When I join our Zoom call early, Nell Mescal has already beaten me to it. Camera on, hair half-damp, wrapped in a moss-green jumper and nursing a mug that’s still steaming. It’s a surprisingly domestic image for someone at the tail end of a whirlwind few months recording in New York and touring arenas across Europe, but the counterpoint of energy feels apt. There’s a rare kind of clarity that emerges from sitting in the middle of emotional chaos, and Nell has built her entire craft on striking the heart of ambiguity — and her sophomore EP, The Closest We’ll Get, showcases her artistry in its clearest focus yet. For good reason, too.
“Because it’s literally my life story,” she says. “Each song is an exact moment in which I learnt something, and most of it is learning hard truths.” The six-track project, her first under Atlantic Records, delves into the grey area between friends to lovers, a space of uncertainty that Mescal inhabited for over a year and a half. It was a year and a half of wrestling with not knowing where she stood with someone and where their connection was headed. She continues, “I could have made my life a lot easier by stopping it sooner. But then I wouldn’t have made the EP.”
And that uncertainty wasn’t confined to the songs themselves; produced by Grammy-nominated Philip Weinrobe (Leonard Cohen, Adrienne Lenker, Billie Marten), the record was shaped by a rigid, almost confrontational studio routine in New York at Weinrobe’s Sugar Mountain Studios. Six songs across three days, recorded live with no headphones and no listening back. “If you did something and you liked it and wanted to recreate it, Philip would say no. You could either do something different or do something better,” she explains. That discipline demanded presence, and fizzed vulnerability to the surface. On ‘Middle Man’, the nearing-five minute piano rallying cry of the EP, she begins to cry in the final line. She says, “You can hear my voice wobble, and I didn’t do that for the sake of being cringe! I couldn’t help it. It was just such a physical recording process with so much restraint that you can’t not immerse yourself in it from trying to give it all you’ve got.”
That physicality is woven throughout the entire record, but it was intuition that guided which songs made the final cut. The closing statement of the project is testified through ‘Sweet Relief’, a labour of love written in her bedroom after visiting New York for the first time last year, which was added to the final cut four days before the recording sessions began. Nell says, “We had so many songs that just didn’t feel right, and I knew that recording from ground zero in the way that we were would tell ‘Sweet Relief’’s story in a way I needed it to. I was like, ‘I have to use this one’. It couldn’t be more intimate.”
And that timing wasn’t coincidental. Where all of her songs are written in a few hours, ‘Sweet Relief’ was “written in a few hours and a year,” she laughs, casting her mind back to when she penned the first line last spring. And it was May of last year that Nell released her debut EP, Can I Miss It For a Minute?, an emotionally driven love letter to growing up, friendship, and heartbreak, built on sparse instrumentation and introspective confidence. With The Closest We’ll Get, that vulnerability remains, but the palette has widened tenfold. She says, “My debut was so different because it was three of us in a room for a few weeks. Everything was thought about. But this time, we did it all live. You just have to leave everything out there. I kept getting this feeling that made me feel like a child. Like I was back in choir and hearing harmony.”
At only 22 years old, Nell’s life has felt like a ready, set, go! of performance. Born in Maynooth, County Kildale, she spent her childhood singing in choirs and talent showcases before hitting the ground running as a songwriter as a tween as a form of escapism during recovery after surgery. Before she could even legally drink, she was playing in Brighton, and as soon as she blew out her 18 candles, she packed up and moved to London to pursue music full-time. “Performing has always been the thing that I’ve felt I was good at and the thing I always wanted to do. More so than even learning any of the words! Give me no words and a dream, and I will perform my ass off,” she says. And it was those early experiences that laid the foundations of the fluidity that she now carries not just into every recording session, but every live performance.
From being a special guest for Shania Twain at Hyde Park to opening for Florence + The Machine, to playing audiences scoping Baby’s All Right to Reading and Leeds, Mescal has honed a stage presence most recently sharpened by opening for indie sister trio HAIM across their arenas in Europe during October. It was a gig she wasn’t aware of until a few days before she hit the road, but saw her connect with her largest, most receptive audiences yet. One venue, in particular, was actually the biggest arena in Europe, until she found out that it wasn’t, sighing, “Everyone on my management team was like, “you’re about to play the biggest venue in Europe,” and so, excited, I posted it on TikTok, and then everyone in the comments was like, “Er, no, it’s not.” Turns out it’s the biggest standing venue in Europe.” She shakes her head. I tell her to not let her whimsy be suffocated. Nell raises her fist á la The Breakfast Club.
It’s been tackling those varied stages that’s truly taught her to let go of perfectionism and take each show as it comes. She says, “There were so many moments on this tour where my in-ears would fall out of my ear and I’d have to stop playing for a second, and that would have freaked me out ages ago, but you just have to enjoy it because if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry. But it was such an exciting week, I’m still trying to catch up on myself.”
But despite her live performance CV being peppered with collaborations and stages that take most artists decades to come by, it’s the connection that matters most for Nell. As she prepares for her biggest headline tour yet, spanning 12 dates across the UK, she dotes on seeing familiar faces from support gigs and her own shows and vice versa, from groups of girls singing above everyone else at a support show for Maisie Peters, to Will, from Derry, who has become like seeing a friend. She says, “It’s real people that really care. They travel from across the country sometimes, they pay for a hotel, and then they give their all in a crowd of people that may not know my lyrics. They let me know I’m being held.”
That kind of loyalty isn’t lost on her — and it charges the intimacy that runs through her craft. The give-and-take of performance sits at the centre of The Closest We’ll Get, a record bypassing neat resolutions and perfect takes; instead cherishing presence, even when things aren’t certain. Because, for Nell Mescal, that’s when the good stuff happens.
The Closest We’ll Get is available on all streaming platforms, and tickets for Nell’s upcoming tour can be purchased via her website: Nell Mescal
Words by Sophie Jarvis
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