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Nell Mescal has just released the most hopeful song of her life, one about the day everything finally calms down, and she is spending its release week doing the single least calm activity available to a young person in Britain. "Flat hunting in 30-degree heat," she reports. "Absolutely not fun, get me out of here."
It’s certainly apt timing, if a bit on-the-nose. 'Settles' is a song that dreams of stillness, by someone whose life is currently orbiting sweaty viewings and holding deposit maths. The universe, clearly, has a sense of humour. Fortunately, so does she.
Regular readers will need no introduction here. Dork has been carrying a torch for Nell Mescal since 'Graduating' arrived in the summer of 2022, through a Hype List mag cover, and the night she launched her debut EP at our own party at the 100 Club. In the four years since that first single, the Maynooth-raised songwriter has built one of the most convincing catalogues in indie-slash-alt-pop: 'Homesick' and its five-star ache, the growing-up-and-moving-away songs of 'Can I Miss It For A Minute?', and last autumn's 'The Closest We'll Get', a Brooklyn-recorded EP that pushed her towards something folkier and rawer. Add sold-out first shows in New York and support slots that read more like a fantasy festival bill (Florence, HAIM's arenas, a P!nk-sized Hyde Park), and the trajectory really isn't hard to track.
Look closer at those songs, though, and nearly all of them are about the same thing: going. Leaving school, leaving Ireland, leaving friendships that curdled, leaving versions of herself behind. Departure has been her home turf since she was a teenager. Which is what makes 'Settles' quietly momentous. For once, Nell Mescal has written a song about arriving.
"Settles is a love song about a long-distance relationship where it feels like the time spent together is fleeting and you always seem to be saying goodbye to each other at an airport," she explains. "It's about the hope that one day the dust will settle, life will get less busy, and the two of you will get to be together without any interruptions. It's about reassurance, yearning, hope and loving someone from a distance."
Did writing it help her make peace with all that waiting, or did she already know what she wanted to say? "A little bit of both I think," she reckons. "It helped me relax a little bit. Even now, still in that long-distance limbo, I think about this song a lot. We constantly say 'once it settles' as a sort of mantra." Note the present tense. The dust in question has not yet settled; the song is a promise still in progress, which might be exactly why it hits the way it does.
Don't call it sad, either. She's noticed people trying. "Absolutely!" she says, on whether it mattered that this one didn't end up a heartbreak song. "And still people are saying it's sad but I think it's my happiest song yet. To me all the joys and hopes in the song completely outweigh the sadness of having to wait!"
That openness is the whole operation, and it's getting more powerful with time. 'Thin', the song she once described as coming from "all my darkest and most untrue thoughts" about herself, has spent the past month finding an enormous new audience - streams up 800%, millions of views across reels, the hardest thing she's ever written, the one soundtracking strangers' lives. You might expect that to make a songwriter cagier about what she gives away. The opposite, apparently. "I sometimes think about trying to keep certain things in my life out of my music but it can be difficult," she says. "If anything it's made me want to dig even deeper to connect even more with people."
The writing itself has shifted too, in the way she describes with a shrug that undersells it. "I think I just feel like I change so often and so the writing has just kind of come on that journey with me, and probably has become more sure of itself as I've gained more confidence." As for what's next: "I feel like every song I write feels slightly different to me which is exciting because it even surprises me. The next while might be a bit upbeat and on the happier side but my current favourite demo on my phone is really sad and slow, so you truly never know."
"People are saying it's sad, but I think it's my happiest song yet"
— Nell Mescal
Before any of that, there's a summer to get through, and it's a properly good one. A pop-up show at Ellie's in Dalston on 20th July, Kendal Calling at the end of the month, and then the big one: All Points East on 22nd August, on the sold-out day headlined by Lorde. There's a neat symmetry in that booking. Victoria Park was one of the first festivals Nell ever played, back in 2022, when 'Graduating' was weeks old and nobody was sure who she was without framing it through those familial connections. She returns to the same grass with the crowd already sold on the music, by the music, for the music.
The season's already delivered one full-circle moment. "Supporting Kodaline at home in Ireland was a huge highlight," she says. "Getting to see loads of friends and family and perform to such big crowds. It was very full circle for me - I used to sing Kodaline songs in choir growing up!"
The Lorde thing, though, is operating on another level entirely. "It's quite surreal," she admits. "I really try to take stuff like this in because I would never in a million years have believed that sentence growing up so you really have to live in the moment and feel it all when stuff like this happens because it's incredibly cool and exciting and I'm very very lucky."
Just don't expect her to be counting down too hard. "When I was growing up, every Christmas I'd be so excited for Santa to come that I'd get sick," she says, "so I try to keep calm until it gets closer to the gig because otherwise it's Christmas eve all over again and I need a doctors appointment."
What she wants from the day itself is simple enough. "I hope they love the music and can see how much me and my band are enjoying playing," she says of anyone catching her for the first time. "Playing live really is the most fun, and the most exciting part about doing this as a career is getting to sing, so if I'm doing that it's hard to wipe the smiles off my face." And beyond the festivals? "I've been writing so much for the past year and it's really difficult keeping all these songs in my voice memos. I'm really excited to just keep releasing more!"
Once it settles, goes the mantra. On the evidence of the diary, the dust should expect a long wait; there are songs queuing up in her phone, a park full of people to win over, and, somewhere in this heat, a flat with her name on it. Some things deserve to settle. The best things, on this form, absolutely shouldn't.
Nell Mescal's single 'Settles' is out now. She plays Lorde's day of All Points East on 22nd August.
