overcome. “We’d get stuck a lot but you just had to let the stress go and come back to it. It’s a different version of the album to the one we would have made normally.”
The album’s curtain raiser, Millions of Heartbeats, sets out the album’s lyrical themes perfectly. “It’s about that point in the pandemic where I had lost my spark for life,” she says. “And I’m a pretty sparky person, so it was really sad to me.” She references the lyric “the spark is lit at such a low flame” as a crucial moment. “I felt like I lost a part of myself. I didn’t know how to get it back.” As with all of the songs on the album, it’s not just about one thing, however. “I think it also sums up a lot of how I feel about how people act in the world right now. Am I a number or am I a person? What are we trying to be right now? I’m a human being. But we’re so quantifiable and packaged and everyone is a brand. We’re in this capitalist explosion and I feel the effect of it in a way I’ve never felt before.” But it’s also a song that, by its end, flickers with a light that can’t be completely put out. “At the end of the day, the world is beautiful, there are all these heartbeats out there, and there is hope,” she says with a smile. “We have to try! You can’t fucking give up. This song is a sign of what’s to come – there’s going to be darkness and depression but we’ll get to hope by the end.”
A rare guitar appears on Ray, which delves deeper into mental health struggles, detailing depression and anxiety. It’s a theme Nash is keen to share with her fans in a typically honest manner. “It’s natural for an artist to write about emotions and feelings and darkness,” Nash says. “Also a lot of my fans suffer from depression too and I noticed it more when I was doing my livestream chats over lockdown. Not talking about it is not the solution. Being open and creating that community within my fanbase is really important.” It’s one she’s fostered not only via the Kickstarter campaigns that funded Girl Talk and Yesterday Was Forever, but also her Patreon account which she used in the pandemic to connect with her loyal fans via livestreams.
That darkness also weaves through Misery, which marries a propulsive string arrangement and a buoyant beat to lyrics that try to outrun the emotion of its title, while the livid My Bile is an emotional exorcism married to beatific strings and crashing drums. “I guess that song is the little patience I have left to give to all the bullshit, all the shitty parts of the industry, the media, the way people talk to other human beings, me as a woman in the industry, all the things people say about you online,” she explains. “I’m done. I don’t have anything left to give to that. I’ve proved who I am with actions, which is more important. I just have bile left.” There’s love on the album too, specifically on Space Odyssey 2001, which recounts a first proper date with her now partner. On the surface it feels like a diss of the Kubrick classic, 2001: Space Odyssey, but is more about its poor choice given the context. “It’s the wrong film for a date,” she smiles, “but I love the film. I like making jokes in songs. I like that there’s this beautiful love song but it’s also complaining about this critically acclaimed film being too long. I don’t recommend it for a first date!”
While the album was finished at the end of 2021, Nash wasn’t sure what to do with it. Free from the typical record industry framework – no manager, no label, no booking agents – she did two things; went on tour in 2022, which was rejuvenating, and joined TikTok. Her first post was a timeline of her extraordinary career, which ended with her questioning the best way in which to release the new album (some of the songs, including Misery, Wasteman and Horsie, had already started to emerge without a label). That first post went viral, leading to an influx of offers from labels and managers, creating a scenario Nash had been in before; dealing with some of the industry’s shadier characters. One label, however, had been interested for a while. “Kill Rock Stars had been pursuing me for two years. They had been checking in for a while saying ‘we notice the album hasn’t come out, we really love it’.” Once Nash had secured an excellent new manager, the loose ends were tied up and the album was ready to go.
Recent one-off single, Change, released to coincide with the signing announcement, was an example of what having a label can give you. “I didn’t have to do anything,” she laughs. “I’ve been doing everything myself, alongside my band and my tour manager and my various managers, but I am always the driving force. But it’s like you’re driving a 16 wheeler – there’s so much you have to take responsibility for. What was so nice with this release was that I just did the creative bit and the stuff I’m good at. The label takes care of everything else.”
It’s been a refreshing change to be able to fully focus on the creative side. That creativity is also there in the artwork for 9 Sad Symphonies, which features Nash in front of an old school Hollywood backdrop that recalls British nature while also alluding to Nash’s on-off home of LA. That visual world will also extend to Nash’s always incredible live shows, which are a key goal for her in 2024. “You can always push things further and take it to a new place,” she says. “So with this album I want to play really quality shows.”
On 9 Sad Symphonies, Nash has taken another huge step towards cementing her place as one of Britain’s most unique and fearless talents. “I’ve climbed through the sewers of this industry and so my goal is to make good music I believe in, to have longevity, and have good live shows,” she states. “I make a living from my music, which is awesome.” As for other ambitions and expectations, she’s been doing this long enough to know not to place your hopes in things you can’t control. “I don’t feel competitive with the industry anymore. I’ve been in the game for twenty years, and I’m in my own league now.”
Nearly twenty years into her ever-evolving career, London and LA-based, Brit award-winning singer, songwriter, actor and activist Kate Nash has seen it all. She’s achieved huge commercial success – 2007’s debut Made of Bricks, featuring the hit single Foundations, reached number 1 in the UK and spent seven months in the top 40 – seen the darker side of the industry after being dropped in 2012 following 2010’s Bernard Butler-assisted My Best Friend Is You, forged her own path as a successful independent artist via 2013’s punk-y Girl Talk and 2018’s Yesterday Was Forever, and starred in HBO’s hit wrestling drama, GLOW. She’s also been the subject of an award-winning documentary, Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl, and also co-created a musical, Only Gold, with Hamilton choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler. Oh, and she also starred in that too. Still only 36, Nash isn’t finished shape-shifting just yet; after signing with legendary label Kill Rock Stars, whose alumni include Nash favourites Elliott Smith and Sleater-Kinney, in early 2024, she’ll release her fifth album, 9 Sad Symphonies, in June.
Inspired by old Hollywood, vintage musicals and a desperate quest to find beauty in a rotten world, it’s another sonic shift following her “rage-y” recent output. “It needed to be cinematic and dreamy,” Nash says of the 10-track album (the title is both a joke and an ode to passing achievable goals when creativity crumbles). As for the sonic shifts, it’s just second nature: “I do things based on what I’m feeling at the time, and what I’m inspired by,” she explains.
That moment of the album’s creation was fuelled by two things; her work on Only Gold and a global pandemic that curtailed filming on the fourth season of GLOW and sent Nash – and everyone – into a tailspin. After a period of laying bed watching zombie movies, creativity started to arrive in the autumn and winter of 2020, with songs being worked on well into 2021. Having worked with Danish producer Frederick Thaae on her musical, they quickly reconnected to start work on 9 Sad Symphonies. “We were in this completely different landscape for writing songs [on the musical], which was completely freeing,” Nash explains. “I was writing for a story, I was writing about a King and a Queen and a proper story arc. In that world you need the audience to understand the songs immediately, it’s very direct, and it has lots of editing which I’d never done. It changed my outlook on songwriting. Also, we said at the beginning that we wanted to make something beautiful, nothing harsh. I’ve done a lot of harsh stuff before. We wanted loads of beautiful string arrangements.”
These melodic, bright-on-the-surface but deeply layered songs started to emerge out of creative scenarios that had been completely changed by the pandemic. “We were on Zoom, which was… challenging,” she laughs. “We discussed ideas and then we’d hang up on Zoom, go away for three hours, or Frederick would send me the small thing we’d started, then I’d start writing and doing melodies and lyrics, and he would do production, and then we’d meet up on Zoom later.” Slowly the songs started to evolve, their unusual creation adding intriguing problems to try and overcome. “We’d get stuck a lot but you just had to let the stress go and come back to it. It’s a different version of the album to the one we would have made normally.”
The album’s curtain raiser, Millions of Heartbeats, sets out the album’s lyrical themes perfectly. “It’s about that point in the pandemic where I had lost my spark for life,” she says. “And I’m a pretty sparky person, so it was really sad to me.” She references the lyric “the spark is lit at such a low flame” as a crucial moment. “I felt like I lost a part of myself. I didn’t know how to get it back.” As with all of the songs on the album, it’s not just about one thing, however. “I think it also sums up a lot of how I feel about how people act in the world right now. Am I a number or am I a person? What are we trying to be right now? I’m a human being. But we’re so quantifiable and packaged and everyone is a brand. We’re in this capitalist explosion and I feel the effect of it in a way I’ve never felt before.” But it’s also a song that, by its end, flickers with a light that can’t be completely put out. “At the end of the day, the world is beautiful, there are all these heartbeats out there, and there is hope,” she says with a smile. “We have to try! You can’t fucking give up. This song is a sign of what’s to come – there’s going to be darkness and depression but we’ll get to hope by the end.”
A rare guitar appears on Ray, which delves deeper into mental health struggles, detailing depression and anxiety. It’s a theme Nash is keen to share with her fans in a typically honest manner. “It’s natural for an artist to write about emotions and feelings and darkness,” Nash says. “Also a lot of my fans suffer from depression too and I noticed it more when I was doing my livestream chats over lockdown. Not talking about it is not the solution. Being open and creating that community within my fanbase is really important.” It’s one she’s fostered not only via the Kickstarter campaigns that funded Girl Talk and Yesterday Was Forever, but also her Patreon account which she used in the pandemic to connect with her loyal fans via livestreams.
That darkness also weaves through Misery, which marries a propulsive string arrangement and a buoyant beat to lyrics that try to outrun the emotion of its title, while the livid My Bile is an emotional exorcism married to beatific strings and crashing drums. “I guess that song is the little patience I have left to give to all the bullshit, all the shitty parts of the industry, the media, the way people talk to other human beings, me as a woman in the industry, all the things people say about you online,” she explains. “I’m done. I don’t have anything left to give to that. I’ve proved who I am with actions, which is more important. I just have bile left.” There’s love on the album too, specifically on Space Odyssey 2001, which recounts a first proper date with her now partner. On the surface it feels like a diss of the Kubrick classic, 2001: Space Odyssey, but is more about its poor choice given the context. “It’s the wrong film for a date,” she smiles, “but I love the film. I like making jokes in songs. I like that there’s this beautiful love song but it’s also complaining about this critically acclaimed film being too long. I don’t recommend it for a first date!”
While the album was finished at the end of 2021, Nash wasn’t sure what to do with it. Free from the typical record industry framework – no manager, no label, no booking agents – she did two things; went on tour in 2022, which was rejuvenating, and joined TikTok. Her first post was a timeline of her extraordinary career, which ended with her questioning the best way in which to release the new album (some of the songs, including Misery, Wasteman and Horsie, had already started to emerge without a label). That first post went viral, leading to an influx of offers from labels and managers, creating a scenario Nash had been in before; dealing with some of the industry’s shadier characters. One label, however, had been interested for a while. “Kill Rock Stars had been pursuing me for two years. They had been checking in for a while saying ‘we notice the album hasn’t come out, we really love it’.” Once Nash had secured an excellent new manager, the loose ends were tied up and the album was ready to go.
Recent one-off single, Change, released to coincide with the signing announcement, was an example of what having a label can give you. “I didn’t have to do anything,” she laughs. “I’ve been doing everything myself, alongside my band and my tour manager and my various managers, but I am always the driving force. But it’s like you’re driving a 16 wheeler – there’s so much you have to take responsibility for. What was so nice with this release was that I just did the creative bit and the stuff I’m good at. The label takes care of everything else.”
It’s been a refreshing change to be able to fully focus on the creative side. That creativity is also there in the artwork for 9 Sad Symphonies, which features Nash in front of an old school Hollywood backdrop that recalls British nature while also alluding to Nash’s on-off home of LA. That visual world will also extend to Nash’s always incredible live shows, which are a key goal for her in 2024. “You can always push things further and take it to a new place,” she says. “So with this album I want to play really quality shows.”
On 9 Sad Symphonies, Nash has taken another huge step towards cementing her place as one of Britain’s most unique and fearless talents. “I’ve climbed through the sewers of this industry and so my goal is to make good music I believe in, to have longevity, and have good live shows,” she states. “I make a living from my music, which is awesome.” As for other ambitions and expectations, she’s been doing this long enough to know not to place your hopes in things you can’t control. “I don’t feel competitive with the industry anymore. I’ve been in the game for twenty years, and I’m in my own league now.”
Nearly twenty years into her ever-evolving career, London and LA-based, Brit award-winning singer, songwriter, actor and activist Kate Nash has seen it all. She’s achieved huge commercial success – 2007’s debut Made of Bricks, featuring the hit single Foundations, reached number 1 in the UK and spent seven months in the top 40 – seen the darker side of the industry after being dropped in 2012 following 2010’s Bernard Butler-assisted My Best Friend Is You, forged her own path as a successful independent artist via 2013’s punk-y Girl Talk and 2018’s Yesterday Was Forever, and starred in HBO’s hit wrestling drama, GLOW. She’s also been the subject of an award-winning documentary, Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl, and also co-created a musical, Only Gold, with Hamilton choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler. Oh, and she also starred in that too. Still only 36, Nash isn’t finished shape-shifting just yet; after signing with legendary label Kill Rock Stars, whose alumni include Nash favourites Elliott Smith and Sleater-Kinney, in early 2024, she’ll release her fifth album, 9 Sad Symphonies, in June.
Inspired by old Hollywood, vintage musicals and a desperate quest to find beauty in a rotten world, it’s another sonic shift following her “rage-y” recent output. “It needed to be cinematic and dreamy,” Nash says of the 10-track album (the title is both a joke and an ode to passing achievable goals when creativity crumbles). As for the sonic shifts, it’s just second nature: “I do things based on what I’m feeling at the time, and what I’m inspired by,” she explains.
That moment of the album’s creation was fuelled by two things; her work on Only Gold and a global pandemic that curtailed filming on the fourth season of GLOW and sent Nash – and everyone – into a tailspin. After a period of laying bed watching zombie movies, creativity started to arrive in the autumn and winter of 2020, with songs being worked on well into 2021. Having worked with Danish producer Frederick Thaae on her musical, they quickly reconnected to start work on 9 Sad Symphonies. “We were in this completely different landscape for writing songs [on the musical], which was completely freeing,” Nash explains. “I was writing for a story, I was writing about a King and a Queen and a proper story arc. In that world you need the audience to understand the songs immediately, it’s very direct, and it has lots of editing which I’d never done. It changed my outlook on songwriting. Also, we said at the beginning that we wanted to make something beautiful, nothing harsh. I’ve done a lot of harsh stuff before. We wanted loads of beautiful string arrangements.”
These melodic, bright-on-the-surface but deeply layered songs started to emerge out of creative scenarios that had been completely changed by the pandemic. “We were on Zoom, which was… challenging,” she laughs. “We discussed ideas and then we’d hang up on Zoom, go away for three hours, or Frederick would send me the small thing we’d started, then I’d start writing and doing melodies and lyrics, and he would do production, and then we’d meet up on Zoom later.” Slowly the songs started to evolve, their unusual creation adding intriguing problems to try and overcome. “We’d get stuck a lot but you just had to let the stress go and come back to it. It’s a different version of the album to the one we would have made normally.”
The album’s curtain raiser, Millions of Heartbeats, sets out the album’s lyrical themes perfectly. “It’s about that point in the pandemic where I had lost my spark for life,” she says. “And I’m a pretty sparky person, so it was really sad to me.” She references the lyric “the spark is lit at such a low flame” as a crucial moment. “I felt like I lost a part of myself. I didn’t know how to get it back.” As with all of the songs on the album, it’s not just about one thing, however. “I think it also sums up a lot of how I feel about how people act in the world right now. Am I a number or am I a person? What are we trying to be right now? I’m a human being. But we’re so quantifiable and packaged and everyone is a brand. We’re in this capitalist explosion and I feel the effect of it in a way I’ve never felt before.” But it’s also a song that, by its end, flickers with a light that can’t be completely put out. “At the end of the day, the world is beautiful, there are all these heartbeats out there, and there is hope,” she says with a smile. “We have to try! You can’t fucking give up. This song is a sign of what’s to come – there’s going to be darkness and depression but we’ll get to hope by the end.”
A rare guitar appears on Ray, which delves deeper into mental health struggles, detailing depression and anxiety. It’s a theme Nash is keen to share with her fans in a typically honest manner. “It’s natural for an artist to write about emotions and feelings and darkness,” Nash says. “Also a lot of my fans suffer from depression too and I noticed it more when I was doing my livestream chats over lockdown. Not talking about it is not the solution. Being open and creating that community within my fanbase is really important.” It’s one she’s fostered not only via the Kickstarter campaigns that funded Girl Talk and Yesterday Was Forever, but also her Patreon account which she used in the pandemic to connect with her loyal fans via livestreams.
That darkness also weaves through Misery, which marries a propulsive string arrangement and a buoyant beat to lyrics that try to outrun the emotion of its title, while the livid My Bile is an emotional exorcism married to beatific strings and crashing drums. “I guess that song is the little patience I have left to give to all the bullshit, all the shitty parts of the industry, the media, the way people talk to other human beings, me as a woman in the industry, all the things people say about you online,” she explains. “I’m done. I don’t have anything left to give to that. I’ve proved who I am with actions, which is more important. I just have bile left.” There’s love on the album too, specifically on Space Odyssey 2001, which recounts a first proper date with her now partner. On the surface it feels like a diss of the Kubrick classic, 2001: Space Odyssey, but is more about its poor choice given the context. “It’s the wrong film for a date,” she smiles, “but I love the film. I like making jokes in songs. I like that there’s this beautiful love song but it’s also complaining about this critically acclaimed film being too long. I don’t recommend it for a first date!”
While the album was finished at the end of 2021, Nash wasn’t sure what to do with it. Free from the typical record industry framework – no manager, no label, no booking agents – she did two things; went on tour in 2022, which was rejuvenating, and joined TikTok. Her first post was a timeline of her extraordinary career, which ended with her questioning the best way in which to release the new album (some of the songs, including Misery, Wasteman and Horsie, had already started to emerge without a label). That first post went viral, leading to an influx of offers from labels and managers, creating a scenario Nash had been in before; dealing with some of the industry’s shadier characters. One label, however, had been interested for a while. “Kill Rock Stars had been pursuing me for two years. They had been checking in for a while saying ‘we notice the album hasn’t come out, we really love it’.” Once Nash had secured an excellent new manager, the loose ends were tied up and the album was ready to go.
Recent one-off single, Change, released to coincide with the signing announcement, was an example of what having a label can give you. “I didn’t have to do anything,” she laughs. “I’ve been doing everything myself, alongside my band and my tour manager and my various managers, but I am always the driving force. But it’s like you’re driving a 16 wheeler – there’s so much you have to take responsibility for. What was so nice with this release was that I just did the creative bit and the stuff I’m good at. The label takes care of everything else.”
It’s been a refreshing change to be able to fully focus on the creative side. That creativity is also there in the artwork for 9 Sad Symphonies, which features Nash in front of an old school Hollywood backdrop that recalls British nature while also alluding to Nash’s on-off home of LA. That visual world will also extend to Nash’s always incredible live shows, which are a key goal for her in 2024. “You can always push things further and take it to a new place,” she says. “So with this album I want to play really quality shows.”
