Nick Ward has shared a new single, ‘ALIEN’.
Written with Cub Sport’s Tim Nelson, and co-produced by Lucianblomkamp, the track is taken from his new EP ‘BRAND NEW YOU’, which is set to arrive on 29th April.
Nick explains: “ALIEN feels like the mission statement of BRAND NEW YOU – it’s the song that sets up the narrative and themes, while also being a bridge from my first EP, ‘Everything I Wish I Told You’. The song is about queer masculinity and the binaries that hung over my head while I was in high school. I knew I didn’t fit in there, at the all-boys school, but I also didn’t feel completely seen when I went to most queer spaces with friends – ‘I feel like an alien, in every single room I’m in’. I felt pressure to fit into one of these moulds – what I perceived as Australian hetero-masculinity, versus a queer masculine stereotype. Little did I know that there was a whole world of beauty and complexity in between the two. ALIEN is the final, fluid stage that I find myself in now – embracing ambiguity, complexity and the ‘grey area’. I now have the confidence to be my own type of person, and the self respect to not let myself be boxed in.”
He continues: “I wrote this song with Tim from Cub Sport, who is such an amazing performer and has been one of my heroes since I was 15, when I heard their first record. I haven’t done many songwriting sessions for my own music, and I’ve rarely let anyone touch my lyrics – so this session was a real breath of fresh air. We had a really special conversation about queer masculinity and stereotypes, and I felt completely safe writing the song with him. I’ve been in songwriting sessions in the past, where someone tries to speak about my experiences for me, only to suggest something really reductive and inauthentic, whereas Tim and I share the same universal experience of growing up queer in Australia. The beat was made a couple days earlier with Lucian Blomkamp, who I’m a huge fan of. I’ve always wanted to write a song about my sexuality that was loud, expressive and punchy – so we jumped up and down in the writing room to get the best dancing tempo. I was really inspired by late-90s/early-2000s electronic music when writing this project, so it was nice to have a really direct reference to that style of music – this is really just queer Windowlicker. I’m so excited to play this one live – this is my first time shouting on a song and I wrote it specifically for it to be shouted right back at me. It’s going to be really special.”
A genre-skipping mix of influences melded together into one exceptional track, you can check out ‘ALIEN’ below.
