Following on from Nadia Reid’s announcement of her fourth album, Enter Now Brightness, released 7th February on Chrysalis Records, comes the new single ‘Hotel Santa Cruz’.
For the new album and for the first time in her career, Reid entered the studio (with long-standing guitarist Sam Taylor and producer Tom Healy (Tiny Ruins, Marlon Williams) without a clutch of songs written and ready to record. There were half-songs and sketches and lyrics untethered from music. “There was a revelation of: it doesn’t have to be finished, it doesn’t have to be a perfect song before it’s taken to the band.” The results find Reid moving ever further from her earlier folk inclinations, establishing a sound that is all her own.
One song where is this is most evident is new single ‘Hotel Santa Cruz’ – a free-wheeling full band anthem that Reid wrote on a trip to the Canary Islands: “I wrote this in Tenerife and it turned out to be quite hooky. It’s just a series of questions. I feel quite moved at the end, with the line ‘You are everything I’d like to be’. I always give myself goosebumps when I perform that line. But I’m not sure who I’m referring to. Sometimes I think it’s Angus or my children, or maybe this is a God thing, or it’s just my imagination”.
Much had changed since Out of My Province, the album she released in early March 2020. Reid toured the record as best she could, she put on hold her plans to move to the UK, attended to the steady rhythms of living. In July of 2021, she gave birth to her first daughter, Elliotte; her second, Goldie, arrived this past Spring. Shortly before, Reid finally relocated to the UK, settling in Manchester.
Enter Now feels different. It is an album, she says, of departure and questioning, that has reminded her how songwriting can be “the most useful thing to do with pain and joy and thoughts and feelings and anger.” That through music we can find great change. “I’m so much better off now that it exists,” she says. “Now feels like a new time.”
Nadia Reid – Enter Now Brightness
Releases February 7th, 2025
on Slow Time Records in Aotearoa
Enter Now Brightness Tracklist
Emmanuelle
Cry On Cue
Baby Bright
Hold It Up
Changed Unchained
Second Nature
Even Now
Hotel Santa Cruz
Woman Apart
Send It Down The Line
NZ Show Dates in November 2024
