“I just want to be alright.” A straightforward sentiment that recurs across Nico Hedley‘s forthcoming album, Nico Hedley Wants To Sing It So Loud That It Makes It Alright. Sometimes as a request, others a simple statement of fact, though on repeated listens it’s difficult not to sense a frustrated irony lingering in the words. Could such a modest plea really require so much effort? Can ‘alright’ be so far out of reach?
The album, coming later this week on Ruination Record Co., embraces this frustration wholeheartedly. With a sound far looser and louder than fans of previous album Painterly might expect, Nico Hedley uses resentment and anxiety as fuel for the pursuit, though it remains unclear whether the mythical bounty is indeed a white whale to be speared or line of windmills on the hill. To the point where, across seven tracks heavy on distortion and feedback, it appears the record’s only real conquest is that of coming to understand that happiness might be its own kind of myth.
In this way, it feels like the logical successor to Painterly. An album, as we wrote back in 2021, “of deferred epiphanies, brief moments of enlightenment come and gone. One which understands there is no endpoint to aim for, just the constant, changing process of moving forwards, and hoping to be somehow better for embracing the ride.” The sound of …That It Makes It Alright could therefore be read as the aftermath of such an understanding. A seesaw between anxiety and anhedonia that can do little but lean into the swing.
It’s little wonder then Hedley chose to depart from his folk sensibilities. As nuanced and conflicted as Painterly might have been, but there’s an inherent hope within country music. A kind of wilful dreaming. “I hope there is a hopefulness,” as he told us in an interview, “a sense that we can move beyond the ways we have been and be better.” But to constantly preach hope can feel like its own kind of betrayal. Sometimes abandon is required. Recklessness. Catharsis. Thus Hedley turned back towards the punk and noise rock that constituted a large part of his musical upbringing in 00s/10s New York, encouraging bandmates Andrew Stocker (bass) and Jeff Widner (drums) to forgo precision in favour of visceral passion. If there’s a certain desperation to the will to be alright, then it’s only right the sound should follow suit.
Today we get to share the latest single from the record, ‘Rosy’. A kind of twin sister to Painterly‘s ‘Lioness’, where the narrator maps the personal via an exterior image. As though the world is only too willing to serve as a mirror of ourselves, or else reflect back that which we lack. ‘Lioness’ presented a creeping warmth, its arms slowly wrapping the listener and eventually lifting them towards towards the light even as the lyrics tended towards bitterness, whereas ‘Rosy’ inverts the pattern. It’s a song which foregrounds the antagonism, Hedley’s vocals emerging through a teetering swirl of feedback that threatens to escalate and overwhelm, only occasionally thinning enough to give glimpses of the wistful tone still evident underneath.