On 9 Sad Symphonies, Nash has taken another huge step towards cementing her place as one of Britain’s most unique and fearless talents. “I’ve climbed through the sewers of this industry and so my goal is to make good music I believe in, to have longevity, and have good live shows,” she states. “I make a living from my music, which is awesome.” As for other ambitions and expectations, she’s been doing this long enough to know not to place your hopes in things you can’t control. “I don’t feel competitive with the industry anymore. I’ve been in the game for twenty years, and I’m in my own league now.”
Nearly twenty years into her ever-evolving career, London and LA-based, Brit award-winning singer, songwriter, actor and activist Kate Nash has seen it all. She’s achieved huge commercial success – 2007’s debut Made of Bricks, featuring the hit single Foundations, reached number 1 in the UK and spent seven months in the top 40 – seen the darker side of the industry after being dropped in 2012 following 2010’s Bernard Butler-assisted My Best Friend Is You, forged her own path as a successful independent artist via 2013’s punk-y Girl Talk and 2018’s Yesterday Was Forever, and starred in HBO’s hit wrestling drama, GLOW. She’s also been the subject of an award-winning documentary, Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl, and also co-created a musical, Only Gold, with Hamilton choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler. Oh, and she also starred in that too. Still only 36, Nash isn’t finished shape-shifting just yet; after signing with legendary label Kill Rock Stars, whose alumni include Nash favourites Elliott Smith and Sleater-Kinney, in early 2024, she’ll release her fifth album, 9 Sad Symphonies, in June.
Inspired by old Hollywood, vintage musicals and a desperate quest to find beauty in a rotten world, it’s another sonic shift following her “rage-y” recent output. “It needed to be cinematic and dreamy,” Nash says of the 10-track album (the title is both a joke and an ode to passing achievable goals when creativity crumbles). As for the sonic shifts, it’s just second nature: “I do things based on what I’m feeling at the time, and what I’m inspired by,” she explains.
That moment of the album’s creation was fuelled by two things; her work on Only Gold and a global pandemic that curtailed filming on the fourth season of GLOW and sent Nash – and everyone – into a tailspin. After a period of laying bed watching zombie movies, creativity started to arrive in the autumn and winter of 2020, with songs being worked on well into 2021. Having worked with Danish producer Frederick Thaae on her musical, they quickly reconnected to start work on 9 Sad Symphonies. “We were in this completely different landscape for writing songs [on the musical], which was completely freeing,” Nash explains. “I was writing for a story, I was writing about a King and a Queen and a proper story arc. In that world you need the audience to understand the songs immediately, it’s very direct, and it has lots of editing which I’d never done. It changed my outlook on songwriting. Also, we said at the beginning that we wanted to make something beautiful, nothing harsh. I’ve done a lot of harsh stuff before. We wanted loads of beautiful string arrangements.”
These melodic, bright-on-the-surface but deeply layered songs started to emerge out of creative scenarios that had been completely changed by the pandemic. “We were on Zoom, which was… challenging,” she laughs. “We discussed ideas and then we’d hang up on Zoom, go away for three hours, or Frederick would send me the small thing we’d started, then I’d start writing and doing melodies and lyrics, and he would do production, and then we’d meet up on Zoom later.” Slowly the songs started to evolve, their unusual creation adding intriguing problems to try and overcome. “We’d get stuck a lot but you just had to let the stress go and come back to it. It’s a different version of the album to the one we would have made normally.”
The album’s curtain raiser, Millions of Heartbeats, sets out the album’s lyrical themes perfectly. “It’s about that point in the pandemic where I had lost my spark for life,” she says. “And I’m a pretty sparky person, so it was really sad to me.” She references the lyric “the spark is lit at such a low flame” as a crucial moment. “I felt like I lost a part of myself. I didn’t know how to get it back.” As with all of the songs on the album, it’s not just about one thing, however. “I think it also sums up a lot of how I feel about how people act in the world right now. Am I a number or am I a person? What are we trying to be right now? I’m a human being. But we’re so quantifiable and packaged and everyone is a brand. We’re in this capitalist explosion and I feel the effect of it in a way I’ve never felt before.” But it’s also a song that, by its end, flickers with a light that can’t be completely put out. “At the end of the day, the world is beautiful, there are all these heartbeats out there, and there is hope,” she says with a smile. “We have to try! You can’t fucking give up. This song is a sign of what’s to come – there’s going to be darkness and depression but we’ll get to hope by the end.”
A rare guitar appears on Ray, which delves deeper into mental health struggles, detailing depression and anxiety. It’s a theme Nash is keen to share with her fans in a typically honest manner. “It’s natural for an artist to write about emotions and feelings and darkness,” Nash says. “Also a lot of my fans suffer from depression too and I noticed it more when I was doing my livestream chats over lockdown. Not talking about it is not the solution. Being open and creating that community within my fanbase is really important.” It’s one she’s fostered not only via the Kickstarter campaigns that funded Girl Talk and Yesterday Was Forever, but also her Patreon account which she used in the pandemic to connect with her loyal fans via livestreams.
That darkness also weaves through Misery, which marries a propulsive string arrangement and a buoyant beat to lyrics that try to outrun the emotion of its title, while the livid My Bile is an emotional exorcism married to beatific strings and crashing drums. “I guess that song is the little patience I have left to give to all the bullshit, all the shitty parts of the industry, the media, the way people talk to other human beings, me as a woman in the industry, all the things people say about you online,” she explains. “I’m done. I don’t have anything left to give to that. I’ve proved who I am with actions, which is more important. I just have bile left.” There’s love on the album too, specifically on Space Odyssey 2001, which recounts a first proper date with her now partner. On the surface it feels like a diss of the Kubrick classic, 2001: Space Odyssey, but is more about its poor choice given the context. “It’s the wrong film for a date,” she smiles, “but I love the film. I like making jokes in songs. I like that there’s this beautiful love song but it’s also complaining about this critically acclaimed film being too long. I don’t recommend it for a first date!”
While the album was finished at the end of 2021, Nash wasn’t sure what to do with it. Free from the typical record industry framework – no manager, no label, no booking agents – she did two things; went on tour in 2022, which was rejuvenating, and joined TikTok. Her first post was a timeline of her extraordinary career, which ended with her questioning the best way in which to release the new album (some of the songs, including Misery, Wasteman and Horsie, had already started to emerge without a label). That first post went viral, leading to an influx of offers from labels and managers, creating a scenario Nash had been in before; dealing with some of the industry’s shadier characters. One label, however, had been interested for a while. “Kill Rock Stars had been pursuing me for two years. They had been checking in for a while saying ‘we notice the album hasn’t come out, we really love it’.” Once Nash had secured an excellent new manager, the loose ends were tied up and the album was ready to go.
Recent one-off single, Change, released to coincide with the signing announcement, was an example of what having a label can give you. “I didn’t have to do anything,” she laughs. “I’ve been doing everything myself, alongside my band and my tour manager and my various managers, but I am always the driving force. But it’s like you’re driving a 16 wheeler – there’s so much you have to take responsibility for. What was so nice with this release was that I just did the creative bit and the stuff I’m good at. The label takes care of everything else.”
It’s been a refreshing change to be able to fully focus on the creative side. That creativity is also there in the artwork for 9 Sad Symphonies, which features Nash in front of an old school Hollywood backdrop that recalls British nature while also alluding to Nash’s on-off home of LA. That visual world will also extend to Nash’s always incredible live shows, which are a key goal for her in 2024. “You can always push things further and take it to a new place,” she says. “So with this album I want to play really quality shows.”
On 9 Sad Symphonies, Nash has taken another huge step towards cementing her place as one of Britain’s most unique and fearless talents. “I’ve climbed through the sewers of this industry and so my goal is to make good music I believe in, to have longevity, and have good live shows,” she states. “I make a living from my music, which is awesome.” As for other ambitions and expectations, she’s been doing this long enough to know not to place your hopes in things you can’t control. “I don’t feel competitive with the industry anymore. I’ve been in the game for twenty years, and I’m in my own league now.”
Nearly twenty years into her ever-evolving career, London and LA-based, Brit award-winning singer, songwriter, actor and activist Kate Nash has seen it all. She’s achieved huge commercial success – 2007’s debut Made of Bricks, featuring the hit single Foundations, reached number 1 in the UK and spent seven months in the top 40 – seen the darker side of the industry after being dropped in 2012 following 2010’s Bernard Butler-assisted My Best Friend Is You, forged her own path as a successful independent artist via 2013’s punk-y Girl Talk and 2018’s Yesterday Was Forever, and starred in HBO’s hit wrestling drama, GLOW. She’s also been the subject of an award-winning documentary, Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl, and also co-created a musical, Only Gold, with Hamilton choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler. Oh, and she also starred in that too. Still only 36, Nash isn’t finished shape-shifting just yet; after signing with legendary label Kill Rock Stars, whose alumni include Nash favourites Elliott Smith and Sleater-Kinney, in early 2024, she’ll release her fifth album, 9 Sad Symphonies, in June.
Inspired by old Hollywood, vintage musicals and a desperate quest to find beauty in a rotten world, it’s another sonic shift following her “rage-y” recent output. “It needed to be cinematic and dreamy,” Nash says of the 10-track album (the title is both a joke and an ode to passing achievable goals when creativity crumbles). As for the sonic shifts, it’s just second nature: “I do things based on what I’m feeling at the time, and what I’m inspired by,” she explains.
That moment of the album’s creation was fuelled by two things; her work on Only Gold and a global pandemic that curtailed filming on the fourth season of GLOW and sent Nash – and everyone – into a tailspin. After a period of laying bed watching zombie movies, creativity started to arrive in the autumn and winter of 2020, with songs being worked on well into 2021. Having worked with Danish producer Frederick Thaae on her musical, they quickly reconnected to start work on 9 Sad Symphonies. “We were in this completely different landscape for writing songs [on the musical], which was completely freeing,” Nash explains. “I was writing for a story, I was writing about a King and a Queen and a proper story arc. In that world you need the audience to understand the songs immediately, it’s very direct, and it has lots of editing which I’d never done. It changed my outlook on songwriting. Also, we said at the beginning that we wanted to make something beautiful, nothing harsh. I’ve done a lot of harsh stuff before. We wanted loads of beautiful string arrangements.”
These melodic, bright-on-the-surface but deeply layered songs started to emerge out of creative scenarios that had been completely changed by the pandemic. “We were on Zoom, which was… challenging,” she laughs. “We discussed ideas and then we’d hang up on Zoom, go away for three hours, or Frederick would send me the small thing we’d started, then I’d start writing and doing melodies and lyrics, and he would do production, and then we’d meet up on Zoom later.” Slowly the songs started to evolve, their unusual creation adding intriguing problems to try and overcome. “We’d get stuck a lot but you just had to let the stress go and come back to it. It’s a different version of the album to the one we would have made normally.”
The album’s curtain raiser, Millions of Heartbeats, sets out the album’s lyrical themes perfectly. “It’s about that point in the pandemic where I had lost my spark for life,” she says. “And I’m a pretty sparky person, so it was really sad to me.” She references the lyric “the spark is lit at such a low flame” as a crucial moment. “I felt like I lost a part of myself. I didn’t know how to get it back.” As with all of the songs on the album, it’s not just about one thing, however. “I think it also sums up a lot of how I feel about how people act in the world right now. Am I a number or am I a person? What are we trying to be right now? I’m a human being. But we’re so quantifiable and packaged and everyone is a brand. We’re in this capitalist explosion and I feel the effect of it in a way I’ve never felt before.” But it’s also a song that, by its end, flickers with a light that can’t be completely put out. “At the end of the day, the world is beautiful, there are all these heartbeats out there, and there is hope,” she says with a smile. “We have to try! You can’t fucking give up. This song is a sign of what’s to come – there’s going to be darkness and depression but we’ll get to hope by the end.”
A rare guitar appears on Ray, which delves deeper into mental health struggles, detailing depression and anxiety. It’s a theme Nash is keen to share with her fans in a typically honest manner. “It’s natural for an artist to write about emotions and feelings and darkness,” Nash says. “Also a lot of my fans suffer from depression too and I noticed it more when I was doing my livestream chats over lockdown. Not talking about it is not the solution. Being open and creating that community within my fanbase is really important.” It’s one she’s fostered not only via the Kickstarter campaigns that funded Girl Talk and Yesterday Was Forever, but also her Patreon account which she used in the pandemic to connect with her loyal fans via livestreams.
That darkness also weaves through Misery, which marries a propulsive string arrangement and a buoyant beat to lyrics that try to outrun the emotion of its title, while the livid My Bile is an emotional exorcism married to beatific strings and crashing drums. “I guess that song is the little patience I have left to give to all the bullshit, all the shitty parts of the industry, the media, the way people talk to other human beings, me as a woman in the industry, all the things people say about you online,” she explains. “I’m done. I don’t have anything left to give to that. I’ve proved who I am with actions, which is more important. I just have bile left.” There’s love on the album too, specifically on Space Odyssey 2001, which recounts a first proper date with her now partner. On the surface it feels like a diss of the Kubrick classic, 2001: Space Odyssey, but is more about its poor choice given the context. “It’s the wrong film for a date,” she smiles, “but I love the film. I like making jokes in songs. I like that there’s this beautiful love song but it’s also complaining about this critically acclaimed film being too long. I don’t recommend it for a first date!”
While the album was finished at the end of 2021, Nash wasn’t sure what to do with it. Free from the typical record industry framework – no manager, no label, no booking agents – she did two things; went on tour in 2022, which was rejuvenating, and joined TikTok. Her first post was a timeline of her extraordinary career, which ended with her questioning the best way in which to release the new album (some of the songs, including Misery, Wasteman and Horsie, had already started to emerge without a label). That first post went viral, leading to an influx of offers from labels and managers, creating a scenario Nash had been in before; dealing with some of the industry’s shadier characters. One label, however, had been interested for a while. “Kill Rock Stars had been pursuing me for two years. They had been checking in for a while saying ‘we notice the album hasn’t come out, we really love it’.” Once Nash had secured an excellent new manager, the loose ends were tied up and the album was ready to go.
Recent one-off single, Change, released to coincide with the signing announcement, was an example of what having a label can give you. “I didn’t have to do anything,” she laughs. “I’ve been doing everything myself, alongside my band and my tour manager and my various managers, but I am always the driving force. But it’s like you’re driving a 16 wheeler – there’s so much you have to take responsibility for. What was so nice with this release was that I just did the creative bit and the stuff I’m good at. The label takes care of everything else.”
It’s been a refreshing change to be able to fully focus on the creative side. That creativity is also there in the artwork for 9 Sad Symphonies, which features Nash in front of an old school Hollywood backdrop that recalls British nature while also alluding to Nash’s on-off home of LA. That visual world will also extend to Nash’s always incredible live shows, which are a key goal for her in 2024. “You can always push things further and take it to a new place,” she says. “So with this album I want to play really quality shows.”
On 9 Sad Symphonies, Nash has taken another huge step towards cementing her place as one of Britain’s most unique and fearless talents. “I’ve climbed through the sewers of this industry and so my goal is to make good music I believe in, to have longevity, and have good live shows,” she states. “I make a living from my music, which is awesome.” As for other ambitions and expectations, she’s been doing this long enough to know not to place your hopes in things you can’t control. “I don’t feel competitive with the industry anymore. I’ve been in the game for twenty years, and I’m in my own league now.”
Nearly twenty years into her ever-evolving career, London and LA-based, Brit award-winning singer, songwriter, actor and activist Kate Nash has seen it all. She’s achieved huge commercial success – 2007’s debut Made of Bricks, featuring the hit single Foundations, reached number 1 in the UK and spent seven months in the top 40 – seen the darker side of the industry after being dropped in 2012 following 2010’s Bernard Butler-assisted My Best Friend Is You, forged her own path as a successful independent artist via 2013’s punk-y Girl Talk and 2018’s Yesterday Was Forever, and starred in HBO’s hit wrestling drama, GLOW. She’s also been the subject of an award-winning documentary, Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl, and also co-created a musical, Only Gold, with Hamilton choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler. Oh, and she also starred in that too. Still only 36, Nash isn’t finished shape-shifting just yet; after signing with legendary label Kill Rock Stars, whose alumni include Nash favourites Elliott Smith and Sleater-Kinney, in early 2024, she’ll release her fifth album, 9 Sad Symphonies, in June.
Inspired by old Hollywood, vintage musicals and a desperate quest to find beauty in a rotten world, it’s another sonic shift following her “rage-y” recent output. “It needed to be cinematic and dreamy,” Nash says of the 10-track album (the title is both a joke and an ode to passing achievable goals when creativity crumbles). As for the sonic shifts, it’s just second nature: “I do things based on what I’m feeling at the time, and what I’m inspired by,” she explains.
That moment of the album’s creation was fuelled by two things; her work on Only Gold and a global pandemic that curtailed filming on the fourth season of GLOW and sent Nash – and everyone – into a tailspin. After a period of laying bed watching zombie movies, creativity started to arrive in the autumn and winter of 2020, with songs being worked on well into 2021. Having worked with Danish producer Frederick Thaae on her musical, they quickly reconnected to start work on 9 Sad Symphonies. “We were in this completely different landscape for writing songs [on the musical], which was completely freeing,” Nash explains. “I was writing for a story, I was writing about a King and a Queen and a proper story arc. In that world you need the audience to understand the songs immediately, it’s very direct, and it has lots of editing which I’d never done. It changed my outlook on songwriting. Also, we said at the beginning that we wanted to make something beautiful, nothing harsh. I’ve done a lot of harsh stuff before. We wanted loads of beautiful string arrangements.”
These melodic, bright-on-the-surface but deeply layered songs started to emerge out of creative scenarios that had been completely changed by the pandemic. “We were on Zoom, which was… challenging,” she laughs. “We discussed ideas and then we’d hang up on Zoom, go away for three hours, or Frederick would send me the small thing we’d started, then I’d start writing and doing melodies and lyrics, and he would do production, and then we’d meet up on Zoom later.” Slowly the songs started to evolve, their unusual creation adding intriguing problems to try and overcome. “We’d get stuck a lot but you just had to let the stress go and come back to it. It’s a different version of the album to the one we would have made normally.”
The album’s curtain raiser, Millions of Heartbeats, sets out the album’s lyrical themes perfectly. “It’s about that point in the pandemic where I had lost my spark for life,” she says. “And I’m a pretty sparky person, so it was really sad to me.” She references the lyric “the spark is lit at such a low flame” as a crucial moment. “I felt like I lost a part of myself. I didn’t know how to get it back.” As with all of the songs on the album, it’s not just about one thing, however. “I think it also sums up a lot of how I feel about how people act in the world right now. Am I a number or am I a person? What are we trying to be right now? I’m a human being. But we’re so quantifiable and packaged and everyone is a brand. We’re in this capitalist explosion and I feel the effect of it in a way I’ve never felt before.” But it’s also a song that, by its end, flickers with a light that can’t be completely put out. “At the end of the day, the world is beautiful, there are all these heartbeats out there, and there is hope,” she says with a smile. “We have to try! You can’t fucking give up. This song is a sign of what’s to come – there’s going to be darkness and depression but we’ll get to hope by the end.”
