Nudista have released their new EP Halfway Here via Sad Club Records. The EP contains an acute melancholic look at life that lives with you, long after you’ve finished listening.
The duo were kind enough to give us some of their time to walk us through this deeply personal release, providing a unique insight into the work. Read on.
‘Confess’
Pilar: I started writing this right before the pandemic exploded. I guess I was just a bit overwhelmed with the fast-paced nature of our day to day and I was feeling quite creatively disconnected. Coming to terms with life in all its mundanity: working, paying rent, surviving the city, etc and the slow acknowledgement that predictions for life in mid-20s were inaccurate, coming to terms with this and, eventually, being okay with it – sitting in that feeling, It’s sad but it’s all good. It’s kind of me acknowledging that I don’t know how to ‘play’ the game of life and not knowing all of its intricate rules that you need to learn, and finding these a bit overwhelming. That no one really knows what they are doing. We are all kind of improvising and accepting all of these strange rules that we all need to follow just because we are alive. And that’s it’s okay to feel lost and confused, eventually you start taking things less seriously and it’s been proven if we stop a bit things can become less overwhelming.
‘Inasmuch’
Pilar: I wrote this in the middle of the pandemic and it came to me very easily – I think I wrote this in a couple of hours. I feel it came out of frustration of being alienated into having a certain mindset/mindframe imposed on me that took a while to unlearn. Coming to terms with my past and conflicting ideas. At the same time it talks about the frustration to see people so fixated in their own ideas that sometimes can be so wrong and their unwillingness to change or see the other side of the picture and empathise.
Our pride as humankind that we think what we know is everything and is the absolute truth. Coming to that realisation that as humans we can evolve and change what we’ve done in the past can be liberating, but can also be scary and sometimes impossible. And that impossible dimension is what’s scary and what frustrates me, and it’s reflected in the song, especially in the line ‘Hold it inside, this is not the end, it’s hard to believe when nothing seems fair’. And in the line ‘It’s from within we figure out what’s right’, this is where I’m trying to convey the idea of thinking on your own feet with what life and your own reflection tell you, that you can question what you know and tradition: ‘Are we all trapped in our own lies or in all the tales some old man prophesied’ and we, as humankind can question the structures we live in. There is also hope in the song with the long drawn outro, repeating to myself as a mantra or even a church hymn that ‘it’s alright’ but once in a while reminding myself that ‘it isn’t alright’ that there is a long way to go, and that we have to keep evolving on a personal level as humans, and that’s our own responsibility.
‘Window’
Robbie: Window is about the difference between how you think things are meant to go and how they actually turn out, and how sometimes if you sit with that thought for long enough, it can be overwhelming (‘It all goes out the window when I work it out‘) and then trying to get yourself back to the present to convince/remind your that everything is okay (‘it all comes down to how I feel today‘). Like the rest of the songs on the EP it’s an observation of how we think we function in and respond to daily life. The song can be seen as both a withdrawal from this reality and an attempt to remedy it.
‘Morning’
Robbie: The song was written in two parts, the first part is about sitting in indecision, the process of feeling pressure to be doing, to be active and productive, only to be left feeling unavoidably distracted and then deciding to give up (pack it in).Â
The second part was written by Robbie a few years ago, during a depression, and it was about actively deciding to not talk to anyone about it. This was by no means the healthiest thing to do, but it was a reaction to how he felt everything had to be shared all the time. Choosing not to talk can give a false sense of control over a situation like this. This part of the song is sad but has a happy ending because, in the end, this all gets talked about, very publicly, in a song.
When Pilar joins that second part with her vocal on top of Robbie´s, its showing two people can just be talking at each other, not listening/caring. So, we had the first part written and needed it to go somewhere else and this bit of music fitted and it’s on theme with feeling low and pressure to be doing stuff you are expected to do just because you’re supposed to, which is an overall theme of the EP, a dissociation towards how we are expected to function.
