Nadine Shah - A rift in madness

It's impossible to talk about a proper scene, since in these frantic 2010s, aside from the awakening of the so-called “peripheries,” very few unifying movements have emerged capable of shaping a collective mindset. It is true, however, that despite the diversity of background and context, dark-tinged songwriting has been a current that has touched a fair number of artists scattered across the globe, determined to draw strength from darker, more mystery-laden imagery to give shape to their reflections, whatever form they might take. Among the most prominent exponents of an expressive scene that has once again found the momentum to break free of a years-long impasse (Zola Jesus, Chelsea Wolfe, Anna Calvi), and figures who push its communicative boundaries further towards the margins (King Dude, Daughn Gibson), it might seem odd, at least at first glance, to mention an artist like Nadine Shah. Yet it takes only a brief dive into the British singer-songwriter's output (not to mention a glance at her shadowy album covers, at times reminiscent of Italian giallo cinema) to see how, behind a clean-cut face and an unfussy image, lies a soul far more restless than appearances suggest, ready to put her talent to use tackling subjects that are anything but easy or pleasant. A contralto with a deep, vibrant croon, and an executive talent spanning guitar and piano with remarkable fluidity, Nadine Shah has revealed herself, release after release, to be an artist with a sharp pen and an expressive gift that fuses jazz moods, blues progressions, industrial patterns and sturdier post-punk incursions into a single whole, turning into the most convincing (and rather formidable) spiritual heir to figures like PJ Harvey and Nick Cave, sharing their mood, lyrical power and drive for renewal. The story, in any case, took a different turn right from the start.

Nadine Petra Katarina Shah was born on 16 January 1986 in Whitburn, a small seaside village south of Newcastle, to a British mother of Norwegian descent and a Pakistani father who had emigrated to Her Majesty's country at the age of 25. While these might seem like intrusive details (the artist herself has said she isn't particularly thrilled about how often her origins are brought up), they are in fact crucial particulars that would significantly shape the musician's future output, especially in terms of themes and lyrics. Growing up in close contact with her father's native culture and relatives from that side of the family, young Shah was raised in a household that brought together classical music (which also accounts for her remarkable command of the piano) and Sufi tradition, ghazal performances and jazz records, as well as the early LPs of a young Scott Walker, in a cultural blend that well describes a large slice of Britain's millennial generation, shaped from within the family itself by a complex web of influences and references. In particular, though, it was Scott Walker (Shah names “Scott” as her favourite album) and her jazz influences that kicked off a musical education not especially broad in scope, but certainly fuelled with remarkable intensity and fervour, enough to become an irresistible driving force for the dreams and ambitions of a girl who was already nursing visions of stardom.

At just sixteen, picturing herself as a jazz diva, she left the rocky shores of Whitburn and headed for the capital to try her luck and turn her vision into reality. The climb, needless to say, soon hit a wall, yet the experience proved anything but fruitless. A regular at London's jazz clubs, a keen and voracious listener, Nadine Shah learned from the many musicians she crossed paths with the discipline and perseverance needed — if not to reach the top of the charts, then at least to not give up on her own intentions and pursue a different ideal for her artistic prospects.

They name you dumb, they name you mad

Nevertheless, despite an ongoing process of listening, mingling and direct contact with musicians of various kinds, it was only at the start of the 2010s that this no-longer-budding singer began producing her first songs and compositions, manifestations of a talent that was initially hesitant but more than enough to let her name gradually spread through the industry and eventually reach the ears of Ben Hillier, one of the big names of UK production (Blur, Elbow, Doves, and many more besides).

It was thanks to his instinct, through a collaboration in which Shah's writing began to sharpen and find more mature, more personal expression, that the songs of her debut album came into being. Nurtured for a long time, written and rewritten in a process the artist would call exhausting, the tracks took shape without any particular haste, developed with care, with the aim of making every element involved fall into place. By the close of 2012, with a release date for her debut album already set for the following year, the artist finally began presenting her first songs to the public, laying the foundations for her future career.

