Introspective, engaging, ethereal and intimate; these are all words used to describe the first album of Tāmaki Makaurau-based Louisa Nicklin. With her second album ‘The Big Sulk’ Nicklin expands on her signature sound, creating a mesmerising tapestry of folk-infused rock that is sure to hypnotise listeners. Evie Bamford spoke with her for NZ Musician.

Outside of her own music Louisa Nicklin performs a smorgasbord of instruments in multiple local bands, balancing that with an active outdoor daytime routine.

“I work as a gardener. I work for myself and drive around in my truck! Yeah, I’ve kind of done different things. I used to work in mental health for a bit, but then got burnt out during Covid, so now I just play in bands and cut hedges. And it’s good, I reckon it’s good for now.”

Her discography includes a six-song EP titled ‘When You Are Home’ released in 2020 and a self-titled 2021 album. A graduate of Te Kōkī NZ School of Music, she has had her own classical compositions performed and recorded by professional ensembles, including the NZ Symphony Orchestra. 

Upon first listen of ‘The Big Sulk’, produced and recorded in collaboration with Shayne Carter (Dimmer, Straitjacket Fits), the compositional elements of Nicklin’s songwriting ring out. Every cymbal shimmer and accented guitar string feels intentional and purposeful, an artistic attention to detail that is reminiscent of her experience composing classical pieces.

While this aspect of Nicklin’s musical identity tends to come up regularly in the public eye, her composition degree isn’t something she uses consciously in her songwriting.

“Lots of people have asked me this in different ways, and it’s come up enough that I’ve sort of had to reflect on it. Just like anyone, the path they’ve taken in music and how they’ve learned to enjoy the kind of music they listen to is always influencing you in some ways, whether you mean it to or not.”

Nicklin says she mostly listens to music similar to the kind of stuff she wants to create, and since she lacked the desire to be the next Mozart, elements of her composition degree were tough.

“I don’t listen to a lot of classical music now – to be honest I didn’t listen to much classical music when I was doing composition, which made me feel mad imposter syndrome! But I loved writing it. I would listen to classical music that resonated with me and the kind of music I liked to write, but I wasn’t just sitting around listening to Bach.”

The world of modern contemporary classical music was where Nicklin found her people, something which certainly makes sense when listening to the first few tracks of ‘The Big Sulk’. There’s dissonance and discomfort, elements that can be heard in the music of Ligeti and Stravinsky, composers that Nicklin did listen to during her student years.

“I really liked the sort of 20th-century freaky shit. I think when I was doing the classical stuff I really loved leaning into the gross and weird noises. It can be a bit repelling sometimes, but I think if it’s done in the right way it can be really beautiful.”

There are certainly moments in her new album that feel tense and uneasy; the second track Thick has so much space that it somehow has a claustrophobic effect. The wailing vocals push and pull between atonality and consonance, deliciously incongruous with the looping guitar riff, and the drums thump non-stop until the final 30 seconds of the song, when it takes an unexpected turn into a short-lived groove.

Achieving serenity with the use of the gross and the weird is, she reflects, reminiscent of the inner turmoil she was experiencing when she wrote a lot of the songs. Unable to put her finger on what it was at the time, she knew something needed to change. One might think this would make the record hard for her to listen back to now, but Nicklin has experienced the opposite. Now that this record is out in the world, she can better understand the confronting feelings she was having that were too scary to think about at the time.

“Yeah, the feeling of change on the horizon. It’s like when everything is chill, but you’re actually not that stoked. I think listening back to it now is quite validating because I listen to it and think, ‘Yeah, I was feeling a lot of things’, like I hear things in the music that I was feeling when I wrote the music.”

Another big difference between Nicklin’s 2021 debut album and ‘The Big Sulk’ was the recording and songwriting process, resulting in a cohesive flow of songs that feel intentionally placed. Previously eager to get her music out as quickly as possible, Shayne Carter encouraged her to slow down.

“He really got me to be very considered, and we took a long time doing it, you know, we recorded it over two sessions and had a lot of pre-production time. Whereas the first record was kind of like we went to the studio, this is how much money we got, this is how many days we got. So someone would play something and we’d be like, ‘That’s a cool idea, chuck it on,’ you know!”

The album’s first chunk of recording took place in the Coromandel, living the dream a lot of creatives have about running away from the distractions and noise of the city to hone in on their craft. While Nicklin definitely recommends the experience, there were elements of the trip that proved unexpectedly tough.

“It was really awesome and a lot of fun, but it was also quite hard. I went to a place that’s been in my family for a long time, a house that my grandparents built in the 1950s or ‘60s. I went there for like two weeks with the band, Stephen Marr – who did the engineering for that part – and Shayne.

“I think it was hard because I didn’t think about the fact that I was being like host slash artist slash, kind of like caterer… unintentionally. So I’d be doing some tracking of guitar or vocals and then be like, ‘Alright I’m gonna have a break and head over to the next town to go to the supermarket.’ It was a funny buzz of like, ‘Cool, this is sounding great. Why don’t we track some drums now ‘cause I gotta cook dinner.’”

After that two-week stint in March 2023, the artist and producer had a tricky conversation where they decided that some of the songs didn’t quite cut it. Even though she knew Carter was right, Nicklin says she was frustrated and impatient to get the record done. Under the pressure of encouragement she battled to write more new material, but eventually came up with three new tracks so that no song on the album feels like a filler.

One of the rewritten songs became the opening track Feel On Me. It invites listeners into an immersive and moody space with pungently honest lyrics, sung in a way that shows us the immense depth of Nicklin’s voice. With her live band of Mason Fairy and Eamon Edmonson-Wells, she had been performing the original for years, but they couldn’t get it sounding quite right in the DIY Coromandel studio.

“I don’t know what happened, it was a version from a couple years ago and it really worked, but then we just could not make it sound cool. It sounded shit, just a shallow, empty, rock song. So that was one of the ones that was ditched, but I did a rewrite of it because I really liked aspects of it like the riff, so I slowed it down and changed the rhythm of it a bit. Even though it was quite a simple and repetitive song, it took a lot of work to figure out how to have the subtle changes that actually give it some shape without it going too far from what it is.”

Second track on the album and one of the more thunderous pieces in Nicklin’s oeuvre is The Highs, a song that exhibits her capacity to move listeners through texture and tone. Various melodies are thrown around on different instruments throughout the track and they often clash with the vocals. At times this tension relaxes temporarily and the vocals bawl in unison with the guitar, an utterly compelling and consuming moment in the music.

The album’s fourth and fifth songs take on a somewhat lullaby-esque quality, like something from a dream, but still maintain the sense of gloom and dusk that Nicklin executes so well.

“Want Your Mother is one of my favourites. I like that one because the main riff is nothing, it’s two notes that are dissonant and then move in and out of dissonance. That’s all that’s happening really and it’s so simple, but I love it! It also has this kind of cool little groove that Mason’s doing and the bass line mimicking the vocals is fun. There’s that middle bit where it lifts but there’s always this lid on it, it doesn’t ever get really big. I definitely have a trope or a habit where I start a song and then build, and then by the end of it you’re rocking out. Sometimes you’ve got to not do that every time, so there are tracks where I actively try to keep a lid on it and I feel happy with how they turned out.”

For the next while, Nicklin is going to continue riding on the well-deserved high of the album release, returning to writing songs when the time feels right. In the meantime, you might catch her playing in great bands such as Jazmine Mary and Dimmer, or, if you’re observant, maybe trimming someone’s hedge.

Content photo by Zoë Dunster