A rare guitar appears on Ray, which delves deeper into mental health struggles, detailing depression and anxiety. It’s a theme Nash is keen to share with her fans in a typically honest manner. “It’s natural for an artist to write about emotions and feelings and darkness,” Nash says. “Also a lot of my fans suffer from depression too and I noticed it more when I was doing my livestream chats over lockdown. Not talking about it is not the solution. Being open and creating that community within my fanbase is really important.” It’s one she’s fostered not only via the Kickstarter campaigns that funded Girl Talk and Yesterday Was Forever, but also her Patreon account which she used in the pandemic to connect with her loyal fans via livestreams.
That darkness also weaves through Misery, which marries a propulsive string arrangement and a buoyant beat to lyrics that try to outrun the emotion of its title, while the livid My Bile is an emotional exorcism married to beatific strings and crashing drums. “I guess that song is the little patience I have left to give to all the bullshit, all the shitty parts of the industry, the media, the way people talk to other human beings, me as a woman in the industry, all the things people say about you online,” she explains. “I’m done. I don’t have anything left to give to that. I’ve proved who I am with actions, which is more important. I just have bile left.” There’s love on the album too, specifically on Space Odyssey 2001, which recounts a first proper date with her now partner. On the surface it feels like a diss of the Kubrick classic, 2001: Space Odyssey, but is more about its poor choice given the context. “It’s the wrong film for a date,” she smiles, “but I love the film. I like making jokes in songs. I like that there’s this beautiful love song but it’s also complaining about this critically acclaimed film being too long. I don’t recommend it for a first date!”
While the album was finished at the end of 2021, Nash wasn’t sure what to do with it. Free from the typical record industry framework – no manager, no label, no booking agents – she did two things; went on tour in 2022, which was rejuvenating, and joined TikTok. Her first post was a timeline of her extraordinary career, which ended with her questioning the best way in which to release the new album (some of the songs, including Misery, Wasteman and Horsie, had already started to emerge without a label). That first post went viral, leading to an influx of offers from labels and managers, creating a scenario Nash had been in before; dealing with some of the industry’s shadier characters. One label, however, had been interested for a while. “Kill Rock Stars had been pursuing me for two years. They had been checking in for a while saying ‘we notice the album hasn’t come out, we really love it’.” Once Nash had secured an excellent new manager, the loose ends were tied up and the album was ready to go.
Recent one-off single, Change, released to coincide with the signing announcement, was an example of what having a label can give you. “I didn’t have to do anything,” she laughs. “I’ve been doing everything myself, alongside my band and my tour manager and my various managers, but I am always the driving force. But it’s like you’re driving a 16 wheeler – there’s so much you have to take responsibility for. What was so nice with this release was that I just did the creative bit and the stuff I’m good at. The label takes care of everything else.”
It’s been a refreshing change to be able to fully focus on the creative side. That creativity is also there in the artwork for 9 Sad Symphonies, which features Nash in front of an old school Hollywood backdrop that recalls British nature while also alluding to Nash’s on-off home of LA. That visual world will also extend to Nash’s always incredible live shows, which are a key goal for her in 2024. “You can always push things further and take it to a new place,” she says. “So with this album I want to play really quality shows.”
On 9 Sad Symphonies, Nash has taken another huge step towards cementing her place as one of Britain’s most unique and fearless talents. “I’ve climbed through the sewers of this industry and so my goal is to make good music I believe in, to have longevity, and have good live shows,” she states. “I make a living from my music, which is awesome.” As for other ambitions and expectations, she’s been doing this long enough to know not to place your hopes in things you can’t control. “I don’t feel competitive with the industry anymore. I’ve been in the game for twenty years, and I’m in my own league now.”
Nearly twenty years into her ever-evolving career, London and LA-based, Brit award-winning singer, songwriter, actor and activist Kate Nash has seen it all. She’s achieved huge commercial success – 2007’s debut Made of Bricks, featuring the hit single Foundations, reached number 1 in the UK and spent seven months in the top 40 – seen the darker side of the industry after being dropped in 2012 following 2010’s Bernard Butler-assisted My Best Friend Is You, forged her own path as a successful independent artist via 2013’s punk-y Girl Talk and 2018’s Yesterday Was Forever, and starred in HBO’s hit wrestling drama, GLOW. She’s also been the subject of an award-winning documentary, Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl, and also co-created a musical, Only Gold, with Hamilton choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler. Oh, and she also starred in that too. Still only 36, Nash isn’t finished shape-shifting just yet; after signing with legendary label Kill Rock Stars, whose alumni include Nash favourites Elliott Smith and Sleater-Kinney, in early 2024, she’ll release her fifth album, 9 Sad Symphonies, in June.
Inspired by old Hollywood, vintage musicals and a desperate quest to find beauty in a rotten world, it’s another sonic shift following her “rage-y” recent output. “It needed to be cinematic and dreamy,” Nash says of the 10-track album (the title is both a joke and an ode to passing achievable goals when creativity crumbles). As for the sonic shifts, it’s just second nature: “I do things based on what I’m feeling at the time, and what I’m inspired by,” she explains.
That moment of the album’s creation was fuelled by two things; her work on Only Gold and a global pandemic that curtailed filming on the fourth season of GLOW and sent Nash – and everyone – into a tailspin. After a period of laying bed watching zombie movies, creativity started to arrive in the autumn and winter of 2020, with songs being worked on well into 2021. Having worked with Danish producer Frederick Thaae on her musical, they quickly reconnected to start work on 9 Sad Symphonies. “We were in this completely different landscape for writing songs [on the musical], which was completely freeing,” Nash explains. “I was writing for a story, I was writing about a King and a Queen and a proper story arc. In that world you need the audience to understand the songs immediately, it’s very direct, and it has lots of editing which I’d never done. It changed my outlook on songwriting. Also, we said at the beginning that we wanted to make something beautiful, nothing harsh. I’ve done a lot of harsh stuff before. We wanted loads of beautiful string arrangements.”
These melodic, bright-on-the-surface but deeply layered songs started to emerge out of creative scenarios that had been completely changed by the pandemic. “We were on Zoom, which was… challenging,” she laughs. “We discussed ideas and then we’d hang up on Zoom, go away for three hours, or Frederick would send me the small thing we’d started, then I’d start writing and doing melodies and lyrics, and he would do production, and then we’d meet up on Zoom later.” Slowly the songs started to evolve, their unusual creation adding intriguing problems to try and overcome. “We’d get stuck a lot but you just had to let the stress go and come back to it. It’s a different version of the album to the one we would have made normally.”
The album’s curtain raiser, Millions of Heartbeats, sets out the album’s lyrical themes perfectly. “It’s about that point in the pandemic where I had lost my spark for life,” she says. “And I’m a pretty sparky person, so it was really sad to me.” She references the lyric “the spark is lit at such a low flame” as a crucial moment. “I felt like I lost a part of myself. I didn’t know how to get it back.” As with all of the songs on the album, it’s not just about one thing, however. “I think it also sums up a lot of how I feel about how people act in the world right now. Am I a number or am I a person? What are we trying to be right now? I’m a human being. But we’re so quantifiable and packaged and everyone is a brand. We’re in this capitalist explosion and I feel the effect of it in a way I’ve never felt before.” But it’s also a song that, by its end, flickers with a light that can’t be completely put out. “At the end of the day, the world is beautiful, there are all these heartbeats out there, and there is hope,” she says with a smile. “We have to try! You can’t fucking give up. This song is a sign of what’s to come – there’s going to be darkness and depression but we’ll get to hope by the end.”
A rare guitar appears on Ray, which delves deeper into mental health struggles, detailing depression and anxiety. It’s a theme Nash is keen to share with her fans in a typically honest manner. “It’s natural for an artist to write about emotions and feelings and darkness,” Nash says. “Also a lot of my fans suffer from depression too and I noticed it more when I was doing my livestream chats over lockdown. Not talking about it is not the solution. Being open and creating that community within my fanbase is really important.” It’s one she’s fostered not only via the Kickstarter campaigns that funded Girl Talk and Yesterday Was Forever, but also her Patreon account which she used in the pandemic to connect with her loyal fans via livestreams.
That darkness also weaves through Misery, which marries a propulsive string arrangement and a buoyant beat to lyrics that try to outrun the emotion of its title, while the livid My Bile is an emotional exorcism married to beatific strings and crashing drums. “I guess that song is the little patience I have left to give to all the bullshit, all the shitty parts of the industry, the media, the way people talk to other human beings, me as a woman in the industry, all the things people say about you online,” she explains. “I’m done. I don’t have anything left to give to that. I’ve proved who I am with actions, which is more important. I just have bile left.” There’s love on the album too, specifically on Space Odyssey 2001, which recounts a first proper date with her now partner. On the surface it feels like a diss of the Kubrick classic, 2001: Space Odyssey, but is more about its poor choice given the context. “It’s the wrong film for a date,” she smiles, “but I love the film. I like making jokes in songs. I like that there’s this beautiful love song but it’s also complaining about this critically acclaimed film being too long. I don’t recommend it for a first date!”
While the album was finished at the end of 2021, Nash wasn’t sure what to do with it. Free from the typical record industry framework – no manager, no label, no booking agents – she did two things; went on tour in 2022, which was rejuvenating, and joined TikTok. Her first post was a timeline of her extraordinary career, which ended with her questioning the best way in which to release the new album (some of the songs, including Misery, Wasteman and Horsie, had already started to emerge without a label). That first post went viral, leading to an influx of offers from labels and managers, creating a scenario Nash had been in before; dealing with some of the industry’s shadier characters. One label, however, had been interested for a while. “Kill Rock Stars had been pursuing me for two years. They had been checking in for a while saying ‘we notice the album hasn’t come out, we really love it’.” Once Nash had secured an excellent new manager, the loose ends were tied up and the album was ready to go.
Recent one-off single, Change, released to coincide with the signing announcement, was an example of what having a label can give you. “I didn’t have to do anything,” she laughs. “I’ve been doing everything myself, alongside my band and my tour manager and my various managers, but I am always the driving force. But it’s like you’re driving a 16 wheeler – there’s so much you have to take responsibility for. What was so nice with this release was that I just did the creative bit and the stuff I’m good at. The label takes care of everything else.”
It’s been a refreshing change to be able to fully focus on the creative side. That creativity is also there in the artwork for 9 Sad Symphonies, which features Nash in front of an old school Hollywood backdrop that recalls British nature while also alluding to Nash’s on-off home of LA. That visual world will also extend to Nash’s always incredible live shows, which are a key goal for her in 2024. “You can always push things further and take it to a new place,” she says. “So with this album I want to play really quality shows.”
On 9 Sad Symphonies, Nash has taken another huge step towards cementing her place as one of Britain’s most unique and fearless talents. “I’ve climbed through the sewers of this industry and so my goal is to make good music I believe in, to have longevity, and have good live shows,” she states. “I make a living from my music, which is awesome.” As for other ambitions and expectations, she’s been doing this long enough to know not to place your hopes in things you can’t control. “I don’t feel competitive with the industry anymore. I’ve been in the game for twenty years, and I’m in my own league now.”
Nearly twenty years into her ever-evolving career, London and LA-based, Brit award-winning singer, songwriter, actor and activist Kate Nash has seen it all. She’s achieved huge commercial success – 2007’s debut Made of Bricks, featuring the hit single Foundations, reached number 1 in the UK and spent seven months in the top 40 – seen the darker side of the industry after being dropped in 2012 following 2010’s Bernard Butler-assisted My Best Friend Is You, forged her own path as a successful independent artist via 2013’s punk-y Girl Talk and 2018’s Yesterday Was Forever, and starred in HBO’s hit wrestling drama, GLOW. She’s also been the subject of an award-winning documentary, Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl, and also co-created a musical, Only Gold, with Hamilton choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler. Oh, and she also starred in that too. Still only 36, Nash isn’t finished shape-shifting just yet; after signing with legendary label Kill Rock Stars, whose alumni include Nash favourites Elliott Smith and Sleater-Kinney, in early 2024, she’ll release her fifth album, 9 Sad Symphonies, in June.
Inspired by old Hollywood, vintage musicals and a desperate quest to find beauty in a rotten world, it’s another sonic shift following her “rage-y” recent output. “It needed to be cinematic and dreamy,” Nash says of the 10-track album (the title is both a joke and an ode to passing achievable goals when creativity crumbles). As for the sonic shifts, it’s just second nature: “I do things based on what I’m feeling at the time, and what I’m inspired by,” she explains.
That moment of the album’s creation was fuelled by two things; her work on Only Gold and a global pandemic that curtailed filming on the fourth season of GLOW and sent Nash – and everyone – into a tailspin. After a period of laying bed watching zombie movies, creativity started to arrive in the autumn and winter of 2020, with songs being worked on well into 2021. Having worked with Danish producer Frederick Thaae on her musical, they quickly reconnected to start work on 9 Sad Symphonies. “We were in this completely different landscape for writing songs [on the musical], which was completely freeing,” Nash explains. “I was writing for a story, I was writing about a King and a Queen and a proper story arc. In that world you need the audience to understand the songs immediately, it’s very direct, and it has lots of editing which I’d never done. It changed my outlook on songwriting. Also, we said at the beginning that we wanted to make something beautiful, nothing harsh. I’ve done a lot of harsh stuff before. We wanted loads of beautiful string arrangements.”
These melodic, bright-on-the-surface but deeply layered songs started to emerge out of creative scenarios that had been completely changed by the pandemic. “We were on Zoom, which was… challenging,” she laughs. “We discussed ideas and then we’d hang up on Zoom, go away for three hours, or Frederick would send me the small thing we’d started, then I’d start writing and doing melodies and lyrics, and he would do production, and then we’d meet up on Zoom later.” Slowly the songs started to evolve, their unusual creation adding intriguing problems to try and overcome. “We’d get stuck a lot but you just had to let the stress go and come back to it. It’s a different version of the album to the one we would have made normally.”
The album’s curtain raiser, Millions of Heartbeats, sets out the album’s lyrical themes perfectly. “It’s about that point in the pandemic where I had lost my spark for life,” she says. “And I’m a pretty sparky person, so it was really sad to me.” She references the lyric “the spark is lit at such a low flame” as a crucial moment. “I felt like I lost a part of myself. I didn’t know how to get it back.” As with all of the songs on the album, it’s not just about one thing, however. “I think it also sums up a lot of how I feel about how people act in the world right now. Am I a number or am I a person? What are we trying to be right now? I’m a human being. But we’re so quantifiable and packaged and everyone is a brand. We’re in this capitalist explosion and I feel the effect of it in a way I’ve never felt before.” But it’s also a song that, by its end, flickers with a light that can’t be completely put out. “At the end of the day, the world is beautiful, there are all these heartbeats out there, and there is hope,” she says with a smile. “We have to try! You can’t fucking give up. This song is a sign of what’s to come – there’s going to be darkness and depression but we’ll get to hope by the end.”
A rare guitar appears on Ray, which delves deeper into mental health struggles, detailing depression and anxiety. It’s a theme Nash is keen to share with her fans in a typically honest manner. “It’s natural for an artist to write about emotions and feelings and darkness,” Nash says. “Also a lot of my fans suffer from depression too and I noticed it more when I was doing my livestream chats over lockdown. Not talking about it is not the solution. Being open and creating that community within my fanbase is really important.” It’s one she’s fostered not only via the Kickstarter campaigns that funded Girl Talk and Yesterday Was Forever, but also her Patreon account which she used in the pandemic to connect with her loyal fans via livestreams.
That darkness also weaves through Misery, which marries a propulsive string arrangement and a buoyant beat to lyrics that try to outrun the emotion of its title, while the livid My Bile is an emotional exorcism married to beatific strings and crashing drums. “I guess that song is the little patience I have left to give to all the bullshit, all the shitty parts of the industry, the media, the way people talk to other human beings, me as a woman in the industry, all the things people say about you online,” she explains. “I’m done. I don’t have anything left to give to that. I’ve proved who I am with actions, which is more important. I just have bile left.” There’s love on the album too, specifically on Space Odyssey 2001, which recounts a first proper date with her now partner. On the surface it feels like a diss of the Kubrick classic, 2001: Space Odyssey, but is more about its poor choice given the context. “It’s the wrong film for a date,” she smiles, “but I love the film. I like making jokes in songs. I like that there’s this beautiful love song but it’s also complaining about this critically acclaimed film being too long. I don’t recommend it for a first date!”
While the album was finished at the end of 2021, Nash wasn’t sure what to do with it. Free from the typical record industry framework – no manager, no label, no booking agents – she did two things; went on tour in 2022, which was rejuvenating, and joined TikTok. Her first post was a timeline of her extraordinary career, which ended with her questioning the best way in which to release the new album (some of the songs, including Misery, Wasteman and Horsie, had already started to emerge without a label). That first post went viral, leading to an influx of offers from labels and managers, creating a scenario Nash had been in before; dealing with some of the industry’s shadier characters. One label, however, had been interested for a while. “Kill Rock Stars had been pursuing me for two years. They had been checking in for a while saying ‘we notice the album hasn’t come out, we really love it’.” Once Nash had secured an excellent new manager, the loose ends were tied up and the album was ready to go.
Recent one-off single, Change, released to coincide with the signing announcement, was an example of what having a label can give you. “I didn’t have to do anything,” she laughs. “I’ve been doing everything myself, alongside my band and my tour manager and my various managers, but I am always the driving force. But it’s like you’re driving a 16 wheeler – there’s so much you have to take responsibility for. What was so nice with this release was that I just did the creative bit and the stuff I’m good at. The label takes care of everything else.”
It’s been a refreshing change to be able to fully focus on the creative side. That creativity is also there in the artwork for 9 Sad Symphonies, which features Nash in front of an old school Hollywood backdrop that recalls British nature while also alluding to Nash’s on-off home of LA. That visual world will also extend to Nash’s always incredible live shows, which are a key goal for her in 2024. “You can always push things further and take it to a new place,” she says. “So with this album I want to play really quality shows.”
On 9 Sad Symphonies, Nash has taken another huge step towards cementing her place as one of Britain’s most unique and fearless talents. “I’ve climbed through the sewers of this industry and so my goal is to make good music I believe in, to have longevity, and have good live shows,” she states. “I make a living from my music, which is awesome.” As for other ambitions and expectations, she’s been doing this long enough to know not to place your hopes in things you can’t control. “I don’t feel competitive with the industry anymore. I’ve been in the game for twenty years, and I’m in my own league now.”
Nearly twenty years into her ever-evolving career, London and LA-based, Brit award-winning singer, songwriter, actor and activist Kate Nash has seen it all. She’s achieved huge commercial success – 2007’s debut Made of Bricks, featuring the hit single Foundations, reached number 1 in the UK and spent seven months in the top 40 – seen the darker side of the industry after being dropped in 2012 following 2010’s Bernard Butler-assisted My Best Friend Is You, forged her own path as a successful independent artist via 2013’s punk-y Girl Talk and 2018’s Yesterday Was Forever, and starred in HBO’s hit wrestling drama, GLOW. She’s also been the subject of an award-winning documentary, Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl, and also co-created a musical, Only Gold, with Hamilton choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler. Oh, and she also starred in that too. Still only 36, Nash isn’t finished shape-shifting just yet; after signing with legendary label Kill Rock Stars, whose alumni include Nash favourites Elliott Smith and Sleater-Kinney, in early 2024, she’ll release her fifth album, 9 Sad Symphonies, in June.