Represented by two EPs released five months apart, Nadine Shah's recording debut, however brief in duration, was by no means the classic tentative first approach to the studio and the conventions of recording, the little calling card from which to glean the usual promise of things to come. Across the six songs split between Aching Bones and Dreary Town (whose title tracks would go on to become among the standout songs of Love Your Dum And Mad), the songstress already shows herself to be perfectly aware of what she wants to offer and the most convincing way to present it. Undoubtedly, having the backing of a heavyweight producer from her very first steps in the studio allowed for a drive and a control over sonic dynamics that others wouldn't have had access to, yet it's in Shah's writing, in the plurality of references she's able to channel, that the heart of the matter lies, and one she wastes no time putting to her own advantage.

Born out of the artist's literary and cinematic passions, and endowed with a theatricality that her performances (strictly delivered in her Newcastle accent) constantly carry through, Shah's writing draws on jagged textures, creaking, repetitive patterns, and harsh expressive turns, mirroring a pulsing, dramatic darkness, passionate enough to immediately invite comparisons with PJ Harvey and Nick Cave. The artist has said she only became acquainted with the two rock heavyweights after the recordings were finished, yet the kinship with them, if only in mood, is evident from the very start. Across the six tracks of the two EPs, Shah thus moves between shadowy explorations of the soul, through which she displays her fascination with sinister blues openings (“Aching Bones” itself, with the industrial edge of its percussion acting as a martial backbone to the imposing gothic parade above), guitar compositions tinged with a lopsided folk flavour, at times sharpened by the narrative character of the lyrics (“Bobby Heron,” almost a gothic-country update of British traditional heritage), and unsettling chamber-like openings, where the near-exclusive support of the piano reinforces the complexity of the artist's performances, able to lend an entirely new meaning to the concept of the dark chanteuse through her sudden vocal climbs (“Dreary Town,” “Cry Me A River,” especially in its striking closing coda).

It's precisely within this stylistic triangle, with a pen that further sharpens the expressive peculiarities of Shah's contralto, that we can locate the space in which Love Your Dum And Mad moves, a full-length debut that in its own way almost serves as a corollary to a six-month period dense with recording activity, already a worthy showcase for a fully blossomed talent. Dedicated to two people who died by suicide for mental health reasons (one of whom also drew the artwork for the EP and the album, somewhere between Egon Schiele and the deformed figures of "Guernica"), with a title that cleverly drops the "b" from "dumb" to make the work's theme explicit and create a fascinating inversion of initials, the record takes it upon itself to expand and spell out all the flair and character that had already permeated the dark early work, with an awareness and sense of purpose that, for obvious reasons, are now far more evident.

Between the grey of regret and the vivid red of the purest passion, and every shade in between, unfold the eleven stories told in the songs of Love Your Dum And Mad, songs dominated by torment and remorse, built around recurring ideas of loss and defeat that run throughout the tracklist. The deep melancholy for a youth inexorably slipping away ("To Be A Young Man"), funereal dedications to loved ones who died prematurely (the very "Dreary Town", a bitter waltz-memorial to her ex-partner who took his own life, written two days after the tragedy), narcoleptic reflections on everyday life and marginalization (the superlative "Floating", a happy musical oxymoron achieved through the unnaturally calm surface of its minimal backdrop): Shah fears no demons of any kind, she doesn't push them away — if anything she calls them to her, turns them into poetry, treats them like good friends to help face the surrounding darkness. And there's no doubt, this is an exorcism that closely echoes the gothic atmospheres of that "To Bring You My Love", the record that catapulted PJ Harvey into the pantheon of Nineties icons. The musician herself will often find herself having to acknowledge the resemblance, at least in mood, to Polly Jean (just listen to the already-mentioned "To Be A Young Man", a dark, combative folk-rock number, to catch within it echoes of the unforgettable "Send His Love To Me"), yet her art pushes the conversation much further, following trajectories that dig even deeper into a pain that seems endless. Certainly, pressing on the themes of mental illness and suicide can only have heightened certain dynamics.

