After a rigorous 2024 that saw them touring almost the entire year and releasing their second EP, ‘Isotope’, they decided it was time to make their debut album. They locked themselves in a studio in East London, determined not to leave until the work was done.

“In hindsight, with something as big as an album, you can’t really be that rigorous and judgmental that early on when seeds of songs need to be heard and listened to,” Will admits. “And I don’t think we were listening to each other. I don’t think we were listening to ourselves.”

Olivia remembers they were fully focused on ensuring ‘Nocturne’ was going to be big. Mostly in the sense of being a project that felt plotted and planned, every song interconnecting. “We really worked hard on making it a cohesive, curated bunch of songs that all complement each other,” she recalls. “We started with so many ideas and so many directions we could have gone in, but we really hammered home this idea that it was a world and that they all complement each other.”

And so, by summer 2025, under the scrutiny of their self-imposed pressure, Will ran away. His sojourn in Berlin was necessary for his state of mind. “I didn’t know what music was anymore to me,” he admits. “When I left for Berlin, I just didn’t know what the fuck was going on. I feel with most creative processes you get the scaries.”

While there, he immersed himself in the club scene, soaking himself in darker house and dance music. He also went to jazz clubs, and while in these two vastly different environments, Will rediscovered what music actually means to people.

“I spent a lot of time feeling the music for myself and experiencing it, but I also spent a lot of time looking at the audience. Like Olivia, that’s what I was craving: the feeling of why we’re doing this, what connection is like. It was a real discovery of what the impact of music on people and what it’s about.”

However, while Will was in Berlin, Olivia was rooted in the studio. “I was very harsh, I tried to force myself because of the way I’d worked before. I’d gone from school into touring, and this was the first time that music was the full-time thing,” she says. “The way I treated my academics and the stuff I’m ambitious about has always been very rigorous, so even when I don’t feel like it, you do it…”

“It was a nightmare to grow up with,” Will interrupts while jokingly rolling his eyes.

“It’s not that I’m actually necessarily very disciplined as a person,” Olivia continues, “I just get obsessive. I cared so much about this thing, it was my entire life and making it good and knowing that if I just kept going, it would eventually be realised.”

Her decision to stay rooted was also prompted by the 2024 touring schedule. “The last thing I wanted to do was travel a bunch. A weird instinct was to stay home and build roots in a way that I never had before. A lot of my friends had gone to uni, and I didn’t have people grounding me, so I really wanted to like give time to building a routine that I’ve never had before. But in retrospect, I could have done with a little getaway,” she laughs now. “I could have done with some time to not think about it. But when I’m so immersed in it, I can’t detach because it’s so fundamentally part of what you’re experiencing and the emotions in your life. It’s a learning curve I’m still trying to figure out.”

Olivia’s own refreshing of the mind came when they were touring again in the latter half of 2025, particularly at Lollapalooza. “We’d been holed up in this little studio in East London for months, trying to tinker away at these little ideas and perfecting them, and then there was this massive crowd, and it was like, ‘Oh my god!’” she recalls.

It was a grounding moment for the pair. It pulled them out of their insular studio mindset and allowed them to experience the connection Will had been so keenly focused on firsthand. Live music, after all, is where the pair have found the most joy. “When we came back, it was very much more flowing,” Olivia affirms.

When they came back together, they also noticed a shift in their individual philosophies - although, as Will points out, “I feel at our age you can’t call anything we think philosophies yet.” Rather than forcing together songs from various ideas and scraps they’d accumulated over the years, they began letting those pieces breathe. “You’ve got to find this balance in the middle,” Will recalls. “It’s allowing space for both elements to come in at the same time.”

The pair also found themselves on the same wavelength after attending one of Oasis’s reunion shows. “I think it was seeing the scale and the impact of some of those songs. It was like the bangers and the effort. But I don’t think anybody knows how a banger comes about,” Olivia says.

“I have a lot of time for Noel Gallagher,” Will adds. “He’s prolific. I think being prolific and keeping writing is a great way to go about songwriting. It might be the spiritual thing or connecting, and it being a gift or whatever. But actually, it is hard work. You keep working at songs, and not every song is gonna sound great or be great, it’s a graft.”

‘Nocturne’ is an ambitious opening statement. It’s an album in two parts, with each side offering Will and Olivia’s take on the internal changes that happen when night falls. “The album has always been liminal, surreal emotions that are very unique to the night,” Olivia explains. “I feel like I’ve only felt these very specific feelings at night in my life, which also taps into creativity. It can reach existential levels or very deep reflective levels about yourself at night.”

Pulsating opener ‘2515’ finds Olivia’s vocals gliding over a gently building piano line before it breaks loose during its chorus. It feels befitting of a soundtrack ripped right from one of Will’s Berlin nights. It also introduces Wasia Project’s new sound.

Where their earlier work often felt intimate and delicate, on ‘Nocturne’, those textures are stretched into something darker, bigger and considerably more restless. Centrepoint ‘Even If I Tried’, cacophonous in its dying moments, is where the album splinters in two. This big-picture thinking is most certainly the result of two artists who have changed their outlooks and decided they want their debut album to be representative of who they’ve grown to be.

Reflecting on the band they are now, Will says, “This has really outgrown my expectations in a really good way. The bar is so high, and I’m really proud of this work because it feels so different from anything I could have imagined at the beginning, but at the same time, I think we were always like, ‘We want to go massive, we want to go as max as we can’.”

After all is said and done, Wasia Project feels like a band that have finally found their footing. Will references their previous work as “too sweet, too like honey,” which feels apt, whereas now they’re in the grips of something grander that they want to keep chasing. “I think ‘Nocturne’ is, if anything, the top of a tip of an iceberg of a much grander development for us as artists and the music we’ve made,” he says.

“The whole year felt a journey to that,” Olivia says.

And while that journey may have taken literal and figurative miles to figure out, the pair are stronger for it. They have a deeper understanding of each other and themselves that branches just beyond the familial.

“I’m curious about what’s next because I feel like there are lots of different directions we could go in,” she adds. “And we’ve always felt that, but this album sets the precedent of wanting to go in a different direction and not be boxed into this one thing that we keep doing.”

Now, it’s an endless road in front of them, and as Olivia puts it, as they wrap up our conversation: “It’s now just following that ethos and what feels right next.”

Taken from the October 2026 issue of Dork. Wasia Project’s album ‘Nocturne’ is out 18th September.