Inspired by old Hollywood, vintage musicals and a desperate quest to find beauty in a rotten world, it’s another sonic shift following her “rage-y” recent output. “It needed to be cinematic and dreamy,” Nash says of the 10-track album (the title is both a joke and an ode to passing achievable goals when creativity crumbles). As for the sonic shifts, it’s just second nature: “I do things based on what I’m feeling at the time, and what I’m inspired by,” she explains.
That moment of the album’s creation was fuelled by two things; her work on Only Gold and a global pandemic that curtailed filming on the fourth season of GLOW and sent Nash – and everyone – into a tailspin. After a period of laying bed watching zombie movies, creativity started to arrive in the autumn and winter of 2020, with songs being worked on well into 2021. Having worked with Danish producer Frederick Thaae on her musical, they quickly reconnected to start work on 9 Sad Symphonies. “We were in this completely different landscape for writing songs [on the musical], which was completely freeing,” Nash explains. “I was writing for a story, I was writing about a King and a Queen and a proper story arc. In that world you need the audience to understand the songs immediately, it’s very direct, and it has lots of editing which I’d never done. It changed my outlook on songwriting. Also, we said at the beginning that we wanted to make something beautiful, nothing harsh. I’ve done a lot of harsh stuff before. We wanted loads of beautiful string arrangements.”
These melodic, bright-on-the-surface but deeply layered songs started to emerge out of creative scenarios that had been completely changed by the pandemic. “We were on Zoom, which was… challenging,” she laughs. “We discussed ideas and then we’d hang up on Zoom, go away for three hours, or Frederick would send me the small thing we’d started, then I’d start writing and doing melodies and lyrics, and he would do production, and then we’d meet up on Zoom later.” Slowly the songs started to evolve, their unusual creation adding intriguing problems to try and overcome. “We’d get stuck a lot but you just had to let the stress go and come back to it. It’s a different version of the album to the one we would have made normally.”
The album’s curtain raiser, Millions of Heartbeats, sets out the album’s lyrical themes perfectly. “It’s about that point in the pandemic where I had lost my spark for life,” she says. “And I’m a pretty sparky person, so it was really sad to me.” She references the lyric “the spark is lit at such a low flame” as a crucial moment. “I felt like I lost a part of myself. I didn’t know how to get it back.” As with all of the songs on the album, it’s not just about one thing, however. “I think it also sums up a lot of how I feel about how people act in the world right now. Am I a number or am I a person? What are we trying to be right now? I’m a human being. But we’re so quantifiable and packaged and everyone is a brand. We’re in this capitalist explosion and I feel the effect of it in a way I’ve never felt before.” But it’s also a song that, by its end, flickers with a light that can’t be completely put out. “At the end of the day, the world is beautiful, there are all these heartbeats out there, and there is hope,” she says with a smile. “We have to try! You can’t fucking give up. This song is a sign of what’s to come – there’s going to be darkness and depression but we’ll get to hope by the end.”
A rare guitar appears on Ray, which delves deeper into mental health struggles, detailing depression and anxiety. It’s a theme Nash is keen to share with her fans in a typically honest manner. “It’s natural for an artist to write about emotions and feelings and darkness,” Nash says. “Also a lot of my fans suffer from depression too and I noticed it more when I was doing my livestream chats over lockdown. Not talking about it is not the solution. Being open and creating that community within my fanbase is really important.” It’s one she’s fostered not only via the Kickstarter campaigns that funded Girl Talk and Yesterday Was Forever, but also her Patreon account which she used in the pandemic to connect with her loyal fans via livestreams.
That darkness also weaves through Misery, which marries a propulsive string arrangement and a buoyant beat to lyrics that try to outrun the emotion of its title, while the livid My Bile is an emotional exorcism married to beatific strings and crashing drums. “I guess that song is the little patience I have left to give to all the bullshit, all the shitty parts of the industry, the media, the way people talk to other human beings, me as a woman in the industry, all the things people say about you online,” she explains. “I’m done. I don’t have anything left to give to that. I’ve proved who I am with actions, which is more important. I just have bile left.” There’s love on the album too, specifically on Space Odyssey 2001, which recounts a first proper date with her now partner. On the surface it feels like a diss of the Kubrick classic, 2001: Space Odyssey, but is more about its poor choice given the context. “It’s the wrong film for a date,” she smiles, “but I love the film. I like making jokes in songs. I like that there’s this beautiful love song but it’s also complaining about this critically acclaimed film being too long. I don’t recommend it for a first date!”
While the album was finished at the end of 2021, Nash wasn’t sure what to do with it. Free from the typical record industry framework – no manager, no label, no booking agents – she did two things; went on tour in 2022, which was rejuvenating, and joined TikTok. Her first post was a timeline of her extraordinary career, which ended with her questioning the best way in which to release the new album (some of the songs, including Misery, Wasteman and Horsie, had already started to emerge without a label). That first post went viral, leading to an influx of offers from labels and managers, creating a scenario Nash had been in before; dealing with some of the industry’s shadier characters. One label, however, had been interested for a while. “Kill Rock Stars had been pursuing me for two years. They had been checking in for a while saying ‘we notice the album hasn’t come out, we really love it’.” Once Nash had secured an excellent new manager, the loose ends were tied up and the album was ready to go.
Recent one-off single, Change, released to coincide with the signing announcement, was an example of what having a label can give you. “I didn’t have to do anything,” she laughs. “I’ve been doing everything myself, alongside my band and my tour manager and my various managers, but I am always the driving force. But it’s like you’re driving a 16 wheeler – there’s so much you have to take responsibility for. What was so nice with this release was that I just did the creative bit and the stuff I’m good at. The label takes care of everything else.”
It’s been a refreshing change to be able to fully focus on the creative side. That creativity is also there in the artwork for 9 Sad Symphonies, which features Nash in front of an old school Hollywood backdrop that recalls British nature while also alluding to Nash’s on-off home of LA. That visual world will also extend to Nash’s always incredible live shows, which are a key goal for her in 2024. “You can always push things further and take it to a new place,” she says. “So with this album I want to play really quality shows.”
On 9 Sad Symphonies, Nash has taken another huge step towards cementing her place as one of Britain’s most unique and fearless talents. “I’ve climbed through the sewers of this industry and so my goal is to make good music I believe in, to have longevity, and have good live shows,” she states. “I make a living from my music, which is awesome.” As for other ambitions and expectations, she’s been doing this long enough to know not to place your hopes in things you can’t control. “I don’t feel competitive with the industry anymore. I’ve been in the game for twenty years, and I’m in my own league now.”
Nearly twenty years into her ever-evolving career, London and LA-based, Brit award-winning singer, songwriter, actor and activist Kate Nash has seen it all. She’s achieved huge commercial success – 2007’s debut Made of Bricks, featuring the hit single Foundations, reached number 1 in the UK and spent seven months in the top 40 – seen the darker side of the industry after being dropped in 2012 following 2010’s Bernard Butler-assisted My Best Friend Is You, forged her own path as a successful independent artist via 2013’s punk-y Girl Talk and 2018’s Yesterday Was Forever, and starred in HBO’s hit wrestling drama, GLOW. She’s also been the subject of an award-winning documentary, Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl, and also co-created a musical, Only Gold, with Hamilton choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler. Oh, and she also starred in that too. Still only 36, Nash isn’t finished shape-shifting just yet; after signing with legendary label Kill Rock Stars, whose alumni include Nash favourites Elliott Smith and Sleater-Kinney, in early 2024, she’ll release her fifth album, 9 Sad Symphonies, in June.
Inspired by old Hollywood, vintage musicals and a desperate quest to find beauty in a rotten world, it’s another sonic shift following her “rage-y” recent output. “It needed to be cinematic and dreamy,” Nash says of the 10-track album (the title is both a joke and an ode to passing achievable goals when creativity crumbles). As for the sonic shifts, it’s just second nature: “I do things based on what I’m feeling at the time, and what I’m inspired by,” she explains.
That moment of the album’s creation was fuelled by two things; her work on Only Gold and a global pandemic that curtailed filming on the fourth season of GLOW and sent Nash – and everyone – into a tailspin. After a period of laying bed watching zombie movies, creativity started to arrive in the autumn and winter of 2020, with songs being worked on well into 2021. Having worked with Danish producer Frederick Thaae on her musical, they quickly reconnected to start work on 9 Sad Symphonies. “We were in this completely different landscape for writing songs [on the musical], which was completely freeing,” Nash explains. “I was writing for a story, I was writing about a King and a Queen and a proper story arc. In that world you need the audience to understand the songs immediately, it’s very direct, and it has lots of editing which I’d never done. It changed my outlook on songwriting. Also, we said at the beginning that we wanted to make something beautiful, nothing harsh. I’ve done a lot of harsh stuff before. We wanted loads of beautiful string arrangements.”
These melodic, bright-on-the-surface but deeply layered songs started to emerge out of creative scenarios that had been completely changed by the pandemic. “We were on Zoom, which was… challenging,” she laughs. “We discussed ideas and then we’d hang up on Zoom, go away for three hours, or Frederick would send me the small thing we’d started, then I’d start writing and doing melodies and lyrics, and he would do production, and then we’d meet up on Zoom later.” Slowly the songs started to evolve, their unusual creation adding intriguing problems to try and overcome. “We’d get stuck a lot but you just had to let the stress go and come back to it. It’s a different version of the album to the one we would have made normally.”
The album’s curtain raiser, Millions of Heartbeats, sets out the album’s lyrical themes perfectly. “It’s about that point in the pandemic where I had lost my spark for life,” she says. “And I’m a pretty sparky person, so it was really sad to me.” She references the lyric “the spark is lit at such a low flame” as a crucial moment. “I felt like I lost a part of myself. I didn’t know how to get it back.” As with all of the songs on the album, it’s not just about one thing, however. “I think it also sums up a lot of how I feel about how people act in the world right now. Am I a number or am I a person? What are we trying to be right now? I’m a human being. But we’re so quantifiable and packaged and everyone is a brand. We’re in this capitalist explosion and I feel the effect of it in a way I’ve never felt before.” But it’s also a song that, by its end, flickers with a light that can’t be completely put out. “At the end of the day, the world is beautiful, there are all these heartbeats out there, and there is hope,” she says with a smile. “We have to try! You can’t fucking give up. This song is a sign of what’s to come – there’s going to be darkness and depression but we’ll get to hope by the end.”
A rare guitar appears on Ray, which delves deeper into mental health struggles, detailing depression and anxiety. It’s a theme Nash is keen to share with her fans in a typically honest manner. “It’s natural for an artist to write about emotions and feelings and darkness,” Nash says. “Also a lot of my fans suffer from depression too and I noticed it more when I was doing my livestream chats over lockdown. Not talking about it is not the solution. Being open and creating that community within my fanbase is really important.” It’s one she’s fostered not only via the Kickstarter campaigns that funded Girl Talk and Yesterday Was Forever, but also her Patreon account which she used in the pandemic to connect with her loyal fans via livestreams.
That darkness also weaves through Misery, which marries a propulsive string arrangement and a buoyant beat to lyrics that try to outrun the emotion of its title, while the livid My Bile is an emotional exorcism married to beatific strings and crashing drums. “I guess that song is the little patience I have left to give to all the bullshit, all the shitty parts of the industry, the media, the way people talk to other human beings, me as a woman in the industry, all the things people say about you online,” she explains. “I’m done. I don’t have anything left to give to that. I’ve proved who I am with actions, which is more important. I just have bile left.” There’s love on the album too, specifically on Space Odyssey 2001, which recounts a first proper date with her now partner. On the surface it feels like a diss of the Kubrick classic, 2001: Space Odyssey, but is more about its poor choice given the context. “It’s the wrong film for a date,” she smiles, “but I love the film. I like making jokes in songs. I like that there’s this beautiful love song but it’s also complaining about this critically acclaimed film being too long. I don’t recommend it for a first date!”
While the album was finished at the end of 2021, Nash wasn’t sure what to do with it. Free from the typical record industry framework – no manager, no label, no booking agents – she did two things; went on tour in 2022, which was rejuvenating, and joined TikTok. Her first post was a timeline of her extraordinary career, which ended with her questioning the best way in which to release the new album (some of the songs, including Misery, Wasteman and Horsie, had already started to emerge without a label). That first post went viral, leading to an influx of offers from labels and managers, creating a scenario Nash had been in before; dealing with some of the industry’s shadier characters. One label, however, had been interested for a while. “Kill Rock Stars had been pursuing me for two years. They had been checking in for a while saying ‘we notice the album hasn’t come out, we really love it’.” Once Nash had secured an excellent new manager, the loose ends were tied up and the album was ready to go.
Recent one-off single, Change, released to coincide with the signing announcement, was an example of what having a label can give you. “I didn’t have to do anything,” she laughs. “I’ve been doing everything myself, alongside my band and my tour manager and my various managers, but I am always the driving force. But it’s like you’re driving a 16 wheeler – there’s so much you have to take responsibility for. What was so nice with this release was that I just did the creative bit and the stuff I’m good at. The label takes care of everything else.”
It’s been a refreshing change to be able to fully focus on the creative side. That creativity is also there in the artwork for 9 Sad Symphonies, which features Nash in front of an old school Hollywood backdrop that recalls British nature while also alluding to Nash’s on-off home of LA. That visual world will also extend to Nash’s always incredible live shows, which are a key goal for her in 2024. “You can always push things further and take it to a new place,” she says. “So with this album I want to play really quality shows.”
On 9 Sad Symphonies, Nash has taken another huge step towards cementing her place as one of Britain’s most unique and fearless talents. “I’ve climbed through the sewers of this industry and so my goal is to make good music I believe in, to have longevity, and have good live shows,” she states. “I make a living from my music, which is awesome.” As for other ambitions and expectations, she’s been doing this long enough to know not to place your hopes in things you can’t control. “I don’t feel competitive with the industry anymore. I’ve been in the game for twenty years, and I’m in my own league now.”
Nearly twenty years into her ever-evolving career, London and LA-based, Brit award-winning singer, songwriter, actor and activist Kate Nash has seen it all. She’s achieved huge commercial success – 2007’s debut Made of Bricks, featuring the hit single Foundations, reached number 1 in the UK and spent seven months in the top 40 – seen the darker side of the industry after being dropped in 2012 following 2010’s Bernard Butler-assisted My Best Friend Is You, forged her own path as a successful independent artist via 2013’s punk-y Girl Talk and 2018’s Yesterday Was Forever, and starred in HBO’s hit wrestling drama, GLOW. She’s also been the subject of an award-winning documentary, Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl, and also co-created a musical, Only Gold, with Hamilton choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler. Oh, and she also starred in that too. Still only 36, Nash isn’t finished shape-shifting just yet; after signing with legendary label Kill Rock Stars, whose alumni include Nash favourites Elliott Smith and Sleater-Kinney, in early 2024, she’ll release her fifth album, 9 Sad Symphonies, in June.
Inspired by old Hollywood, vintage musicals and a desperate quest to find beauty in a rotten world, it’s another sonic shift following her “rage-y” recent output. “It needed to be cinematic and dreamy,” Nash says of the 10-track album (the title is both a joke and an ode to passing achievable goals when creativity crumbles). As for the sonic shifts, it’s just second nature: “I do things based on what I’m feeling at the time, and what I’m inspired by,” she explains.
That moment of the album’s creation was fuelled by two things; her work on Only Gold and a global pandemic that curtailed filming on the fourth season of GLOW and sent Nash – and everyone – into a tailspin. After a period of laying bed watching zombie movies, creativity started to arrive in the autumn and winter of 2020, with songs being worked on well into 2021. Having worked with Danish producer Frederick Thaae on her musical, they quickly reconnected to start work on 9 Sad Symphonies. “We were in this completely different landscape for writing songs [on the musical], which was completely freeing,” Nash explains. “I was writing for a story, I was writing about a King and a Queen and a proper story arc. In that world you need the audience to understand the songs immediately, it’s very direct, and it has lots of editing which I’d never done. It changed my outlook on songwriting. Also, we said at the beginning that we wanted to make something beautiful, nothing harsh. I’ve done a lot of harsh stuff before. We wanted loads of beautiful string arrangements.”
These melodic, bright-on-the-surface but deeply layered songs started to emerge out of creative scenarios that had been completely changed by the pandemic. “We were on Zoom, which was… challenging,” she laughs. “We discussed ideas and then we’d hang up on Zoom, go away for three hours, or Frederick would send me the small thing we’d started, then I’d start writing and doing melodies and lyrics, and he would do production, and then we’d meet up on Zoom later.” Slowly the songs started to evolve, their unusual creation adding intriguing problems to try and overcome. “We’d get stuck a lot but you just had to let the stress go and come back to it. It’s a different version of the album to the one we would have made normally.”
The album’s curtain raiser, Millions of Heartbeats, sets out the album’s lyrical themes perfectly. “It’s about that point in the pandemic where I had lost my spark for life,” she says. “And I’m a pretty sparky person, so it was really sad to me.” She references the lyric “the spark is lit at such a low flame” as a crucial moment. “I felt like I lost a part of myself. I didn’t know how to get it back.” As with all of the songs on the album, it’s not just about one thing, however. “I think it also sums up a lot of how I feel about how people act in the world right now. Am I a number or am I a person? What are we trying to be right now? I’m a human being. But we’re so quantifiable and packaged and everyone is a brand. We’re in this capitalist explosion and I feel the effect of it in a way I’ve never felt before.” But it’s also a song that, by its end, flickers with a light that can’t be completely put out. “At the end of the day, the world is beautiful, there are all these heartbeats out there, and there is hope,” she says with a smile. “We have to try! You can’t fucking give up. This song is a sign of what’s to come – there’s going to be darkness and depression but we’ll get to hope by the end.”
A rare guitar appears on Ray, which delves deeper into mental health struggles, detailing depression and anxiety. It’s a theme Nash is keen to share with her fans in a typically honest manner. “It’s natural for an artist to write about emotions and feelings and darkness,” Nash says. “Also a lot of my fans suffer from depression too and I noticed it more when I was doing my livestream chats over lockdown. Not talking about it is not the solution. Being open and creating that community within my fanbase is really important.” It’s one she’s fostered not only via the Kickstarter campaigns that funded Girl Talk and Yesterday Was Forever, but also her Patreon account which she used in the pandemic to connect with her loyal fans via livestreams.
That darkness also weaves through Misery, which marries a propulsive string arrangement and a buoyant beat to lyrics that try to outrun the emotion of its title, while the livid My Bile is an emotional exorcism married to beatific strings and crashing drums. “I guess that song is the little patience I have left to give to all the bullshit, all the shitty parts of the industry, the media, the way people talk to other human beings, me as a woman in the industry, all the things people say about you online,” she explains. “I’m done. I don’t have anything left to give to that. I’ve proved who I am with actions, which is more important. I just have bile left.” There’s love on the album too, specifically on Space Odyssey 2001, which recounts a first proper date with her now partner. On the surface it feels like a diss of the Kubrick classic, 2001: Space Odyssey, but is more about its poor choice given the context. “It’s the wrong film for a date,” she smiles, “but I love the film. I like making jokes in songs. I like that there’s this beautiful love song but it’s also complaining about this critically acclaimed film being too long. I don’t recommend it for a first date!”