Relying on very few elements, mostly built around the author's fleeting piano impressions (especially in the second half of the record, past the turning point of the discouraging synthetic blues of "All I Want"), Shah builds, with pinpoint inspiration, spells in which the oblique, sinister writing shines in all its power. A power further heightened by a sensually tormented contralto, which has earned her comparisons to Diamanda Galás as a vocalist. The author indeed exploits her vocal versatility right from the opening track: while it's true that the vocal tour-de-force of a "Cry Me A River" is nowhere to be found on the record, the performances reveal a genuinely shapeshifting voice, now capable of turning into a hushed, heavyweight blues-woman's groan, now ready to take the path of moved earthly liturgies. The record, in short, takes on, without much ceremony, an anguish that, even by the time we reach the chamber ballad "Winter Reigns", has only been dissolved to a minimal degree, like a kind of exorcism against loss and abandonment.

Although the jazz roots and theatrical framing undoubtedly heighten much of the drama running through the album, which tends to be far more restrained and nuanced in its details (as "The Devil" itself suggests), an album like Love Your Dum And Mad nonetheless bears witness to themes and a kind of suffering rarely addressed with this level of empathy, with a drive capable of carrying the weight of the deepest introspection and revealing it in all its power, with few filters. Rarely have debut albums managed to align art and lived experience with such clarity.

You, my sweet, are a fool, you, my sweet, are plain and weak

Less than two years later, with a wealth of fresh experience behind her and a much quicker, sharper songwriting process (she herself describes her songwriting as a discipline to be cultivated steadily, through constant practice), Shah releases Fast Food, the follow-up to her already remarkable debut, working decisively to deepen the most visceral, carnal side of her music, breaking down further filters in how she exposes herself and her art. Keeping pre-release output to a minimum, limiting it to the singles "Fool" and "Stealing Cars" (both nonetheless quite indicative of the direction given to the sound), the Whitburn-born artist narrows her sonic scope, yet doesn't retreat a single step from the anguished intensity of her debut, which is if anything pushed to further extremes in its developments and modulations. The shift that follows has brought about significant adjustments in the musician's artistic aims, now called to make weightier choices and achieve greater stylistic focus: even so, the powerful restlessness that has marked Shah's past finds a thousand and one ways to express itself.

Faced with herself, with still-unconquered obstacles, with fears to confront and a past to settle, Nadine applies no filter, sugarcoats nothing. Above all, she doesn't take the road of self-pity, of smug self-indulgence to be crooned over three chords and a barely sketched, whiny vocal line. With bold, bright colors evoking 70s horror movie posters, and with the author's own face finally peeking through in a pose worthy of an old-time femme fatale, the cover makes it clear: this is about passion, rage and ardor — there's no more time to reflect, to hold one's breath and play hide-and-seek with feelings. The time has come, in short, to act, to take a few more risks; if that means raising the stakes, so be it. Drive and fervor, then, with few alternative routes: all the better that Shah's magnifying glass is now turned on reflections about interpersonal relationships, about love affairs gone wrong, about the psychological fallout that toxic people — but also much calmer relationships cut cleanly short — can leave behind. It's quite understandable, then, that to map out the songstress's soul, rather than the piano, a full, powerful instrumental lineup is called upon, rock-based in structure but unpredictable in its drift. In this sense, Fast Food amplifies and scatters the electric through-lines that had made the fortune of the first five tracks of Love Your Dum And Mad, at times foregrounding their most obsessive, minimal side, at others opening up to more inventive, disorienting solutions that cut off any specific genre comparison.

