For Nick Ward, coming of age often felt like an endurance test. It took him a number of years, he tells NME, to look internally and understand that his anxiety was in free fall. Growing up in suburban Sydney, the songwriter’s worries were exacerbated by the strict religious environment that was enforced within the prestigious all-boys school he attended. Yet, he was also a teenager in dogged pursuit of a life that could feel kinder and more liberating. His heart remained wide open.
The 23-year-old’s phenomenal debut album, ‘House With The Blue Door’ (due October 4), details these difficult years with brooding intimacy, while also speaking to family ties and how they can never really be severed. Ward makes slinking, understated pop that finds dignity in sorrow – his melodies are defined by deep bass tones and breathy affectations, much like the celestial shimmer of Jam City or the palpable amber glow of Robyn’s ‘Honey’ era.
In a post-pandemic haze, Ward started work on the record with his twin brother Tom, exorcising some personal demons along the way. Out of the murky waters of a depressive spell, he emerged renewed. “When I started making this music, I said, ‘If I don’t feel sick while playing this – or if I’m not talking over the lyrics so that my parents can’t hear – then I shouldn’t be releasing it,” he says. “I knew I had to have a physical reaction to it.”
We meet for coffee in a sun-dappled cafe in Camden Town, an area abuzz with summer tourists. Ward shares their curiosity and enthusiasm towards London; this trip marks the first time he has been in the capital since he was 15. The week before our interview, he opened for LCD Soundsystem at All Points East festival, a few days before playing his first UK headline show at the George Tavern in Shadwell – a community-focused venue that he says reminded him of Sydney’s DIY scene, the creative garden of his youth.
“When I started making this music, I said, ‘If I don’t feel sick while playing this, then I shouldn’t be releasing it’”
‘House With The Blue Door’, both literally and figuratively speaking, has been a lifetime in the making. Ward’s relationship with his past may be far from clear-cut, but the record seeks to interrogate the reasons why. “In high school, I struggled with not feeling seen or respected for who I was,” he explains, smoothing the ends of his slick-backed hair as he speaks. “So throwing myself into the album felt like proving that I could do something that has meaning. Making music is an act of becoming a better person.”
That studious determination led Ward to get into the weeds of his family history. He draws comparisons between his symptoms of low mood and the depression that has previously affected his father, compounded by a “difficult” trip to see distant relatives in Melbourne a few years back. “When deep knots untie, that’s when you finally set yourself free,” Ward sings on the album’s emotional centrepiece, ‘Speak’. He wrote the track to capture his state of mind at the time: vulnerable; forgiving; proud; overwhelmed. All things he still feels today, even after years of therapy.
“Whether it’s certain thought patterns, or strengths and weaknesses, I was able to make direct links between my behaviours and those of members of my family. It’s made me understand myself more,” he says. This epiphany aligns with the core messaging of ‘House With The Blue Door’, its title an ode to his mother’s holiday cottage in rural New South Wales – a cornerstone of Ward’s childhood. If one side of the LP finds him “unpacking the turbulence of life”, then the other is about embracing empathy in its abundant forms.
The first step towards achieving the latter began when Ward was 21 and came across a wealth of Super 8 footage in an old suitcase, following the passing of his grandmother. Having already won multiple youth film awards and self-produced a web docuseries, he began to digitise it all. The videos were filmed by his grandparents in the late 1950s and ‘60s, documenting their move from Muar, Malaysia to Perth, where Ward’s father was raised. “When we first got the footage back, I remember feeling weirdly nauseous. It was intense. But I could really feel the weight and importance of what I was doing,” he adds.
Enlivened by the deeper understanding he was gaining of his family’s story and the sacrifices they made to live in Australia, Ward interspersed these clips into the music video for uplifting album closer ‘All Your Life’. His idea of hope grew and evolved as he worked on more songs from his bedroom studio, all of which were borne from “pure emotion” rather than granular details of events, having never kept a journal in his life.
“I think it’s important when making music in Australia to keep things specific to our experience”
“All of my big emotional experiences have come through watching or listening to something,” Ward says, pointing towards the eternal optimism of The Beach Boys’ discography. “If you’re trying to chase the feeling of something, it’s perhaps more accurate than if you’re going to be ultra-specific with your writing.”
He pauses for a few long, weightless seconds, before explaining how he sees this new collection as a vast progression from his early indie-flecked EPs. Ward taught himself how to use production software during his early teens; playful, homespun touches defined his 2022 release ‘Brand New You’, which NME described as “an incredibly promising snapshot of an artist stepping into their identity.” Ward notes: “Through the eyes of a teenager, everything is just completely apocalyptic – like, fucking crazy. But all of it has made me who I am.”