While the album was finished at the end of 2021, Nash wasn’t sure what to do with it. Free from the typical record industry framework – no manager, no label, no booking agents – she did two things; went on tour in 2022, which was rejuvenating, and joined TikTok. Her first post was a timeline of her extraordinary career, which ended with her questioning the best way in which to release the new album (some of the songs, including Misery, Wasteman and Horsie, had already started to emerge without a label). That first post went viral, leading to an influx of offers from labels and managers, creating a scenario Nash had been in before; dealing with some of the industry’s shadier characters. One label, however, had been interested for a while. “Kill Rock Stars had been pursuing me for two years. They had been checking in for a while saying ‘we notice the album hasn’t come out, we really love it’.” Once Nash had secured an excellent new manager, the loose ends were tied up and the album was ready to go.
Recent one-off single, Change, released to coincide with the signing announcement, was an example of what having a label can give you. “I didn’t have to do anything,” she laughs. “I’ve been doing everything myself, alongside my band and my tour manager and my various managers, but I am always the driving force. But it’s like you’re driving a 16 wheeler – there’s so much you have to take responsibility for. What was so nice with this release was that I just did the creative bit and the stuff I’m good at. The label takes care of everything else.”
It’s been a refreshing change to be able to fully focus on the creative side. That creativity is also there in the artwork for 9 Sad Symphonies, which features Nash in front of an old school Hollywood backdrop that recalls British nature while also alluding to Nash’s on-off home of LA. That visual world will also extend to Nash’s always incredible live shows, which are a key goal for her in 2024. “You can always push things further and take it to a new place,” she says. “So with this album I want to play really quality shows.”
On 9 Sad Symphonies, Nash has taken another huge step towards cementing her place as one of Britain’s most unique and fearless talents. “I’ve climbed through the sewers of this industry and so my goal is to make good music I believe in, to have longevity, and have good live shows,” she states. “I make a living from my music, which is awesome.” As for other ambitions and expectations, she’s been doing this long enough to know not to place your hopes in things you can’t control. “I don’t feel competitive with the industry anymore. I’ve been in the game for twenty years, and I’m in my own league now.”
Nearly twenty years into her ever-evolving career, London and LA-based, Brit award-winning singer, songwriter, actor and activist Kate Nash has seen it all. She’s achieved huge commercial success – 2007’s debut Made of Bricks, featuring the hit single Foundations, reached number 1 in the UK and spent seven months in the top 40 – seen the darker side of the industry after being dropped in 2012 following 2010’s Bernard Butler-assisted My Best Friend Is You, forged her own path as a successful independent artist via 2013’s punk-y Girl Talk and 2018’s Yesterday Was Forever, and starred in HBO’s hit wrestling drama, GLOW. She’s also been the subject of an award-winning documentary, Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl, and also co-created a musical, Only Gold, with Hamilton choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler. Oh, and she also starred in that too. Still only 36, Nash isn’t finished shape-shifting just yet; after signing with legendary label Kill Rock Stars, whose alumni include Nash favourites Elliott Smith and Sleater-Kinney, in early 2024, she’ll release her fifth album, 9 Sad Symphonies, in June.
Inspired by old Hollywood, vintage musicals and a desperate quest to find beauty in a rotten world, it’s another sonic shift following her “rage-y” recent output. “It needed to be cinematic and dreamy,” Nash says of the 10-track album (the title is both a joke and an ode to passing achievable goals when creativity crumbles). As for the sonic shifts, it’s just second nature: “I do things based on what I’m feeling at the time, and what I’m inspired by,” she explains.
That moment of the album’s creation was fuelled by two things; her work on Only Gold and a global pandemic that curtailed filming on the fourth season of GLOW and sent Nash – and everyone – into a tailspin. After a period of laying bed watching zombie movies, creativity started to arrive in the autumn and winter of 2020, with songs being worked on well into 2021. Having worked with Danish producer Frederick Thaae on her musical, they quickly reconnected to start work on 9 Sad Symphonies. “We were in this completely different landscape for writing songs [on the musical], which was completely freeing,” Nash explains. “I was writing for a story, I was writing about a King and a Queen and a proper story arc. In that world you need the audience to understand the songs immediately, it’s very direct, and it has lots of editing which I’d never done. It changed my outlook on songwriting. Also, we said at the beginning that we wanted to make something beautiful, nothing harsh. I’ve done a lot of harsh stuff before. We wanted loads of beautiful string arrangements.”
These melodic, bright-on-the-surface but deeply layered songs started to emerge out of creative scenarios that had been completely changed by the pandemic. “We were on Zoom, which was… challenging,” she laughs. “We discussed ideas and then we’d hang up on Zoom, go away for three hours, or Frederick would send me the small thing we’d started, then I’d start writing and doing melodies and lyrics, and he would do production, and then we’d meet up on Zoom later.” Slowly the songs started to evolve, their unusual creation adding intriguing problems to try and overcome. “We’d get stuck a lot but you just had to let the stress go and come back to it. It’s a different version of the album to the one we would have made normally.”
The album’s curtain raiser, Millions of Heartbeats, sets out the album’s lyrical themes perfectly. “It’s about that point in the pandemic where I had lost my spark for life,” she says. “And I’m a pretty sparky person, so it was really sad to me.” She references the lyric “the spark is lit at such a low flame” as a crucial moment. “I felt like I lost a part of myself. I didn’t know how to get it back.” As with all of the songs on the album, it’s not just about one thing, however. “I think it also sums up a lot of how I feel about how people act in the world right now. Am I a number or am I a person? What are we trying to be right now? I’m a human being. But we’re so quantifiable and packaged and everyone is a brand. We’re in this capitalist explosion and I feel the effect of it in a way I’ve never felt before.” But it’s also a song that, by its end, flickers with a light that can’t be completely put out. “At the end of the day, the world is beautiful, there are all these heartbeats out there, and there is hope,” she says with a smile. “We have to try! You can’t fucking give up. This song is a sign of what’s to come – there’s going to be darkness and depression but we’ll get to hope by the end.”
A rare guitar appears on Ray, which delves deeper into mental health struggles, detailing depression and anxiety. It’s a theme Nash is keen to share with her fans in a typically honest manner. “It’s natural for an artist to write about emotions and feelings and darkness,” Nash says. “Also a lot of my fans suffer from depression too and I noticed it more when I was doing my livestream chats over lockdown. Not talking about it is not the solution. Being open and creating that community within my fanbase is really important.” It’s one she’s fostered not only via the Kickstarter campaigns that funded Girl Talk and Yesterday Was Forever, but also her Patreon account which she used in the pandemic to connect with her loyal fans via livestreams.
That darkness also weaves through Misery, which marries a propulsive string arrangement and a buoyant beat to lyrics that try to outrun the emotion of its title, while the livid My Bile is an emotional exorcism married to beatific strings and crashing drums. “I guess that song is the little patience I have left to give to all the bullshit, all the shitty parts of the industry, the media, the way people talk to other human beings, me as a woman in the industry, all the things people say about you online,” she explains. “I’m done. I don’t have anything left to give to that. I’ve proved who I am with actions, which is more important. I just have bile left.” There’s love on the album too, specifically on Space Odyssey 2001, which recounts a first proper date with her now partner. On the surface it feels like a diss of the Kubrick classic, 2001: Space Odyssey, but is more about its poor choice given the context. “It’s the wrong film for a date,” she smiles, “but I love the film. I like making jokes in songs. I like that there’s this beautiful love song but it’s also complaining about this critically acclaimed film being too long. I don’t recommend it for a first date!”
While the album was finished at the end of 2021, Nash wasn’t sure what to do with it. Free from the typical record industry framework – no manager, no label, no booking agents – she did two things; went on tour in 2022, which was rejuvenating, and joined TikTok. Her first post was a timeline of her extraordinary career, which ended with her questioning the best way in which to release the new album (some of the songs, including Misery, Wasteman and Horsie, had already started to emerge without a label). That first post went viral, leading to an influx of offers from labels and managers, creating a scenario Nash had been in before; dealing with some of the industry’s shadier characters. One label, however, had been interested for a while. “Kill Rock Stars had been pursuing me for two years. They had been checking in for a while saying ‘we notice the album hasn’t come out, we really love it’.” Once Nash had secured an excellent new manager, the loose ends were tied up and the album was ready to go.
Recent one-off single, Change, released to coincide with the signing announcement, was an example of what having a label can give you. “I didn’t have to do anything,” she laughs. “I’ve been doing everything myself, alongside my band and my tour manager and my various managers, but I am always the driving force. But it’s like you’re driving a 16 wheeler – there’s so much you have to take responsibility for. What was so nice with this release was that I just did the creative bit and the stuff I’m good at. The label takes care of everything else.”
It’s been a refreshing change to be able to fully focus on the creative side. That creativity is also there in the artwork for 9 Sad Symphonies, which features Nash in front of an old school Hollywood backdrop that recalls British nature while also alluding to Nash’s on-off home of LA. That visual world will also extend to Nash’s always incredible live shows, which are a key goal for her in 2024. “You can always push things further and take it to a new place,” she says. “So with this album I want to play really quality shows.”
On 9 Sad Symphonies, Nash has taken another huge step towards cementing her place as one of Britain’s most unique and fearless talents. “I’ve climbed through the sewers of this industry and so my goal is to make good music I believe in, to have longevity, and have good live shows,” she states. “I make a living from my music, which is awesome.” As for other ambitions and expectations, she’s been doing this long enough to know not to place your hopes in things you can’t control. “I don’t feel competitive with the industry anymore. I’ve been in the game for twenty years, and I’m in my own league now.”
Nearly twenty years into her ever-evolving career, London and LA-based, Brit award-winning singer, songwriter, actor and activist Kate Nash has seen it all. She’s achieved huge commercial success – 2007’s debut Made of Bricks, featuring the hit single Foundations, reached number 1 in the UK and spent seven months in the top 40 – seen the darker side of the industry after being dropped in 2012 following 2010’s Bernard Butler-assisted My Best Friend Is You, forged her own path as a successful independent artist via 2013’s punk-y Girl Talk and 2018’s Yesterday Was Forever, and starred in HBO’s hit wrestling drama, GLOW. She’s also been the subject of an award-winning documentary, Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl, and also co-created a musical, Only Gold, with Hamilton choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler. Oh, and she also starred in that too. Still only 36, Nash isn’t finished shape-shifting just yet; after signing with legendary label Kill Rock Stars, whose alumni include Nash favourites Elliott Smith and Sleater-Kinney, in early 2024, she’ll release her fifth album, 9 Sad Symphonies, in June.
Inspired by old Hollywood, vintage musicals and a desperate quest to find beauty in a rotten world, it’s another sonic shift following her “rage-y” recent output. “It needed to be cinematic and dreamy,” Nash says of the 10-track album (the title is both a joke and an ode to passing achievable goals when creativity crumbles). As for the sonic shifts, it’s just second nature: “I do things based on what I’m feeling at the time, and what I’m inspired by,” she explains.
That moment of the album’s creation was fuelled by two things; her work on Only Gold and a global pandemic that curtailed filming on the fourth season of GLOW and sent Nash – and everyone – into a tailspin. After a period of laying bed watching zombie movies, creativity started to arrive in the autumn and winter of 2020, with songs being worked on well into 2021. Having worked with Danish producer Frederick Thaae on her musical, they quickly reconnected to start work on 9 Sad Symphonies. “We were in this completely different landscape for writing songs [on the musical], which was completely freeing,” Nash explains. “I was writing for a story, I was writing about a King and a Queen and a proper story arc. In that world you need the audience to understand the songs immediately, it’s very direct, and it has lots of editing which I’d never done. It changed my outlook on songwriting. Also, we said at the beginning that we wanted to make something beautiful, nothing harsh. I’ve done a lot of harsh stuff before. We wanted loads of beautiful string arrangements.”
These melodic, bright-on-the-surface but deeply layered songs started to emerge out of creative scenarios that had been completely changed by the pandemic. “We were on Zoom, which was… challenging,” she laughs. “We discussed ideas and then we’d hang up on Zoom, go away for three hours, or Frederick would send me the small thing we’d started, then I’d start writing and doing melodies and lyrics, and he would do production, and then we’d meet up on Zoom later.” Slowly the songs started to evolve, their unusual creation adding intriguing problems to try and overcome. “We’d get stuck a lot but you just had to let the stress go and come back to it. It’s a different version of the album to the one we would have made normally.”
The album’s curtain raiser, Millions of Heartbeats, sets out the album’s lyrical themes perfectly. “It’s about that point in the pandemic where I had lost my spark for life,” she says. “And I’m a pretty sparky person, so it was really sad to me.” She references the lyric “the spark is lit at such a low flame” as a crucial moment. “I felt like I lost a part of myself. I didn’t know how to get it back.” As with all of the songs on the album, it’s not just about one thing, however. “I think it also sums up a lot of how I feel about how people act in the world right now. Am I a number or am I a person? What are we trying to be right now? I’m a human being. But we’re so quantifiable and packaged and everyone is a brand. We’re in this capitalist explosion and I feel the effect of it in a way I’ve never felt before.” But it’s also a song that, by its end, flickers with a light that can’t be completely put out. “At the end of the day, the world is beautiful, there are all these heartbeats out there, and there is hope,” she says with a smile. “We have to try! You can’t fucking give up. This song is a sign of what’s to come – there’s going to be darkness and depression but we’ll get to hope by the end.”
A rare guitar appears on Ray, which delves deeper into mental health struggles, detailing depression and anxiety. It’s a theme Nash is keen to share with her fans in a typically honest manner. “It’s natural for an artist to write about emotions and feelings and darkness,” Nash says. “Also a lot of my fans suffer from depression too and I noticed it more when I was doing my livestream chats over lockdown. Not talking about it is not the solution. Being open and creating that community within my fanbase is really important.” It’s one she’s fostered not only via the Kickstarter campaigns that funded Girl Talk and Yesterday Was Forever, but also her Patreon account which she used in the pandemic to connect with her loyal fans via livestreams.
That darkness also weaves through Misery, which marries a propulsive string arrangement and a buoyant beat to lyrics that try to outrun the emotion of its title, while the livid My Bile is an emotional exorcism married to beatific strings and crashing drums. “I guess that song is the little patience I have left to give to all the bullshit, all the shitty parts of the industry, the media, the way people talk to other human beings, me as a woman in the industry, all the things people say about you online,” she explains. “I’m done. I don’t have anything left to give to that. I’ve proved who I am with actions, which is more important. I just have bile left.” There’s love on the album too, specifically on Space Odyssey 2001, which recounts a first proper date with her now partner. On the surface it feels like a diss of the Kubrick classic, 2001: Space Odyssey, but is more about its poor choice given the context. “It’s the wrong film for a date,” she smiles, “but I love the film. I like making jokes in songs. I like that there’s this beautiful love song but it’s also complaining about this critically acclaimed film being too long. I don’t recommend it for a first date!”
While the album was finished at the end of 2021, Nash wasn’t sure what to do with it. Free from the typical record industry framework – no manager, no label, no booking agents – she did two things; went on tour in 2022, which was rejuvenating, and joined TikTok. Her first post was a timeline of her extraordinary career, which ended with her questioning the best way in which to release the new album (some of the songs, including Misery, Wasteman and Horsie, had already started to emerge without a label). That first post went viral, leading to an influx of offers from labels and managers, creating a scenario Nash had been in before; dealing with some of the industry’s shadier characters. One label, however, had been interested for a while. “Kill Rock Stars had been pursuing me for two years. They had been checking in for a while saying ‘we notice the album hasn’t come out, we really love it’.” Once Nash had secured an excellent new manager, the loose ends were tied up and the album was ready to go.
Recent one-off single, Change, released to coincide with the signing announcement, was an example of what having a label can give you. “I didn’t have to do anything,” she laughs. “I’ve been doing everything myself, alongside my band and my tour manager and my various managers, but I am always the driving force. But it’s like you’re driving a 16 wheeler – there’s so much you have to take responsibility for. What was so nice with this release was that I just did the creative bit and the stuff I’m good at. The label takes care of everything else.”
It’s been a refreshing change to be able to fully focus on the creative side. That creativity is also there in the artwork for 9 Sad Symphonies, which features Nash in front of an old school Hollywood backdrop that recalls British nature while also alluding to Nash’s on-off home of LA. That visual world will also extend to Nash’s always incredible live shows, which are a key goal for her in 2024. “You can always push things further and take it to a new place,” she says. “So with this album I want to play really quality shows.”
On 9 Sad Symphonies, Nash has taken another huge step towards cementing her place as one of Britain’s most unique and fearless talents. “I’ve climbed through the sewers of this industry and so my goal is to make good music I believe in, to have longevity, and have good live shows,” she states. “I make a living from my music, which is awesome.” As for other ambitions and expectations, she’s been doing this long enough to know not to place your hopes in things you can’t control. “I don’t feel competitive with the industry anymore. I’ve been in the game for twenty years, and I’m in my own league now.”
Nearly twenty years into her ever-evolving career, London and LA-based, Brit award-winning singer, songwriter, actor and activist Kate Nash has seen it all. She’s achieved huge commercial success – 2007’s debut Made of Bricks, featuring the hit single Foundations, reached number 1 in the UK and spent seven months in the top 40 – seen the darker side of the industry after being dropped in 2012 following 2010’s Bernard Butler-assisted My Best Friend Is You, forged her own path as a successful independent artist via 2013’s punk-y Girl Talk and 2018’s Yesterday Was Forever, and starred in HBO’s hit wrestling drama, GLOW. She’s also been the subject of an award-winning documentary, Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl, and also co-created a musical, Only Gold, with Hamilton choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler. Oh, and she also starred in that too. Still only 36, Nash isn’t finished shape-shifting just yet; after signing with legendary label Kill Rock Stars, whose alumni include Nash favourites Elliott Smith and Sleater-Kinney, in early 2024, she’ll release her fifth album, 9 Sad Symphonies, in June.
Inspired by old Hollywood, vintage musicals and a desperate quest to find beauty in a rotten world, it’s another sonic shift following her “rage-y” recent output. “It needed to be cinematic and dreamy,” Nash says of the 10-track album (the title is both a joke and an ode to passing achievable goals when creativity crumbles). As for the sonic shifts, it’s just second nature: “I do things based on what I’m feeling at the time, and what I’m inspired by,” she explains.
That moment of the album’s creation was fuelled by two things; her work on Only Gold and a global pandemic that curtailed filming on the fourth season of GLOW and sent Nash – and everyone – into a tailspin. After a period of laying bed watching zombie movies, creativity started to arrive in the autumn and winter of 2020, with songs being worked on well into 2021. Having worked with Danish producer Frederick Thaae on her musical, they quickly reconnected to start work on 9 Sad Symphonies. “We were in this completely different landscape for writing songs [on the musical], which was completely freeing,” Nash explains. “I was writing for a story, I was writing about a King and a Queen and a proper story arc. In that world you need the audience to understand the songs immediately, it’s very direct, and it has lots of editing which I’d never done. It changed my outlook on songwriting. Also, we said at the beginning that we wanted to make something beautiful, nothing harsh. I’ve done a lot of harsh stuff before. We wanted loads of beautiful string arrangements.”