So while the main road remains a dark, tight blues, varied in its rhythms and modulations, detours are always lurking around the corner, ready to appear unannounced, without warning. Alongside the seemingly more conventional shapes of "Stealing Cars", where our artist tackles the theme of anxiety with a generous injection of theatricality and a structure that feels like one long chorus, there's also the firm yet heartfelt resolve of "Nothing Else To Do", a minor-key dirge built on a constantly evolving arrangement, a kind of minimalist bolero that still manages, with absolute command, to drop in a striking brass section at the close.

"Big Hands" (the only track to feature them on such a grand scale) then runs headlong away from any form of ballad-style intimacy or jazzy embroidery, knowingly locking itself into a bizarre, rhythmically angular trot, fully at odds with the driving guitar and percussion.

In keeping the level of experimentation high, both in tone and composition, Shah emphasizes the most dramatic and evocative side of her performances, sharpened in their emotional intensity, without ever turning them into pompous, meaningless flourishes. From the raw, rough-hewn opening of the title track, with a dry, desert-like edge that Hugo Race would surely have loved, to the granite-like power of "Fool", equipped with a chorus as mighty as a tank and an arrangement flirting with noise-rock and post-punk, Nadine also pushes her exploration into fascinating contact with more pop-leaning material, with a melodic dimension that opens decisively toward bigger audiences, never lacking in personality.

Bare in the face of her feelings, with disarming honesty working in her favor, Nadine Shah matches, with Fast Food, all the great emotional and stylistic hallmarks of her art, even while drawing on a somewhat narrower expressive palette, delivering about ten tracks that smoothly clear the hurdle of the difficult second album, raising considerably a bar that was already set fairly high. And while comparisons to PJ Harvey and Nick Cave (even namechecked in "Fool" itself, cast in the dual role of "damned" and "saint") keep piling up, the reality shows an artist mature and distinctive enough to file away every comparison (often made in a dismissive spirit) and turn it to her advantage instead, as part of a wondrous trilogy devoted to a dark, sometimes bluesy rock that is never anything less than powerful and passionate. In its own way, there can be no better compliment than that.

Damn your men, damn your women, damn the children damn yourselves

Having crossed the threshold of thirty, fully aware of her own artistic language and of how it can also serve broader, more wide-reaching themes (without that becoming a mere sonic pretext for the chosen subject), for her third album Nadine Shah decides to widen her gaze and open up to politically charged observations, inserting herself forcefully into a creative ferment that openly encourages reflections of this kind. Not that there's any opportunism in the choice — after all, Shah herself, given her family background and the surname she carries, is no stranger to certain racial dynamics and the xenophobic closed-mindedness of some of her compatriots; she has things to say, in short, and a perspective that British songwriters had long been missing.

What sparked the idea for a work like Holiday Destination, however, was an everyday, seemingly trivial event, though one with a symbolic weight that far transcends the fact itself. Against the backdrop of the humanitarian crisis and the migrant emergency that has gripped the Mediterranean for years, some tourists vacationing on the island of Kos, who found themselves witnessing firsthand the mass landings of Syrian refugees fleeing from Turkey, when asked about it, wasted no time declaring that the whole situation had ended up ruining their holiday. Not a single mention of the refugees' misery and suffering. Drawing on these interviews, and on a documentary for Al Jazeera about the refugee camps on the Syria-Turkey border made by her brother (for which Shah composed the score), the singer-songwriter signs off, with her third album, on a tough, unflinching project, an exemplary manifesto that fuses the particular and the universal under one unified, passionate vision. Xenophobia, everyday accounts of racism, anger, desolation and, at the same time, hope all come together under the same roof, in a cycle of songs that see the author laying claim to a language more direct and immediate than ever, one in which the message arrives through some of the most pop-leaning, brilliant melodic and compositional constructions in the musician's catalogue.

