Nate Amos has a claim to be one of the most prolific and influential indie musicians of the decade, with not one but two acclaimed projects: his band Water From Your Eyes and his personal labour of love, This Is Lorelei. The 2024 album 'Box For Buddy, Box For Star' became a long-tail success and a modern cult classic, with Amos feted by artists like Hayley Williams, Waxahatchee, and MJ Lenderman, who cited him as an influence and covered his songs. It was a success that shocked the system for the quiet, reflective songwriter to see his low-key side project turn into a very big deal indeed.
"It's a funny thing," says Nate wistfully as he reflects on the last few years for This Is Lorelei. "I had other projects where the goal was to go ok let's do something with this. Lorelei was never that. It was always kind of this secondary space separate from whatever I was thinking the most about at any given time."
The breakout success of This Is Lorelei and the challenge of following up prompted new challenges for an artist who is naturally reticent and content to be in the shadows. Nate's response is 'The Singer In My Band', an album that foregrounds the core beauty and charm of his songwriting and what makes This Is Lorelei so special, without resorting to adding all manner of bells and whistles to match the increased attention. "It's been really crazy the last couple of years since the Box album came out," he says. "It's been really gratifying as a writer and sometimes really terrifying as a person. I'm someone who prefers not to be the centre of attention. On paper, a concert should be very high up on my list of fears, but I've gotten way more relaxed and figured out how to have a good time with it. It took a couple of mental adjustments to get used to my diary project becoming so public."
When an underground artist starts to break out, the demands and expectations increase from all angles, but perhaps most importantly, the most pressure is felt internally. Nate Amos has been so prolific for so long that he had to channel a different way of working. "This was the first new batch of Lorelei material I'd made since 2022," he explains. "In Lorelei time, that's like two decades. It's the biggest break between writing periods I'd had since I started writing music. That made it a little nerve-wracking hopping back into it."
The Box album, as Nate refers to it in his casually endearing way, is a lodestar that acts as both inspiration for This Is Lorelei going forward, but also as a reminder that things have materially changed. "It's really cool to hear about more people finding it, but there's a sense of the more people gas up that album, the more pressure it feels trying to follow it up," he admits. "For years and years, I would just make something and put it up on streaming, and that would be the end of it. I wouldn't have to live with that as my most recent release for more than a month or two, let alone keep having to play the songs two years after. There's two things: having a hard time moving into the next phase because you're playing those songs and talking about them all the time, and also this secondary frustration with the pace of it. I've had to get used to it and learn how to chill out and take my time writing a bit more."
The songs he began writing for 'The Singer In My Band' were conceived on the road while touring the Box album across America. Might there have been an expectation, though, that Nate could leverage his newfound success and famous fans to make a big-budget high-concept studio album this time out? "Naaaah," he laughs. "I have a hard time working at my best unless I'm by myself. I prefer not to have the distraction of a real studio. It's more about sitting in a room for long enough and waiting. Waiting for it to happen." There were also more practical concerns. You can have all the critical acclaim in the world in 2026, but it's never going to come close to garnering the riches of the music industry in the 80s and 90s. "Studio recording, that shits really expensive," he says. "On a very basic level, why would I spend all this money on something I can do myself, and I know I'll be happier with the way it comes out? If I handle every part of the process, then I have no one to blame. If I do the whole thing, then it helps me evaluate my own work a little better. Presentation is a huge part of it. The song is the work of art, but the arrangement and the recording - that's the frame for it. I feel very particular about how I want to frame things. It would ultimately be a distraction from what is important to the work."
“I’ve had to get used to it and learn how to chill out”
There was no grand vision for 'The Singer In My Band'; like all his work, the songs emerged gradually, blossoming from a small germ of an idea to become something distinctly Lorelei. "I didn't really have much of an idea what I was working on until pretty deep in the process," says Nate of the album's genesis. "I tried to just not let any of the pressure in and do what I felt like I would have done if this hadn't been the big follow-up album. I was thinking about using names pretty early on, and that started as an exercise in writing some of the songs. I knew that I wanted to use particular names for people and places. When you state something with a confident degree of specificity, but that thing is only tangentially related to what's going on at the core of the song, you essentially brute force the listener into beginning to build something, an image through which they can interpret the core of the song."
In some ways, the album is defined by what Nate didn't want to do this time. "I just wanted to make something more minimal writing-wise than the last album. Try and use fewer words. No regrets and it is what it is, but if I had any idea that I was going to be singing 'I'm All Fucked Up' and 'Dancing In The Club' at every show, I would not have made them so fucking complicated," he laughs. "If you manage to say the same and communicate the same emotion with fewer words, then it's even more powerful. I didn't want to accidentally fall into a thing where all of a sudden Lorelei was the band with the guy who sings really fast with 1500 words per song. I don't need that. I tried to address it and aggressively rein that in on this album. That philosophy also applied to the production style. It's way less textured than other, more recent Lorelei albums. When there is something special, like a layer that's not already there, it makes it more of a moment. The strong samples coming in on 'Nitro' that's so out of the ordinary for what the palate of the album has been that you have to personify them because you know they're there for a specific reason and not just another sound."
“I feel like the album is a collection of short stories”
The on-the-road writing of the album and the freewheeling style of the music give it a sense of insularity, like you're cocooned in a small cabin, with the contrasting feeling of seeing the vast expanse of the American landscape pass you by. "There's definitely a vast outdoor quality to those songs," says Nate.
"When it began to come together, it was on a long US tour. I was just so bored and had nothing to do except think about nothing and stare out the window at the different American landscapes," he adds. "Being bored to the point when you're brain dead, but also being stimulated by all this visual information that began stirring things up for me. This album was kind of weird and mysterious in the way it came together. By the time I actually sat down to figure out the chords and specific lyric things, it was like the whole thing was written and I just had to hack away at it a little bit."
You might think a specific beautiful landscape, a wide-open vista, or a cavernous mountain might be an inspiring environment that captures the spirit of the album, but instead, it's something more singular and idiosyncratic that Nate holds in his heart. "There was this gas station with a giant pink elephant statue with glasses," he chuckles, beginning his story. "I took a selfie with it and had this moment. That was the day the whole album came together in my head. This is the album. I was really intent on having that selfie be the cover, and three different people had to talk me down from that ledge. I wonder where that was? I should probably figure that out. It was somewhere in the American southwest, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, that was where the album clicked into place for me."
Once the album was completed and Nate could reflect on it, 'The Singer In My Band' revealed itself to be a deeply human record about relationships and people and weird and wonderful characters. "I feel like the album is a collection of short stories," confirms Nate. "These encounters, sometimes by chance, sometimes by fate, sometimes you're crossing paths with a person multiple times, and sometimes it's a conversation with someone you'll only ever meet one time, and you're both sloshed, pouring your heart out in a bar. For the most part, this album feels like these vignettes of different kinds of people you'll encounter, sometimes repeatedly, throughout your life."
Sloshed and pouring your heart out in a bar feels like a microcosm for This Is Lorelei. Chaotic and beautiful, restrained yet expansive, Nate Amos does it all and 'The Singer In My Band' is yet another enigmatic tale from one of our most cherished modern songwriters.
Taken from the September 2026 issue of Dork. This Is Lorelei's album 'The Singer In My Band' is out 11th September.