These melodic, bright-on-the-surface but deeply layered songs started to emerge out of creative scenarios that had been completely changed by the pandemic. “We were on Zoom, which was… challenging,” she laughs. “We discussed ideas and then we’d hang up on Zoom, go away for three hours, or Frederick would send me the small thing we’d started, then I’d start writing and doing melodies and lyrics, and he would do production, and then we’d meet up on Zoom later.” Slowly the songs started to evolve, their unusual creation adding intriguing problems to try and overcome. “We’d get stuck a lot but you just had to let the stress go and come back to it. It’s a different version of the album to the one we would have made normally.”
The album’s curtain raiser, Millions of Heartbeats, sets out the album’s lyrical themes perfectly. “It’s about that point in the pandemic where I had lost my spark for life,” she says. “And I’m a pretty sparky person, so it was really sad to me.” She references the lyric “the spark is lit at such a low flame” as a crucial moment. “I felt like I lost a part of myself. I didn’t know how to get it back.” As with all of the songs on the album, it’s not just about one thing, however. “I think it also sums up a lot of how I feel about how people act in the world right now. Am I a number or am I a person? What are we trying to be right now? I’m a human being. But we’re so quantifiable and packaged and everyone is a brand. We’re in this capitalist explosion and I feel the effect of it in a way I’ve never felt before.” But it’s also a song that, by its end, flickers with a light that can’t be completely put out. “At the end of the day, the world is beautiful, there are all these heartbeats out there, and there is hope,” she says with a smile. “We have to try! You can’t fucking give up. This song is a sign of what’s to come – there’s going to be darkness and depression but we’ll get to hope by the end.”
A rare guitar appears on Ray, which delves deeper into mental health struggles, detailing depression and anxiety. It’s a theme Nash is keen to share with her fans in a typically honest manner. “It’s natural for an artist to write about emotions and feelings and darkness,” Nash says. “Also a lot of my fans suffer from depression too and I noticed it more when I was doing my livestream chats over lockdown. Not talking about it is not the solution. Being open and creating that community within my fanbase is really important.” It’s one she’s fostered not only via the Kickstarter campaigns that funded Girl Talk and Yesterday Was Forever, but also her Patreon account which she used in the pandemic to connect with her loyal fans via livestreams.
That darkness also weaves through Misery, which marries a propulsive string arrangement and a buoyant beat to lyrics that try to outrun the emotion of its title, while the livid My Bile is an emotional exorcism married to beatific strings and crashing drums. “I guess that song is the little patience I have left to give to all the bullshit, all the shitty parts of the industry, the media, the way people talk to other human beings, me as a woman in the industry, all the things people say about you online,” she explains. “I’m done. I don’t have anything left to give to that. I’ve proved who I am with actions, which is more important. I just have bile left.” There’s love on the album too, specifically on Space Odyssey 2001, which recounts a first proper date with her now partner. On the surface it feels like a diss of the Kubrick classic, 2001: Space Odyssey, but is more about its poor choice given the context. “It’s the wrong film for a date,” she smiles, “but I love the film. I like making jokes in songs. I like that there’s this beautiful love song but it’s also complaining about this critically acclaimed film being too long. I don’t recommend it for a first date!”
While the album was finished at the end of 2021, Nash wasn’t sure what to do with it. Free from the typical record industry framework – no manager, no label, no booking agents – she did two things; went on tour in 2022, which was rejuvenating, and joined TikTok. Her first post was a timeline of her extraordinary career, which ended with her questioning the best way in which to release the new album (some of the songs, including Misery, Wasteman and Horsie, had already started to emerge without a label). That first post went viral, leading to an influx of offers from labels and managers, creating a scenario Nash had been in before; dealing with some of the industry’s shadier characters. One label, however, had been interested for a while. “Kill Rock Stars had been pursuing me for two years. They had been checking in for a while saying ‘we notice the album hasn’t come out, we really love it’.” Once Nash had secured an excellent new manager, the loose ends were tied up and the album was ready to go.
Recent one-off single, Change, released to coincide with the signing announcement, was an example of what having a label can give you. “I didn’t have to do anything,” she laughs. “I’ve been doing everything myself, alongside my band and my tour manager and my various managers, but I am always the driving force. But it’s like you’re driving a 16 wheeler – there’s so much you have to take responsibility for. What was so nice with this release was that I just did the creative bit and the stuff I’m good at. The label takes care of everything else.”
It’s been a refreshing change to be able to fully focus on the creative side. That creativity is also there in the artwork for 9 Sad Symphonies, which features Nash in front of an old school Hollywood backdrop that recalls British nature while also alluding to Nash’s on-off home of LA. That visual world will also extend to Nash’s always incredible live shows, which are a key goal for her in 2024. “You can always push things further and take it to a new place,” she says. “So with this album I want to play really quality shows.”
On 9 Sad Symphonies, Nash has taken another huge step towards cementing her place as one of Britain’s most unique and fearless talents. “I’ve climbed through the sewers of this industry and so my goal is to make good music I believe in, to have longevity, and have good live shows,” she states. “I make a living from my music, which is awesome.” As for other ambitions and expectations, she’s been doing this long enough to know not to place your hopes in things you can’t control. “I don’t feel competitive with the industry anymore. I’ve been in the game for twenty years, and I’m in my own league now.”
Nearly twenty years into her ever-evolving career, London and LA-based, Brit award-winning singer, songwriter, actor and activist Kate Nash has seen it all. She’s achieved huge commercial success – 2007’s debut Made of Bricks, featuring the hit single Foundations, reached number 1 in the UK and spent seven months in the top 40 – seen the darker side of the industry after being dropped in 2012 following 2010’s Bernard Butler-assisted My Best Friend Is You, forged her own path as a successful independent artist via 2013’s punk-y Girl Talk and 2018’s Yesterday Was Forever, and starred in HBO’s hit wrestling drama, GLOW. She’s also been the subject of an award-winning documentary, Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl, and also co-created a musical, Only Gold, with Hamilton choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler. Oh, and she also starred in that too. Still only 36, Nash isn’t finished shape-shifting just yet; after signing with legendary label Kill Rock Stars, whose alumni include Nash favourites Elliott Smith and Sleater-Kinney, in early 2024, she’ll release her fifth album, 9 Sad Symphonies, in June.
Inspired by old Hollywood, vintage musicals and a desperate quest to find beauty in a rotten world, it’s another sonic shift following her “rage-y” recent output. “It needed to be cinematic and dreamy,” Nash says of the 10-track album (the title is both a joke and an ode to passing achievable goals when creativity crumbles). As for the sonic shifts, it’s just second nature: “I do things based on what I’m feeling at the time, and what I’m inspired by,” she explains.
That moment of the album’s creation was fuelled by two things; her work on Only Gold and a global pandemic that curtailed filming on the fourth season of GLOW and sent Nash – and everyone – into a tailspin. After a period of laying bed watching zombie movies, creativity started to arrive in the autumn and winter of 2020, with songs being worked on well into 2021. Having worked with Danish producer Frederick Thaae on her musical, they quickly reconnected to start work on 9 Sad Symphonies. “We were in this completely different landscape for writing songs [on the musical], which was completely freeing,” Nash explains. “I was writing for a story, I was writing about a King and a Queen and a proper story arc. In that world you need the audience to understand the songs immediately, it’s very direct, and it has lots of editing which I’d never done. It changed my outlook on songwriting. Also, we said at the beginning that we wanted to make something beautiful, nothing harsh. I’ve done a lot of harsh stuff before. We wanted loads of beautiful string arrangements.”
These melodic, bright-on-the-surface but deeply layered songs started to emerge out of creative scenarios that had been completely changed by the pandemic. “We were on Zoom, which was… challenging,” she laughs. “We discussed ideas and then we’d hang up on Zoom, go away for three hours, or Frederick would send me the small thing we’d started, then I’d start writing and doing melodies and lyrics, and he would do production, and then we’d meet up on Zoom later.” Slowly the songs started to evolve, their unusual creation adding intriguing problems to try and overcome. “We’d get stuck a lot but you just had to let the stress go and come back to it. It’s a different version of the album to the one we would have made normally.”
The album’s curtain raiser, Millions of Heartbeats, sets out the album’s lyrical themes perfectly. “It’s about that point in the pandemic where I had lost my spark for life,” she says. “And I’m a pretty sparky person, so it was really sad to me.” She references the lyric “the spark is lit at such a low flame” as a crucial moment. “I felt like I lost a part of myself. I didn’t know how to get it back.” As with all of the songs on the album, it’s not just about one thing, however. “I think it also sums up a lot of how I feel about how people act in the world right now. Am I a number or am I a person? What are we trying to be right now? I’m a human being. But we’re so quantifiable and packaged and everyone is a brand. We’re in this capitalist explosion and I feel the effect of it in a way I’ve never felt before.” But it’s also a song that, by its end, flickers with a light that can’t be completely put out. “At the end of the day, the world is beautiful, there are all these heartbeats out there, and there is hope,” she says with a smile. “We have to try! You can’t fucking give up. This song is a sign of what’s to come – there’s going to be darkness and depression but we’ll get to hope by the end.”
A rare guitar appears on Ray, which delves deeper into mental health struggles, detailing depression and anxiety. It’s a theme Nash is keen to share with her fans in a typically honest manner. “It’s natural for an artist to write about emotions and feelings and darkness,” Nash says. “Also a lot of my fans suffer from depression too and I noticed it more when I was doing my livestream chats over lockdown. Not talking about it is not the solution. Being open and creating that community within my fanbase is really important.” It’s one she’s fostered not only via the Kickstarter campaigns that funded Girl Talk and Yesterday Was Forever, but also her Patreon account which she used in the pandemic to connect with her loyal fans via livestreams.
That darkness also weaves through Misery, which marries a propulsive string arrangement and a buoyant beat to lyrics that try to outrun the emotion of its title, while the livid My Bile is an emotional exorcism married to beatific strings and crashing drums. “I guess that song is the little patience I have left to give to all the bullshit, all the shitty parts of the industry, the media, the way people talk to other human beings, me as a woman in the industry, all the things people say about you online,” she explains. “I’m done. I don’t have anything left to give to that. I’ve proved who I am with actions, which is more important. I just have bile left.” There’s love on the album too, specifically on Space Odyssey 2001, which recounts a first proper date with her now partner. On the surface it feels like a diss of the Kubrick classic, 2001: Space Odyssey, but is more about its poor choice given the context. “It’s the wrong film for a date,” she smiles, “but I love the film. I like making jokes in songs. I like that there’s this beautiful love song but it’s also complaining about this critically acclaimed film being too long. I don’t recommend it for a first date!”
While the album was finished at the end of 2021, Nash wasn’t sure what to do with it. Free from the typical record industry framework – no manager, no label, no booking agents – she did two things; went on tour in 2022, which was rejuvenating, and joined TikTok. Her first post was a timeline of her extraordinary career, which ended with her questioning the best way in which to release the new album (some of the songs, including Misery, Wasteman and Horsie, had already started to emerge without a label). That first post went viral, leading to an influx of offers from labels and managers, creating a scenario Nash had been in before; dealing with some of the industry’s shadier characters. One label, however, had been interested for a while. “Kill Rock Stars had been pursuing me for two years. They had been checking in for a while saying ‘we notice the album hasn’t come out, we really love it’.” Once Nash had secured an excellent new manager, the loose ends were tied up and the album was ready to go.
Recent one-off single, Change, released to coincide with the signing announcement, was an example of what having a label can give you. “I didn’t have to do anything,” she laughs. “I’ve been doing everything myself, alongside my band and my tour manager and my various managers, but I am always the driving force. But it’s like you’re driving a 16 wheeler – there’s so much you have to take responsibility for. What was so nice with this release was that I just did the creative bit and the stuff I’m good at. The label takes care of everything else.”
It’s been a refreshing change to be able to fully focus on the creative side. That creativity is also there in the artwork for 9 Sad Symphonies, which features Nash in front of an old school Hollywood backdrop that recalls British nature while also alluding to Nash’s on-off home of LA. That visual world will also extend to Nash’s always incredible live shows, which are a key goal for her in 2024. “You can always push things further and take it to a new place,” she says. “So with this album I want to play really quality shows.”
On 9 Sad Symphonies, Nash has taken another huge step towards cementing her place as one of Britain’s most unique and fearless talents. “I’ve climbed through the sewers of this industry and so my goal is to make good music I believe in, to have longevity, and have good live shows,” she states. “I make a living from my music, which is awesome.” As for other ambitions and expectations, she’s been doing this long enough to know not to place your hopes in things you can’t control. “I don’t feel competitive with the industry anymore. I’ve been in the game for twenty years, and I’m in my own league now.”
Nearly twenty years into her ever-evolving career, London and LA-based, Brit award-winning singer, songwriter, actor and activist Kate Nash has seen it all. She’s achieved huge commercial success – 2007’s debut Made of Bricks, featuring the hit single Foundations, reached number 1 in the UK and spent seven months in the top 40 – seen the darker side of the industry after being dropped in 2012 following 2010’s Bernard Butler-assisted My Best Friend Is You, forged her own path as a successful independent artist via 2013’s punk-y Girl Talk and 2018’s Yesterday Was Forever, and starred in HBO’s hit wrestling drama, GLOW. She’s also been the subject of an award-winning documentary, Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl, and also co-created a musical, Only Gold, with Hamilton choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler. Oh, and she also starred in that too. Still only 36, Nash isn’t finished shape-shifting just yet; after signing with legendary label Kill Rock Stars, whose alumni include Nash favourites Elliott Smith and Sleater-Kinney, in early 2024, she’ll release her fifth album, 9 Sad Symphonies, in June.
Inspired by old Hollywood, vintage musicals and a desperate quest to find beauty in a rotten world, it’s another sonic shift following her “rage-y” recent output. “It needed to be cinematic and dreamy,” Nash says of the 10-track album (the title is both a joke and an ode to passing achievable goals when creativity crumbles). As for the sonic shifts, it’s just second nature: “I do things based on what I’m feeling at the time, and what I’m inspired by,” she explains.
That moment of the album’s creation was fuelled by two things; her work on Only Gold and a global pandemic that curtailed filming on the fourth season of GLOW and sent Nash – and everyone – into a tailspin. After a period of laying bed watching zombie movies, creativity started to arrive in the autumn and winter of 2020, with songs being worked on well into 2021. Having worked with Danish producer Frederick Thaae on her musical, they quickly reconnected to start work on 9 Sad Symphonies. “We were in this completely different landscape for writing songs [on the musical], which was completely freeing,” Nash explains. “I was writing for a story, I was writing about a King and a Queen and a proper story arc. In that world you need the audience to understand the songs immediately, it’s very direct, and it has lots of editing which I’d never done. It changed my outlook on songwriting. Also, we said at the beginning that we wanted to make something beautiful, nothing harsh. I’ve done a lot of harsh stuff before. We wanted loads of beautiful string arrangements.”
These melodic, bright-on-the-surface but deeply layered songs started to emerge out of creative scenarios that had been completely changed by the pandemic. “We were on Zoom, which was… challenging,” she laughs. “We discussed ideas and then we’d hang up on Zoom, go away for three hours, or Frederick would send me the small thing we’d started, then I’d start writing and doing melodies and lyrics, and he would do production, and then we’d meet up on Zoom later.” Slowly the songs started to evolve, their unusual creation adding intriguing problems to try and overcome. “We’d get stuck a lot but you just had to let the stress go and come back to it. It’s a different version of the album to the one we would have made normally.”
The album’s curtain raiser, Millions of Heartbeats, sets out the album’s lyrical themes perfectly. “It’s about that point in the pandemic where I had lost my spark for life,” she says. “And I’m a pretty sparky person, so it was really sad to me.” She references the lyric “the spark is lit at such a low flame” as a crucial moment. “I felt like I lost a part of myself. I didn’t know how to get it back.” As with all of the songs on the album, it’s not just about one thing, however. “I think it also sums up a lot of how I feel about how people act in the world right now. Am I a number or am I a person? What are we trying to be right now? I’m a human being. But we’re so quantifiable and packaged and everyone is a brand. We’re in this capitalist explosion and I feel the effect of it in a way I’ve never felt before.” But it’s also a song that, by its end, flickers with a light that can’t be completely put out. “At the end of the day, the world is beautiful, there are all these heartbeats out there, and there is hope,” she says with a smile. “We have to try! You can’t fucking give up. This song is a sign of what’s to come – there’s going to be darkness and depression but we’ll get to hope by the end.”
A rare guitar appears on Ray, which delves deeper into mental health struggles, detailing depression and anxiety. It’s a theme Nash is keen to share with her fans in a typically honest manner. “It’s natural for an artist to write about emotions and feelings and darkness,” Nash says. “Also a lot of my fans suffer from depression too and I noticed it more when I was doing my livestream chats over lockdown. Not talking about it is not the solution. Being open and creating that community within my fanbase is really important.” It’s one she’s fostered not only via the Kickstarter campaigns that funded Girl Talk and Yesterday Was Forever, but also her Patreon account which she used in the pandemic to connect with her loyal fans via livestreams.
That darkness also weaves through Misery, which marries a propulsive string arrangement and a buoyant beat to lyrics that try to outrun the emotion of its title, while the livid My Bile is an emotional exorcism married to beatific strings and crashing drums. “I guess that song is the little patience I have left to give to all the bullshit, all the shitty parts of the industry, the media, the way people talk to other human beings, me as a woman in the industry, all the things people say about you online,” she explains. “I’m done. I don’t have anything left to give to that. I’ve proved who I am with actions, which is more important. I just have bile left.” There’s love on the album too, specifically on Space Odyssey 2001, which recounts a first proper date with her now partner. On the surface it feels like a diss of the Kubrick classic, 2001: Space Odyssey, but is more about its poor choice given the context. “It’s the wrong film for a date,” she smiles, “but I love the film. I like making jokes in songs. I like that there’s this beautiful love song but it’s also complaining about this critically acclaimed film being too long. I don’t recommend it for a first date!”
While the album was finished at the end of 2021, Nash wasn’t sure what to do with it. Free from the typical record industry framework – no manager, no label, no booking agents – she did two things; went on tour in 2022, which was rejuvenating, and joined TikTok. Her first post was a timeline of her extraordinary career, which ended with her questioning the best way in which to release the new album (some of the songs, including Misery, Wasteman and Horsie, had already started to emerge without a label). That first post went viral, leading to an influx of offers from labels and managers, creating a scenario Nash had been in before; dealing with some of the industry’s shadier characters. One label, however, had been interested for a while. “Kill Rock Stars had been pursuing me for two years. They had been checking in for a while saying ‘we notice the album hasn’t come out, we really love it’.” Once Nash had secured an excellent new manager, the loose ends were tied up and the album was ready to go.