The leap in quality represented by Holiday Destination, standing as it does as part of a far larger, more meaningful whole, leaves little room for argument. The purely musical choices follow suit: while it's true that those searing, anguished guitars, one step away from industrial rock, have been part of Shah's instrumental background since her earliest work (with her trusted collaborator and co-producer Ben Hillier still accompanying her artistic visions), and that ties to gothic rock have always been evident even in her sparest piano ballads, the emphasis placed on the more wave-leaning references in her sound reaches its peak on this record, branching out in countless directions. True to her aim of greater immediacy, the rhythmic patterns become more insistent and present, bass and guitars unashamedly tap into the seductive possibilities of groove, the melodies become more defined and accessible, without ever slipping into facile shortcuts. If anything, this greater structural directness brings about a tighter fusion between meaning and form, two parts of a whole that end up reinforcing each other, tools in service of an irrepressible communicative drive.

In "Place Like This" (identifying with the rubble depicted on the cover comes almost naturally) the gloomy, cavernous tone of the opening gives way to crisp rhythmic breaks and guitars flirting with Latin funk, a play of contrasts on which Shah's performance rests with firmness and severity, singing of displacement and welcome in a foreign land, fading out before the end to let the closing be taken over by a protest march, chanting: "Refugees are welcome here!"

In the title track itself, the insistence with which the line "How you gonna sleep tonight?" is repeated not only calls attention to the tragic living conditions of refugees, but also plants in the apathetic West the seed of unease and solidarity, in the face of a situation that hits closer to home than one might think. A powerful lyric, carried by a melody with clear pop ambitions (we're talking "Fool"-level here), in which, however, the dissonance of the arrangement recalls the finest pages of Siouxsie Sioux, generating a kind of disquieting pleasure. So while "Evil" denounces, without holding back, the racism the songstress has witnessed from her compatriots, moving between creaking jangle, heavy basslines and sudden bursts of noise, in perfect keeping with the aesthetic of unease pursued from the very start, the gaze widens further still to embrace the international political scene, taking aim at Trump's conduct ("Yes Men") and the increasingly worrying rise of nationalist right-wing movements ("2016"), tackling such burning issues with remarkable compositional ease, in a prestigious collection of melodies that combine reinvention with genuine allure.

Third winning record out of three, essentially: channeling her own experience and the events of recent years into a vessel that strengthens their value by loading them with universal meaning, the author of Whitburn delivers with Holiday Destination one of the most humane and thoughtful reflections on social and political contemporaneity in music, without sacrificing an ounce of her expressive stature. In a vast sea of releases with a supposedly "woke" slant that are in fact rather mediocre, this is among the rare albums that actually achieve a real communicative purpose.

Shave my legs, freeze my eggs, will you want me when I am old

"So when are you getting married? And when are you having a baby? Look, you're well past thirty already, don't you ever think about time slipping away?" Who knows how many times these questions have been put to Nadine Shah, or how often they've simply crossed her mind, just by looking around her. For a woman, concepts like marriage and motherhood come up with increasing frequency as time goes on, to the point that not considering them is (almost) seen as a problem. This is the general premise of Kitchen Sink, the fourth album by the formidable singer-songwriter, the leitmotif that drives her, for the first time, to speak about herself so extensively and to tackle themes such as femininity, sexism and aging, with all the irony at her disposal, staging little scenes of alienating, repulsive everyday life.

Less subversive compared to her previous projects, and in that sense closer to the jagged post-punk attitude of her last record, Holiday Destination, the new project nonetheless departs from it with a more flamboyant vision, adding to its wave-inflected setup a versatile dynamism that adjusts itself to the lyrical/melodic tone of each individual song. Words and sound move in lockstep, building biting, suffocating tracks in which the arrangements move with snappy precision, ready to bear the weight of the lyrical passages. Drum breaks and brass explosions kick off the project with all the necessary force, intensifying the sordid edges of the lyrics in "Club Cougar", the unwanted comments hurled by strangers on the dance floor. And while the nursery rhyme sung by her brother during childhood becomes the central theme of "Ladies For Babies (Goats For Love)", the chronicles from that sink, as detested as it is paradoxically craved, grow heavier with anguish and tension, full of that undefined terror that makes the passing of time feel like the worst possible sentence.

