British-Indonesian artist Nadia Kadek’s music exists in the hazy, bittersweet glow of the late summer, where golden light and warmth linger alongside the inescapable heartache of watching the season draw to a close. Her debut EP ‘Green Car’ encapsulates this cyclical feeling, chronicling the soft ache of growing up and watching a childlike, rose-tinted vision of the world dissolve to reveal a more splintered place.
About
While processing her own transition into adulthood, she sought refuge in her favourite records. “I’ve experienced a lot of alienating and isolating moments in my life,” Nadia says. “The one thing that’s always helped me is hearing a song that reminds me that I’m not the only person who’s feeling this.” Now, she hopes she can provide the same shelter for others, within a collection of songs that exude both nostalgia and growth.
As an introduction to her artistry, the now-22-year-old pays homage to her earliest encounters with live music as a self-described “festival baby”. While on long journeys to campsites across the country, she recalls being entranced by the CDs that crackled through the car speaker. Artists like Florence and the Machine would soundtrack her travels, and days later, she’d watch them sing those same songs from the prime view of a fellow audience member’s shoulders. “I felt the most alive when I was in front of live music, even from a young age,” she says.
These brief, bright encounters with music punctuated a childhood in sleepy Norfolk, where nothing much seemed to happen. As a teenager, she sought solace from the boredom of rural life through songwriting. “It kind of felt like I was an observer of everything around me, which was a great way to process living somewhere like that,” she explains.
Later, she began performing at open mics in her town to an encouraging, albeit small, audience of local people, before eventually moving to Leeds to study music. Since then, she’s made one more cross-country move – this time to London, where she says she finally feels at home among the capital’s constant buzz. “You’re always inspired here,” she smiles. “I like a city where you feel anonymous and under the radar.”
It’s while revelling in this anonymity that her EP began to take shape, documenting her tentative first steps into adulthood. “It’s about growing up and processing how hard that is,” she explains. “But it’s also about how universal it is to find change difficult and being kind to yourself. It’s about forgiving yourself, but also trying to forgive everything else as well.”
Recalling the shrewd sensitivity of Adrianne Lenker and Lizzy McAlpine, she weaves her poetic observations over wispy acoustic guitar. Though it’s only her first EP, it sees Nadia rightfully insert herself into a canon of songwriters with the ability to capture the feelings the rest of us can’t quite put to words.
Over five tracks, she explores our peculiar yet innate and beautiful longing for romance (‘Lemonade’), grapples with changing relationships with friends (‘Always Almost Losing You’) and reflects on first, fleeting encounters with love that tragically occur when you’re too young to truly understand them. Elsewhere, on ‘Feeling It All’, she processes the intense emotions that come along with a departure from childhood, with her honest outlook on these all-too-relatable rites of passage etched into every moment – sweet and delicate but equally strong and cathartic.
Bruised family relationships are also a poignant theme, though through a lens of forgiveness in place of the bitterness one might expect. On ‘Green Car’, she sings “I want you to know I’m letting it go/I’m gonna sleep tonight,” an affirmation she says has become a “mantra” through the countless live shows she’s played it at.
“The more I sing those words, the more I feel like I’m forgiving myself and returning back to my life after a really hard time,” she explains. “Now it makes me feel like when you go back to the party and all your friends are still there. It reminds me that life carries on, even though things can get hard.”
It’s no surprise, then, that the EP is an ode to the spontaneous and healing magic of a gig. Nadia sought to carve out an ambience of “organic live sound” balanced by “more atmospheric, beautiful noises”. Recorded between the Oxford countryside (Hook Studios, Oxfordshire) and Studio 13 with producers Riccardo Damian (Sampha, Jorja Smith, Yebba) and Jamie Biles (Isaac Gracie, Hohnen Ford, Asha Banks), she sculpted a sonic universe that twirls and leaps around her honeyed vocals, as if the performance is unfolding right in front of you every time you press play.
“I needed it to feel like it was breathing life, and that there’s somebody in the room with you when you’re listening,” she explains. “I wanted to keep the intimacy of acoustic demos whilst bringing them to life through this combination of live sound with slightly weirder, wonkier atmospherics.”
It speaks to her refreshing nonconformity amid an era where artists are increasingly under pressure to aspire to social media virality. Over the past few years, Nadia has eschewed the new norm, instead gradually building a doting audience through playing these live shows. While winning over the crowds with her silky, confessional ballads, she says the songs have, in turn, become almost a conversation with listeners.
“When you’re playing live, you have the opportunity to communicate directly with someone who has probably never heard of you before. That doesn’t happen in any other normal scenario. It’s the only place you can be so vulnerable in front of people you don’t know, and it’s all amplified through speakers,” she smiles. “And, it’s so freeing to sing my songs so far from when I wrote them, in a live setting where I’m so happy to be there. It’s like those feelings aren’t so heavy anymore.”
A testament to her strength as a live performer, she played Glastonbury 2024 after placing runner-up in their prestigious Emerging Talent Competition – a full circle moment for Nadia, who traipsed around Worthy Farm as a child, barely daring to imagine she may one day be on the other side of the barrier. “It’s insane to have a childhood dream actually come true,” she beams. “Afterwards, I was like: ‘Is this what happens when I believe in myself? What else could I do?”
It’s why, though tackling some of life’s heavier, most heart-wrenching moments, there’s an undeniable hopefulness at the heart of Nadia’s music. “I want people to feel the honesty from my songwriting, and realise that they can be honest themselves about how they’re not perfect and how they don’t know what they’re doing,” she says. “I want them to realise that it’s okay to feel that way.”