Recent one-off single, Change, released to coincide with the signing announcement, was an example of what having a label can give you. “I didn’t have to do anything,” she laughs. “I’ve been doing everything myself, alongside my band and my tour manager and my various managers, but I am always the driving force. But it’s like you’re driving a 16 wheeler – there’s so much you have to take responsibility for. What was so nice with this release was that I just did the creative bit and the stuff I’m good at. The label takes care of everything else.”
It’s been a refreshing change to be able to fully focus on the creative side. That creativity is also there in the artwork for 9 Sad Symphonies, which features Nash in front of an old school Hollywood backdrop that recalls British nature while also alluding to Nash’s on-off home of LA. That visual world will also extend to Nash’s always incredible live shows, which are a key goal for her in 2024. “You can always push things further and take it to a new place,” she says. “So with this album I want to play really quality shows.”
On 9 Sad Symphonies, Nash has taken another huge step towards cementing her place as one of Britain’s most unique and fearless talents. “I’ve climbed through the sewers of this industry and so my goal is to make good music I believe in, to have longevity, and have good live shows,” she states. “I make a living from my music, which is awesome.” As for other ambitions and expectations, she’s been doing this long enough to know not to place your hopes in things you can’t control. “I don’t feel competitive with the industry anymore. I’ve been in the game for twenty years, and I’m in my own league now.”
Nearly twenty years into her ever-evolving career, London and LA-based, Brit award-winning singer, songwriter, actor and activist Kate Nash has seen it all. She’s achieved huge commercial success – 2007’s debut Made of Bricks, featuring the hit single Foundations, reached number 1 in the UK and spent seven months in the top 40 – seen the darker side of the industry after being dropped in 2012 following 2010’s Bernard Butler-assisted My Best Friend Is You, forged her own path as a successful independent artist via 2013’s punk-y Girl Talk and 2018’s Yesterday Was Forever, and starred in HBO’s hit wrestling drama, GLOW. She’s also been the subject of an award-winning documentary, Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl, and also co-created a musical, Only Gold, with Hamilton choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler. Oh, and she also starred in that too. Still only 36, Nash isn’t finished shape-shifting just yet; after signing with legendary label Kill Rock Stars, whose alumni include Nash favourites Elliott Smith and Sleater-Kinney, in early 2024, she’ll release her fifth album, 9 Sad Symphonies, in June.
Inspired by old Hollywood, vintage musicals and a desperate quest to find beauty in a rotten world, it’s another sonic shift following her “rage-y” recent output. “It needed to be cinematic and dreamy,” Nash says of the 10-track album (the title is both a joke and an ode to passing achievable goals when creativity crumbles). As for the sonic shifts, it’s just second nature: “I do things based on what I’m feeling at the time, and what I’m inspired by,” she explains.
That moment of the album’s creation was fuelled by two things; her work on Only Gold and a global pandemic that curtailed filming on the fourth season of GLOW and sent Nash – and everyone – into a tailspin. After a period of laying bed watching zombie movies, creativity started to arrive in the autumn and winter of 2020, with songs being worked on well into 2021. Having worked with Danish producer Frederick Thaae on her musical, they quickly reconnected to start work on 9 Sad Symphonies. “We were in this completely different landscape for writing songs [on the musical], which was completely freeing,” Nash explains. “I was writing for a story, I was writing about a King and a Queen and a proper story arc. In that world you need the audience to understand the songs immediately, it’s very direct, and it has lots of editing which I’d never done. It changed my outlook on songwriting. Also, we said at the beginning that we wanted to make something beautiful, nothing harsh. I’ve done a lot of harsh stuff before. We wanted loads of beautiful string arrangements.”
These melodic, bright-on-the-surface but deeply layered songs started to emerge out of creative scenarios that had been completely changed by the pandemic. “We were on Zoom, which was… challenging,” she laughs. “We discussed ideas and then we’d hang up on Zoom, go away for three hours, or Frederick would send me the small thing we’d started, then I’d start writing and doing melodies and lyrics, and he would do production, and then we’d meet up on Zoom later.” Slowly the songs started to evolve, their unusual creation adding intriguing problems to try and overcome. “We’d get stuck a lot but you just had to let the stress go and come back to it. It’s a different version of the album to the one we would have made normally.”
The album’s curtain raiser, Millions of Heartbeats, sets out the album’s lyrical themes perfectly. “It’s about that point in the pandemic where I had lost my spark for life,” she says. “And I’m a pretty sparky person, so it was really sad to me.” She references the lyric “the spark is lit at such a low flame” as a crucial moment. “I felt like I lost a part of myself. I didn’t know how to get it back.” As with all of the songs on the album, it’s not just about one thing, however. “I think it also sums up a lot of how I feel about how people act in the world right now. Am I a number or am I a person? What are we trying to be right now? I’m a human being. But we’re so quantifiable and packaged and everyone is a brand. We’re in this capitalist explosion and I feel the effect of it in a way I’ve never felt before.” But it’s also a song that, by its end, flickers with a light that can’t be completely put out. “At the end of the day, the world is beautiful, there are all these heartbeats out there, and there is hope,” she says with a smile. “We have to try! You can’t fucking give up. This song is a sign of what’s to come – there’s going to be darkness and depression but we’ll get to hope by the end.”
A rare guitar appears on Ray, which delves deeper into mental health struggles, detailing depression and anxiety. It’s a theme Nash is keen to share with her fans in a typically honest manner. “It’s natural for an artist to write about emotions and feelings and darkness,” Nash says. “Also a lot of my fans suffer from depression too and I noticed it more when I was doing my livestream chats over lockdown. Not talking about it is not the solution. Being open and creating that community within my fanbase is really important.” It’s one she’s fostered not only via the Kickstarter campaigns that funded Girl Talk and Yesterday Was Forever, but also her Patreon account which she used in the pandemic to connect with her loyal fans via livestreams.
That darkness also weaves through Misery, which marries a propulsive string arrangement and a buoyant beat to lyrics that try to outrun the emotion of its title, while the livid My Bile is an emotional exorcism married to beatific strings and crashing drums. “I guess that song is the little patience I have left to give to all the bullshit, all the shitty parts of the industry, the media, the way people talk to other human beings, me as a woman in the industry, all the things people say about you online,” she explains. “I’m done. I don’t have anything left to give to that. I’ve proved who I am with actions, which is more important. I just have bile left.” There’s love on the album too, specifically on Space Odyssey 2001, which recounts a first proper date with her now partner. On the surface it feels like a diss of the Kubrick classic, 2001: Space Odyssey, but is more about its poor choice given the context. “It’s the wrong film for a date,” she smiles, “but I love the film. I like making jokes in songs. I like that there’s this beautiful love song but it’s also complaining about this critically acclaimed film being too long. I don’t recommend it for a first date!”
While the album was finished at the end of 2021, Nash wasn’t sure what to do with it. Free from the typical record industry framework – no manager, no label, no booking agents – she did two things; went on tour in 2022, which was rejuvenating, and joined TikTok. Her first post was a timeline of her extraordinary career, which ended with her questioning the best way in which to release the new album (some of the songs, including Misery, Wasteman and Horsie, had already started to emerge without a label). That first post went viral, leading to an influx of offers from labels and managers, creating a scenario Nash had been in before; dealing with some of the industry’s shadier characters. One label, however, had been interested for a while. “Kill Rock Stars had been pursuing me for two years. They had been checking in for a while saying ‘we notice the album hasn’t come out, we really love it’.” Once Nash had secured an excellent new manager, the loose ends were tied up and the album was ready to go.
Recent one-off single, Change, released to coincide with the signing announcement, was an example of what having a label can give you. “I didn’t have to do anything,” she laughs. “I’ve been doing everything myself, alongside my band and my tour manager and my various managers, but I am always the driving force. But it’s like you’re driving a 16 wheeler – there’s so much you have to take responsibility for. What was so nice with this release was that I just did the creative bit and the stuff I’m good at. The label takes care of everything else.”
It’s been a refreshing change to be able to fully focus on the creative side. That creativity is also there in the artwork for 9 Sad Symphonies, which features Nash in front of an old school Hollywood backdrop that recalls British nature while also alluding to Nash’s on-off home of LA. That visual world will also extend to Nash’s always incredible live shows, which are a key goal for her in 2024. “You can always push things further and take it to a new place,” she says. “So with this album I want to play really quality shows.”
On 9 Sad Symphonies, Nash has taken another huge step towards cementing her place as one of Britain’s most unique and fearless talents. “I’ve climbed through the sewers of this industry and so my goal is to make good music I believe in, to have longevity, and have good live shows,” she states. “I make a living from my music, which is awesome.” As for other ambitions and expectations, she’s been doing this long enough to know not to place your hopes in things you can’t control. “I don’t feel competitive with the industry anymore. I’ve been in the game for twenty years, and I’m in my own league now.”
Nearly twenty years into her ever-evolving career, London and LA-based, Brit award-winning singer, songwriter, actor and activist Kate Nash has seen it all. She’s achieved huge commercial success – 2007’s debut Made of Bricks, featuring the hit single Foundations, reached number 1 in the UK and spent seven months in the top 40 – seen the darker side of the industry after being dropped in 2012 following 2010’s Bernard Butler-assisted My Best Friend Is You, forged her own path as a successful independent artist via 2013’s punk-y Girl Talk and 2018’s Yesterday Was Forever, and starred in HBO’s hit wrestling drama, GLOW. She’s also been the subject of an award-winning documentary, Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl, and also co-created a musical, Only Gold, with Hamilton choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler. Oh, and she also starred in that too. Still only 36, Nash isn’t finished shape-shifting just yet; after signing with legendary label Kill Rock Stars, whose alumni include Nash favourites Elliott Smith and Sleater-Kinney, in early 2024, she’ll release her fifth album, 9 Sad Symphonies, in June.
Inspired by old Hollywood, vintage musicals and a desperate quest to find beauty in a rotten world, it’s another sonic shift following her “rage-y” recent output. “It needed to be cinematic and dreamy,” Nash says of the 10-track album (the title is both a joke and an ode to passing achievable goals when creativity crumbles). As for the sonic shifts, it’s just second nature: “I do things based on what I’m feeling at the time, and what I’m inspired by,” she explains.
That moment of the album’s creation was fuelled by two things; her work on Only Gold and a global pandemic that curtailed filming on the fourth season of GLOW and sent Nash – and everyone – into a tailspin. After a period of laying bed watching zombie movies, creativity started to arrive in the autumn and winter of 2020, with songs being worked on well into 2021. Having worked with Danish producer Frederick Thaae on her musical, they quickly reconnected to start work on 9 Sad Symphonies. “We were in this completely different landscape for writing songs [on the musical], which was completely freeing,” Nash explains. “I was writing for a story, I was writing about a King and a Queen and a proper story arc. In that world you need the audience to understand the songs immediately, it’s very direct, and it has lots of editing which I’d never done. It changed my outlook on songwriting. Also, we said at the beginning that we wanted to make something beautiful, nothing harsh. I’ve done a lot of harsh stuff before. We wanted loads of beautiful string arrangements.”
These melodic, bright-on-the-surface but deeply layered songs started to emerge out of creative scenarios that had been completely changed by the pandemic. “We were on Zoom, which was… challenging,” she laughs. “We discussed ideas and then we’d hang up on Zoom, go away for three hours, or Frederick would send me the small thing we’d started, then I’d start writing and doing melodies and lyrics, and he would do production, and then we’d meet up on Zoom later.” Slowly the songs started to evolve, their unusual creation adding intriguing problems to try and overcome. “We’d get stuck a lot but you just had to let the stress go and come back to it. It’s a different version of the album to the one we would have made normally.”
The album’s curtain raiser, Millions of Heartbeats, sets out the album’s lyrical themes perfectly. “It’s about that point in the pandemic where I had lost my spark for life,” she says. “And I’m a pretty sparky person, so it was really sad to me.” She references the lyric “the spark is lit at such a low flame” as a crucial moment. “I felt like I lost a part of myself. I didn’t know how to get it back.” As with all of the songs on the album, it’s not just about one thing, however. “I think it also sums up a lot of how I feel about how people act in the world right now. Am I a number or am I a person? What are we trying to be right now? I’m a human being. But we’re so quantifiable and packaged and everyone is a brand. We’re in this capitalist explosion and I feel the effect of it in a way I’ve never felt before.” But it’s also a song that, by its end, flickers with a light that can’t be completely put out. “At the end of the day, the world is beautiful, there are all these heartbeats out there, and there is hope,” she says with a smile. “We have to try! You can’t fucking give up. This song is a sign of what’s to come – there’s going to be darkness and depression but we’ll get to hope by the end.”
A rare guitar appears on Ray, which delves deeper into mental health struggles, detailing depression and anxiety. It’s a theme Nash is keen to share with her fans in a typically honest manner. “It’s natural for an artist to write about emotions and feelings and darkness,” Nash says. “Also a lot of my fans suffer from depression too and I noticed it more when I was doing my livestream chats over lockdown. Not talking about it is not the solution. Being open and creating that community within my fanbase is really important.” It’s one she’s fostered not only via the Kickstarter campaigns that funded Girl Talk and Yesterday Was Forever, but also her Patreon account which she used in the pandemic to connect with her loyal fans via livestreams.
That darkness also weaves through Misery, which marries a propulsive string arrangement and a buoyant beat to lyrics that try to outrun the emotion of its title, while the livid My Bile is an emotional exorcism married to beatific strings and crashing drums. “I guess that song is the little patience I have left to give to all the bullshit, all the shitty parts of the industry, the media, the way people talk to other human beings, me as a woman in the industry, all the things people say about you online,” she explains. “I’m done. I don’t have anything left to give to that. I’ve proved who I am with actions, which is more important. I just have bile left.” There’s love on the album too, specifically on Space Odyssey 2001, which recounts a first proper date with her now partner. On the surface it feels like a diss of the Kubrick classic, 2001: Space Odyssey, but is more about its poor choice given the context. “It’s the wrong film for a date,” she smiles, “but I love the film. I like making jokes in songs. I like that there’s this beautiful love song but it’s also complaining about this critically acclaimed film being too long. I don’t recommend it for a first date!”
While the album was finished at the end of 2021, Nash wasn’t sure what to do with it. Free from the typical record industry framework – no manager, no label, no booking agents – she did two things; went on tour in 2022, which was rejuvenating, and joined TikTok. Her first post was a timeline of her extraordinary career, which ended with her questioning the best way in which to release the new album (some of the songs, including Misery, Wasteman and Horsie, had already started to emerge without a label). That first post went viral, leading to an influx of offers from labels and managers, creating a scenario Nash had been in before; dealing with some of the industry’s shadier characters. One label, however, had been interested for a while. “Kill Rock Stars had been pursuing me for two years. They had been checking in for a while saying ‘we notice the album hasn’t come out, we really love it’.” Once Nash had secured an excellent new manager, the loose ends were tied up and the album was ready to go.
Recent one-off single, Change, released to coincide with the signing announcement, was an example of what having a label can give you. “I didn’t have to do anything,” she laughs. “I’ve been doing everything myself, alongside my band and my tour manager and my various managers, but I am always the driving force. But it’s like you’re driving a 16 wheeler – there’s so much you have to take responsibility for. What was so nice with this release was that I just did the creative bit and the stuff I’m good at. The label takes care of everything else.”
It’s been a refreshing change to be able to fully focus on the creative side. That creativity is also there in the artwork for 9 Sad Symphonies, which features Nash in front of an old school Hollywood backdrop that recalls British nature while also alluding to Nash’s on-off home of LA. That visual world will also extend to Nash’s always incredible live shows, which are a key goal for her in 2024. “You can always push things further and take it to a new place,” she says. “So with this album I want to play really quality shows.”
On 9 Sad Symphonies, Nash has taken another huge step towards cementing her place as one of Britain’s most unique and fearless talents. “I’ve climbed through the sewers of this industry and so my goal is to make good music I believe in, to have longevity, and have good live shows,” she states. “I make a living from my music, which is awesome.” As for other ambitions and expectations, she’s been doing this long enough to know not to place your hopes in things you can’t control. “I don’t feel competitive with the industry anymore. I’ve been in the game for twenty years, and I’m in my own league now.”
Nearly twenty years into her ever-evolving career, London and LA-based, Brit award-winning singer, songwriter, actor and activist Kate Nash has seen it all. She’s achieved huge commercial success – 2007’s debut Made of Bricks, featuring the hit single Foundations, reached number 1 in the UK and spent seven months in the top 40 – seen the darker side of the industry after being dropped in 2012 following 2010’s Bernard Butler-assisted My Best Friend Is You, forged her own path as a successful independent artist via 2013’s punk-y Girl Talk and 2018’s Yesterday Was Forever, and starred in HBO’s hit wrestling drama, GLOW. She’s also been the subject of an award-winning documentary, Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl, and also co-created a musical, Only Gold, with Hamilton choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler. Oh, and she also starred in that too. Still only 36, Nash isn’t finished shape-shifting just yet; after signing with legendary label Kill Rock Stars, whose alumni include Nash favourites Elliott Smith and Sleater-Kinney, in early 2024, she’ll release her fifth album, 9 Sad Symphonies, in June.
Inspired by old Hollywood, vintage musicals and a desperate quest to find beauty in a rotten world, it’s another sonic shift following her “rage-y” recent output. “It needed to be cinematic and dreamy,” Nash says of the 10-track album (the title is both a joke and an ode to passing achievable goals when creativity crumbles). As for the sonic shifts, it’s just second nature: “I do things based on what I’m feeling at the time, and what I’m inspired by,” she explains.
That moment of the album’s creation was fuelled by two things; her work on Only Gold and a global pandemic that curtailed filming on the fourth season of GLOW and sent Nash – and everyone – into a tailspin. After a period of laying bed watching zombie movies, creativity started to arrive in the autumn and winter of 2020, with songs being worked on well into 2021. Having worked with Danish producer Frederick Thaae on her musical, they quickly reconnected to start work on 9 Sad Symphonies. “We were in this completely different landscape for writing songs [on the musical], which was completely freeing,” Nash explains. “I was writing for a story, I was writing about a King and a Queen and a proper story arc. In that world you need the audience to understand the songs immediately, it’s very direct, and it has lots of editing which I’d never done. It changed my outlook on songwriting. Also, we said at the beginning that we wanted to make something beautiful, nothing harsh. I’ve done a lot of harsh stuff before. We wanted loads of beautiful string arrangements.”
These melodic, bright-on-the-surface but deeply layered songs started to emerge out of creative scenarios that had been completely changed by the pandemic. “We were on Zoom, which was… challenging,” she laughs. “We discussed ideas and then we’d hang up on Zoom, go away for three hours, or Frederick would send me the small thing we’d started, then I’d start writing and doing melodies and lyrics, and he would do production, and then we’d meet up on Zoom later.” Slowly the songs started to evolve, their unusual creation adding intriguing problems to try and overcome. “We’d get stuck a lot but you just had to let the stress go and come back to it. It’s a different version of the album to the one we would have made normally.”