In this whirlwind of unsolicited questions, awkward encounters and dysfunctional relationships, Shah's pen moves with assurance, full of narrative verve, ready to take the risks that come with it, yet always aware of her turbulent view of the world, of dynamics (of gender and otherwise) whose expiry date has long since passed. There is definitely life after thirty, even without children, and a scornful laugh is there, once again, to make that perfectly clear.

Light up your house for the greatest dancer, happy for now watching shiny dancers

It takes four years before Nadine Shah returns with a new record. A record that very nearly didn't come out at all: with the pandemic and its aftermath as a grim backdrop, the formidable British songwriter had to deal with the death of her mother, got married, and suffered a devastating breakdown that led her to attempt suicide. From there came the arduous climb back up through a rehab facility, and finally divorce. That's hardly a small amount to deal with, in what is, all things considered, a rather short span of time. But knowing her stature as a musician leads to one certainty: her absolute ability to process experience, the drive that converts tragedy into dark narrative material. Presenting herself with all the grime accumulated over these years is an unavoidable necessity, the need for a public and private cleansing through which to come to terms, at just the right distance, with her own inner hell. And who's to say that in purging her own anguish, a genuine laugh can't slip out too?

Written once again alongside Ben Hillier, Shah's true partner-in-crime since her debut, Filthy Underneath is a record that breaks, hopefully for good, some of the assumptions on which the artist's career has rested so far. First and foremost, her voice: no longer just the intense contralto that has marked every one of her previous efforts, on this record it frees itself from every constraint, becomes a feral surge, reveals unexpected soul inflections, spins around in a frenzy as if speaking of nothing at all. That's the case with "Topless Mother", a sharp snapshot of ordinary miscommunication between the artist and her therapist, in which the chorus is a rapid outpouring of words set loose, strung together with a euphoric, childlike abandon. Even "Even Light", though, with its synthetic accents twisted to sound like brass and its bass geometries, shows off a voice unafraid to reach upward, toward the fullness of its own potential. And while it's true that shifts in sound have been a constant throughout the musician's career, never before has such a powerful heterogeneity of tone been on display, one that doesn't forget the post-punk past of recent years but lets it drift into vibrant, arty waters, where the light casts sinister figures, each with its own distinct color.

It's hard to remain unmoved in the face of the downward spiral that Shah captures in several tracks. Hard to stay unaffected by the oblique poetry of "Greatest Dancer", the account of a night of delirium spent dancing in a hallucinatory state in front of an episode of "Strictly Come Dancing". The spoken-word chapter of "Sad Lads Anonymous", built entirely around a bubbling, gothic bassline, uses biting self-irony to comment on the terrible decision to move to a crumbling seaside town. That the squalor of that period can even reveal flashes of humor is the true strength of a record that never falls into excess, instead adopting different languages each time to tell its brutal story. The rarefied cut of the production and its obsessive insistence make the track the most viscous ambient ballad of recent years, counterbalanced by the fine fragility of "Hyperrealism", the thing closest to the snow-pale hush of "Love Your Dum And Mad", with piano prominently on display and an unexpected soulful touch.

It makes all the sense in the world that the closing track should be "French Exit". Playing on the meaning of the title, which refers to leaving a party without saying goodbye to those who remain, Shah confronts the moment of her suicide attempt. With restraint, in silhouette, causing, fittingly, as little disturbance as possible: in that extreme gesture, in that violent act which can't help but carry its own particular tension, the curtain falls. Suddenly, leaving us as an integral part of a story that the album carries forward into the future. Beyond the anguish, beyond the disorientation, lies liberation.

Sure-footed, the architect of one of the most stable and reliable careers in British songwriting of the last twenty years, Nadine Shah gathers wave darkness and pop momentum into one single, broad embrace, both personal and universal, forging a compelling and recognizable formula that is nonetheless constantly geared toward redefining its own structures and composition. In her own way, she is already a classic.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google