Ward began making music to “prove a point – that I could if I wanted to”. His formative years of education were tainted by being bullied for wearing makeup to school and having to wrestle with the weight of subscribing to traditional Australian masculinity. A recent report by the Queensland University of Technology stated that notions of stoicism and self-sufficiency are still felt deeply across the country, while urging a push to educate young men to “break free” from a “blind conformity” to these rigid ideals.
Such experiences are reflected in the video for luminous pop jam ‘Shooting Star’, which views archetypal scenes of aggression in sport – boxing, tug o’ war, heated arguments – from a queer perspective. The song itself, meanwhile, reads as a bildungsroman of sorts; it charts a journey towards the unwavering self-belief that Ward’s mother instilled in him as a child, while also showcasing how pain can live in tandem with escapist pleasure.
This zeal for freedom stemmed from how his mother would regularly take him out of school to visit a local arthouse cinema. Xavier Dolan’s Mommy was his entry point to foreign film, Ward notes, “and now I realise how unique that element of my upbringing was”. However, he had an unexpected reaction to becoming immersed in a new world of culture. “When I finally started to meet like-minded people as I got older, I would stutter in conversation. I had previously had all of these discussions about film solely in my head. I didn’t know how to articulate my passions.”
Surrealist director Alejandro Jodorowsky remains his main influence, with 1973’s The Holy Mountain having inspired ‘Father Son Holy Mountain’ from ‘House With The Blue Door’. Though Ward doesn’t state it explicitly in conversation, it perhaps wouldn’t be remiss to suggest that the film’s allusions to psychomagic – a term first populated by Jodorowsky, relating to the power of using creativity to heal oneself – has had a profound impact on his decision to start letting go of his emotional baggage and, ultimately, fight to not lose himself.
“Through the eyes of a teenager, everything is just completely apocalyptic”
Integral to Ward’s worldview, too, is the innate value of keeping his music localised – something he achieves on ‘Control’, a magnetic revitalisation of the Aussie pub rock sound. “I think it’s important when making music in Australia to keep things specific to our experience, whether that’s using our accents or naming particular places,” he says. It’s a mission statement shared among Sydney’s Full Circle Collective, which Ward is part of alongside local acts like DJ Sollyy and genre-busting band Breakfast Road.
Collaborating with these musicians has been “transformative” for Ward, who, due to a blanket ban on under-18s attending many small venues across the city, didn’t attend his first gig until he opened for BENEE in 2019. Another life-changing friendship has manifested in the form of his bond with Troye Sivan, whom he worked with last year on ‘Something To Give Each Other’ in Stockholm, Sweden.
Much of that blockbuster LP revelled in the pure, almost cosmic joys that Sivan embraced after immersing himself in Melbourne’s nightlife scene. Ward will hit the road with him later this year on his Australian arena tour. “Troye’s vision was so strong for what he wanted to do [with that album] and I learned so much from being around him,” Ward recalls. “As a human, he is also so generous and graceful. He doesn’t compromise on things and is such a fucking remarkable artist.”
It doesn’t seem all that strange that a global superstar would jump at the chance to work with Ward – he is honest and emotionally intuitive, and so driven that he already has a second record in the works. In ‘House With The Blue Door’, though, he has made an album of enveloping warmth and resonance, one that is sure to capture hearts worldwide. Music is clearly the place where he can find release. It’s what enables Ward, a young person still reckoning with the burden of a complex family background, to speak his truth.
His hard-won confidence can be seen in the rockstar leather jacket he dons as we chat, or through the boyish elan he radiates. Ward finishes the last of his Americano, before responding to this suggestion with a warm smile. “Putting music out there still feels very exposing,” he says. “But I am learning how to be more patient. That’s all I can ask of myself.”
Nick Ward’s debut album ‘House With The Blue Door’ will be released on October 4 via EMI Music Australia
Listen to Nick Ward’s exclusive playlist to accompany The Cover below on Spotify and here on Apple Music.
Words: Sophie Williams
Photographer: Dean Podmore
Styling: Nichhia Wippell
Grooming: Fernnando Miranda
Set Design: Max Rixon
Production Unit: Matt Withaar
Lighting Tech: Ryan Achilles
Photo Assistance: Brock McFadzean
Set Assistance: Anja Brown, Mindwell Holcomb
Label: EMI Australia