The album’s curtain raiser, Millions of Heartbeats, sets out the album’s lyrical themes perfectly. “It’s about that point in the pandemic where I had lost my spark for life,” she says. “And I’m a pretty sparky person, so it was really sad to me.” She references the lyric “the spark is lit at such a low flame” as a crucial moment. “I felt like I lost a part of myself. I didn’t know how to get it back.” As with all of the songs on the album, it’s not just about one thing, however. “I think it also sums up a lot of how I feel about how people act in the world right now. Am I a number or am I a person? What are we trying to be right now? I’m a human being. But we’re so quantifiable and packaged and everyone is a brand. We’re in this capitalist explosion and I feel the effect of it in a way I’ve never felt before.” But it’s also a song that, by its end, flickers with a light that can’t be completely put out. “At the end of the day, the world is beautiful, there are all these heartbeats out there, and there is hope,” she says with a smile. “We have to try! You can’t fucking give up. This song is a sign of what’s to come – there’s going to be darkness and depression but we’ll get to hope by the end.”
A rare guitar appears on Ray, which delves deeper into mental health struggles, detailing depression and anxiety. It’s a theme Nash is keen to share with her fans in a typically honest manner. “It’s natural for an artist to write about emotions and feelings and darkness,” Nash says. “Also a lot of my fans suffer from depression too and I noticed it more when I was doing my livestream chats over lockdown. Not talking about it is not the solution. Being open and creating that community within my fanbase is really important.” It’s one she’s fostered not only via the Kickstarter campaigns that funded Girl Talk and Yesterday Was Forever, but also her Patreon account which she used in the pandemic to connect with her loyal fans via livestreams.
That darkness also weaves through Misery, which marries a propulsive string arrangement and a buoyant beat to lyrics that try to outrun the emotion of its title, while the livid My Bile is an emotional exorcism married to beatific strings and crashing drums. “I guess that song is the little patience I have left to give to all the bullshit, all the shitty parts of the industry, the media, the way people talk to other human beings, me as a woman in the industry, all the things people say about you online,” she explains. “I’m done. I don’t have anything left to give to that. I’ve proved who I am with actions, which is more important. I just have bile left.” There’s love on the album too, specifically on Space Odyssey 2001, which recounts a first proper date with her now partner. On the surface it feels like a diss of the Kubrick classic, 2001: Space Odyssey, but is more about its poor choice given the context. “It’s the wrong film for a date,” she smiles, “but I love the film. I like making jokes in songs. I like that there’s this beautiful love song but it’s also complaining about this critically acclaimed film being too long. I don’t recommend it for a first date!”
While the album was finished at the end of 2021, Nash wasn’t sure what to do with it. Free from the typical record industry framework – no manager, no label, no booking agents – she did two things; went on tour in 2022, which was rejuvenating, and joined TikTok. Her first post was a timeline of her extraordinary career, which ended with her questioning the best way in which to release the new album (some of the songs, including Misery, Wasteman and Horsie, had already started to emerge without a label). That first post went viral, leading to an influx of offers from labels and managers, creating a scenario Nash had been in before; dealing with some of the industry’s shadier characters. One label, however, had been interested for a while. “Kill Rock Stars had been pursuing me for two years. They had been checking in for a while saying ‘we notice the album hasn’t come out, we really love it’.” Once Nash had secured an excellent new manager, the loose ends were tied up and the album was ready to go.
Recent one-off single, Change, released to coincide with the signing announcement, was an example of what having a label can give you. “I didn’t have to do anything,” she laughs. “I’ve been doing everything myself, alongside my band and my tour manager and my various managers, but I am always the driving force. But it’s like you’re driving a 16 wheeler – there’s so much you have to take responsibility for. What was so nice with this release was that I just did the creative bit and the stuff I’m good at. The label takes care of everything else.”
It’s been a refreshing change to be able to fully focus on the creative side. That creativity is also there in the artwork for 9 Sad Symphonies, which features Nash in front of an old school Hollywood backdrop that recalls British nature while also alluding to Nash’s on-off home of LA. That visual world will also extend to Nash’s always incredible live shows, which are a key goal for her in 2024. “You can always push things further and take it to a new place,” she says. “So with this album I want to play really quality shows.”
On 9 Sad Symphonies, Nash has taken another huge step towards cementing her place as one of Britain’s most unique and fearless talents. “I’ve climbed through the sewers of this industry and so my goal is to make good music I believe in, to have longevity, and have good live shows,” she states. “I make a living from my music, which is awesome.” As for other ambitions and expectations, she’s been doing this long enough to know not to place your hopes in things you can’t control. “I don’t feel competitive with the industry anymore. I’ve been in the game for twenty years, and I’m in my own league now.”
Nearly twenty years into her ever-evolving career, London and LA-based, Brit award-winning singer, songwriter, actor and activist Kate Nash has seen it all. She’s achieved huge commercial success – 2007’s debut Made of Bricks, featuring the hit single Foundations, reached number 1 in the UK and spent seven months in the top 40 – seen the darker side of the industry after being dropped in 2012 following 2010’s Bernard Butler-assisted My Best Friend Is You, forged her own path as a successful independent artist via 2013’s punk-y Girl Talk and 2018’s Yesterday Was Forever, and starred in HBO’s hit wrestling drama, GLOW. She’s also been the subject of an award-winning documentary, Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl, and also co-created a musical, Only Gold, with Hamilton choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler. Oh, and she also starred in that too. Still only 36, Nash isn’t finished shape-shifting just yet; after signing with legendary label Kill Rock Stars, whose alumni include Nash favourites Elliott Smith and Sleater-Kinney, in early 2024, she’ll release her fifth album, 9 Sad Symphonies, in June.
Inspired by old Hollywood, vintage musicals and a desperate quest to find beauty in a rotten world, it’s another sonic shift following her “rage-y” recent output. “It needed to be cinematic and dreamy,” Nash says of the 10-track album (the title is both a joke and an ode to passing achievable goals when creativity crumbles). As for the sonic shifts, it’s just second nature: “I do things based on what I’m feeling at the time, and what I’m inspired by,” she explains.
That moment of the album’s creation was fuelled by two things; her work on Only Gold and a global pandemic that curtailed filming on the fourth season of GLOW and sent Nash – and everyone – into a tailspin. After a period of laying bed watching zombie movies, creativity started to arrive in the autumn and winter of 2020, with songs being worked on well into 2021. Having worked with Danish producer Frederick Thaae on her musical, they quickly reconnected to start work on 9 Sad Symphonies. “We were in this completely different landscape for writing songs [on the musical], which was completely freeing,” Nash explains. “I was writing for a story, I was writing about a King and a Queen and a proper story arc. In that world you need the audience to understand the songs immediately, it’s very direct, and it has lots of editing which I’d never done. It changed my outlook on songwriting. Also, we said at the beginning that we wanted to make something beautiful, nothing harsh. I’ve done a lot of harsh stuff before. We wanted loads of beautiful string arrangements.”
These melodic, bright-on-the-surface but deeply layered songs started to emerge out of creative scenarios that had been completely changed by the pandemic. “We were on Zoom, which was… challenging,” she laughs. “We discussed ideas and then we’d hang up on Zoom, go away for three hours, or Frederick would send me the small thing we’d started, then I’d start writing and doing melodies and lyrics, and he would do production, and then we’d meet up on Zoom later.” Slowly the songs started to evolve, their unusual creation adding intriguing problems to try and overcome. “We’d get stuck a lot but you just had to let the stress go and come back to it. It’s a different version of the album to the one we would have made normally.”
The album’s curtain raiser, Millions of Heartbeats, sets out the album’s lyrical themes perfectly. “It’s about that point in the pandemic where I had lost my spark for life,” she says. “And I’m a pretty sparky person, so it was really sad to me.” She references the lyric “the spark is lit at such a low flame” as a crucial moment. “I felt like I lost a part of myself. I didn’t know how to get it back.” As with all of the songs on the album, it’s not just about one thing, however. “I think it also sums up a lot of how I feel about how people act in the world right now. Am I a number or am I a person? What are we trying to be right now? I’m a human being. But we’re so quantifiable and packaged and everyone is a brand. We’re in this capitalist explosion and I feel the effect of it in a way I’ve never felt before.” But it’s also a song that, by its end, flickers with a light that can’t be completely put out. “At the end of the day, the world is beautiful, there are all these heartbeats out there, and there is hope,” she says with a smile. “We have to try! You can’t fucking give up. This song is a sign of what’s to come – there’s going to be darkness and depression but we’ll get to hope by the end.”
A rare guitar appears on Ray, which delves deeper into mental health struggles, detailing depression and anxiety. It’s a theme Nash is keen to share with her fans in a typically honest manner. “It’s natural for an artist to write about emotions and feelings and darkness,” Nash says. “Also a lot of my fans suffer from depression too and I noticed it more when I was doing my livestream chats over lockdown. Not talking about it is not the solution. Being open and creating that community within my fanbase is really important.” It’s one she’s fostered not only via the Kickstarter campaigns that funded Girl Talk and Yesterday Was Forever, but also her Patreon account which she used in the pandemic to connect with her loyal fans via livestreams.
That darkness also weaves through Misery, which marries a propulsive string arrangement and a buoyant beat to lyrics that try to outrun the emotion of its title, while the livid My Bile is an emotional exorcism married to beatific strings and crashing drums. “I guess that song is the little patience I have left to give to all the bullshit, all the shitty parts of the industry, the media, the way people talk to other human beings, me as a woman in the industry, all the things people say about you online,” she explains. “I’m done. I don’t have anything left to give to that. I’ve proved who I am with actions, which is more important. I just have bile left.” There’s love on the album too, specifically on Space Odyssey 2001, which recounts a first proper date with her now partner. On the surface it feels like a diss of the Kubrick classic, 2001: Space Odyssey, but is more about its poor choice given the context. “It’s the wrong film for a date,” she smiles, “but I love the film. I like making jokes in songs. I like that there’s this beautiful love song but it’s also complaining about this critically acclaimed film being too long. I don’t recommend it for a first date!”
While the album was finished at the end of 2021, Nash wasn’t sure what to do with it. Free from the typical record industry framework – no manager, no label, no booking agents – she did two things; went on tour in 2022, which was rejuvenating, and joined TikTok. Her first post was a timeline of her extraordinary career, which ended with her questioning the best way in which to release the new album (some of the songs, including Misery, Wasteman and Horsie, had already started to emerge without a label). That first post went viral, leading to an influx of offers from labels and managers, creating a scenario Nash had been in before; dealing with some of the industry’s shadier characters. One label, however, had been interested for a while. “Kill Rock Stars had been pursuing me for two years. They had been checking in for a while saying ‘we notice the album hasn’t come out, we really love it’.” Once Nash had secured an excellent new manager, the loose ends were tied up and the album was ready to go.
Recent one-off single, Change, released to coincide with the signing announcement, was an example of what having a label can give you. “I didn’t have to do anything,” she laughs. “I’ve been doing everything myself, alongside my band and my tour manager and my various managers, but I am always the driving force. But it’s like you’re driving a 16 wheeler – there’s so much you have to take responsibility for. What was so nice with this release was that I just did the creative bit and the stuff I’m good at. The label takes care of everything else.”
It’s been a refreshing change to be able to fully focus on the creative side. That creativity is also there in the artwork for 9 Sad Symphonies, which features Nash in front of an old school Hollywood backdrop that recalls British nature while also alluding to Nash’s on-off home of LA. That visual world will also extend to Nash’s always incredible live shows, which are a key goal for her in 2024. “You can always push things further and take it to a new place,” she says. “So with this album I want to play really quality shows.”
On 9 Sad Symphonies, Nash has taken another huge step towards cementing her place as one of Britain’s most unique and fearless talents. “I’ve climbed through the sewers of this industry and so my goal is to make good music I believe in, to have longevity, and have good live shows,” she states. “I make a living from my music, which is awesome.” As for other ambitions and expectations, she’s been doing this long enough to know not to place your hopes in things you can’t control. “I don’t feel competitive with the industry anymore. I’ve been in the game for twenty years, and I’m in my own league now.”
Nearly twenty years into her ever-evolving career, London and LA-based, Brit award-winning singer, songwriter, actor and activist Kate Nash has seen it all. She’s achieved huge commercial success – 2007’s debut Made of Bricks, featuring the hit single Foundations, reached number 1 in the UK and spent seven months in the top 40 – seen the darker side of the industry after being dropped in 2012 following 2010’s Bernard Butler-assisted My Best Friend Is You, forged her own path as a successful independent artist via 2013’s punk-y Girl Talk and 2018’s Yesterday Was Forever, and starred in HBO’s hit wrestling drama, GLOW. She’s also been the subject of an award-winning documentary, Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl, and also co-created a musical, Only Gold, with Hamilton choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler. Oh, and she also starred in that too. Still only 36, Nash isn’t finished shape-shifting just yet; after signing with legendary label Kill Rock Stars, whose alumni include Nash favourites Elliott Smith and Sleater-Kinney, in early 2024, she’ll release her fifth album, 9 Sad Symphonies, in June.
Inspired by old Hollywood, vintage musicals and a desperate quest to find beauty in a rotten world, it’s another sonic shift following her “rage-y” recent output. “It needed to be cinematic and dreamy,” Nash says of the 10-track album (the title is both a joke and an ode to passing achievable goals when creativity crumbles). As for the sonic shifts, it’s just second nature: “I do things based on what I’m feeling at the time, and what I’m inspired by,” she explains.
That moment of the album’s creation was fuelled by two things; her work on Only Gold and a global pandemic that curtailed filming on the fourth season of GLOW and sent Nash – and everyone – into a tailspin. After a period of laying bed watching zombie movies, creativity started to arrive in the autumn and winter of 2020, with songs being worked on well into 2021. Having worked with Danish producer Frederick Thaae on her musical, they quickly reconnected to start work on 9 Sad Symphonies. “We were in this completely different landscape for writing songs [on the musical], which was completely freeing,” Nash explains. “I was writing for a story, I was writing about a King and a Queen and a proper story arc. In that world you need the audience to understand the songs immediately, it’s very direct, and it has lots of editing which I’d never done. It changed my outlook on songwriting. Also, we said at the beginning that we wanted to make something beautiful, nothing harsh. I’ve done a lot of harsh stuff before. We wanted loads of beautiful string arrangements.”
These melodic, bright-on-the-surface but deeply layered songs started to emerge out of creative scenarios that had been completely changed by the pandemic. “We were on Zoom, which was… challenging,” she laughs. “We discussed ideas and then we’d hang up on Zoom, go away for three hours, or Frederick would send me the small thing we’d started, then I’d start writing and doing melodies and lyrics, and he would do production, and then we’d meet up on Zoom later.” Slowly the songs started to evolve, their unusual creation adding intriguing problems to try and overcome. “We’d get stuck a lot but you just had to let the stress go and come back to it. It’s a different version of the album to the one we would have made normally.”
The album’s curtain raiser, Millions of Heartbeats, sets out the album’s lyrical themes perfectly. “It’s about that point in the pandemic where I had lost my spark for life,” she says. “And I’m a pretty sparky person, so it was really sad to me.” She references the lyric “the spark is lit at such a low flame” as a crucial moment. “I felt like I lost a part of myself. I didn’t know how to get it back.” As with all of the songs on the album, it’s not just about one thing, however. “I think it also sums up a lot of how I feel about how people act in the world right now. Am I a number or am I a person? What are we trying to be right now? I’m a human being. But we’re so quantifiable and packaged and everyone is a brand. We’re in this capitalist explosion and I feel the effect of it in a way I’ve never felt before.” But it’s also a song that, by its end, flickers with a light that can’t be completely put out. “At the end of the day, the world is beautiful, there are all these heartbeats out there, and there is hope,” she says with a smile. “We have to try! You can’t fucking give up. This song is a sign of what’s to come – there’s going to be darkness and depression but we’ll get to hope by the end.”
A rare guitar appears on Ray, which delves deeper into mental health struggles, detailing depression and anxiety. It’s a theme Nash is keen to share with her fans in a typically honest manner. “It’s natural for an artist to write about emotions and feelings and darkness,” Nash says. “Also a lot of my fans suffer from depression too and I noticed it more when I was doing my livestream chats over lockdown. Not talking about it is not the solution. Being open and creating that community within my fanbase is really important.” It’s one she’s fostered not only via the Kickstarter campaigns that funded Girl Talk and Yesterday Was Forever, but also her Patreon account which she used in the pandemic to connect with her loyal fans via livestreams.
That darkness also weaves through Misery, which marries a propulsive string arrangement and a buoyant beat to lyrics that try to outrun the emotion of its title, while the livid My Bile is an emotional exorcism married to beatific strings and crashing drums. “I guess that song is the little patience I have left to give to all the bullshit, all the shitty parts of the industry, the media, the way people talk to other human beings, me as a woman in the industry, all the things people say about you online,” she explains. “I’m done. I don’t have anything left to give to that. I’ve proved who I am with actions, which is more important. I just have bile left.” There’s love on the album too, specifically on Space Odyssey 2001, which recounts a first proper date with her now partner. On the surface it feels like a diss of the Kubrick classic, 2001: Space Odyssey, but is more about its poor choice given the context. “It’s the wrong film for a date,” she smiles, “but I love the film. I like making jokes in songs. I like that there’s this beautiful love song but it’s also complaining about this critically acclaimed film being too long. I don’t recommend it for a first date!”
While the album was finished at the end of 2021, Nash wasn’t sure what to do with it. Free from the typical record industry framework – no manager, no label, no booking agents – she did two things; went on tour in 2022, which was rejuvenating, and joined TikTok. Her first post was a timeline of her extraordinary career, which ended with her questioning the best way in which to release the new album (some of the songs, including Misery, Wasteman and Horsie, had already started to emerge without a label). That first post went viral, leading to an influx of offers from labels and managers, creating a scenario Nash had been in before; dealing with some of the industry’s shadier characters. One label, however, had been interested for a while. “Kill Rock Stars had been pursuing me for two years. They had been checking in for a while saying ‘we notice the album hasn’t come out, we really love it’.” Once Nash had secured an excellent new manager, the loose ends were tied up and the album was ready to go.
Recent one-off single, Change, released to coincide with the signing announcement, was an example of what having a label can give you. “I didn’t have to do anything,” she laughs. “I’ve been doing everything myself, alongside my band and my tour manager and my various managers, but I am always the driving force. But it’s like you’re driving a 16 wheeler – there’s so much you have to take responsibility for. What was so nice with this release was that I just did the creative bit and the stuff I’m good at. The label takes care of everything else.”
It’s been a refreshing change to be able to fully focus on the creative side. That creativity is also there in the artwork for 9 Sad Symphonies, which features Nash in front of an old school Hollywood backdrop that recalls British nature while also alluding to Nash’s on-off home of LA. That visual world will also extend to Nash’s always incredible live shows, which are a key goal for her in 2024. “You can always push things further and take it to a new place,” she says. “So with this album I want to play really quality shows.”
On 9 Sad Symphonies, Nash has taken another huge step towards cementing her place as one of Britain’s most unique and fearless talents. “I’ve climbed through the sewers of this industry and so my goal is to make good music I believe in, to have longevity, and have good live shows,” she states. “I make a living from my music, which is awesome.” As for other ambitions and expectations, she’s been doing this long enough to know not to place your hopes in things you can’t control. “I don’t feel competitive with the industry anymore. I’ve been in the game for twenty years, and I’m in my own league now.”
