Soft Play and Kate Nash have spoken to NME about their collaborative new single ‘Slushy’, and reflected on how the music industry’s “model is broken”. Listen to the song and read the full interview below.
The track is set to appear on an expanded version of the Tunbridge Wells punk duo’s Number Three-charting fourth album ‘Heavy Jelly’ – the original of which arrived last summer.
Titled ‘Heavier Jelly’, the project will feature six new tracks taken from the LP sessions that felt “too soft for the record, but too good to scrap”, the band’s guitarist Laurie Vincent told NME. The playfully snotty duet of ‘Slushy’ marks the second time Nash has joined up with Soft Play vocalist Isaac Holman, following a previous collaboration on his 2023 Baby Dave solo song, ‘Telephobia’.
Nash recently made headlines by joining adult content creator site OnlyFans with her ‘Butts For Buses’ incentive, where she’s been using the platform to highlight the increasingly prohibitive costs of touring for artists.
Speaking alongside Nash about their struggles with making the finances of touring work for them, Vincent revealed to NME that Soft Play recently abandoned plans for a European tour due to the unrealistic expenses involved.
“The guarantees added up to nearly £60,000 and [after all the costs] we would have made £2,000 maximum,” he said. “What’s the fucking point? We’re playing decent-sized venues and getting really good guarantees, so how does anyone else do it? We’re privileged because we’re able to sustain a career with our UK income, but how is anyone ever gonna get out there? I feel like we’re one of the last eras of bands that got through.”
Check out our full interview below where Soft Play and Nash discuss ‘Slushy’, how they are similar as artists, why the music industry needs to change, and recall a “bizarre” encounter with Robbie Williams and Danny Dyer.
NME: Hi everyone. Kate and Isaac, you already worked together previously on Isaac’s solo project Baby Dave – how far back does the friendship go?
Nash: “When you guys were first popping off, I’d already left the UK by that point so we never ran into each other on the festival circuit, but I obviously knew who you were. In the pandemic, I was listening to your first Baby Dave record and I reached out ‘cause I loved it so much, and we just started chatting.”
Were you old-school Kate Nash fans?
Vincent: “I still listen to ‘Foundations’ and all those old songs in the car with my kids on the school run. Kate Nash is a British indie institution!”
What do you think ‘Slushy’ says about your similarities as artists?
Nash: “Both of us, as lyricists and artists, are people that use our environments and where we’re from to tell stories.”
Vincent: “It’s the social observations, like the ‘cheese on toast‘ lyric in [Kate’s 2007 track] ‘Merry Happy’. It’s the same with Isaac: he brings mundane objects into such sharp focus. It’s very British, I think.”
Holman: “It’s just like, say what you see. I always say to people when they’re struggling with writer’s block, ‘You don’t have to have something amazing to write about. Just write about what’s in front of you’.”
And, of course, you were both on the bill for Robbie Williams’ big Hyde Park show last summer…
Vincent: “Obviously Robbie gets it – he’s the link! We went backstage [to talk to him] as he was getting pampered. Someone’s hands were coming in and creaming him and brushing his hair as he was talking to us. To him, it was the most normal thing in the world but me and Isaac were just like… what’s happening?! Danny Dyer was also there watching the England game on the TV. It was fucking bizarre.”
What did you make of the recent artist-led protest to the proposed use of musician’s catalogues to train AI, where more than 1,000 musicians released a collective silent album? Is AI something that feels like a threat, creatively?
Vincent: “It’s scary for the people that are sitting on fucking towers of cash, but it doesn’t even matter if someone rips us off on AI – we’re not big streamers anyway. And maybe that’s a bit apathetic but we’ve got bigger things to worry about than AI as musicians. The disparity in the music industry is so huge now – we’re a two-piece band that can sell out a whole tour and we’re still struggling to make ends meet.”
Nash: “[The argument is] ‘make it fair’, but I need a bit more detail than a silent album on Spotify – one of the most exploitative platforms in the whole industry. Make it fair for who? And exactly which body or organisation are you asking to discuss the terms and conditions of exactly what makes it fair? Because if it’s the major labels, I think we all know how that’s gonna go.
“I think there’s a big focus on AI as posing a threat to human-made art and I don’t think there is a threat to human-made art. This is probably how people felt when hip-hop culture and the birth of sampling happened. Things already aren’t fair, so can we actually deal with what’s happening now?”
Vincent: “Ultimately, I guess Spotify will benefit from AI music because people will just keep streaming, and if they’re not having to pay people because it’s AI then it’s just gonna water down what normal musicians are making.”
Nash: “I do think music has value but it’s only going to a couple of people. The industry has taught people that it’s valueless, but look at the gaming industry – it’s booming.”
Vincent: “You have to buy games, why don’t you have to buy music? I’ve always said that me and Isaac should do an OnlyFans like you Kate, but then we were worried that it would look gimmicky. We could just do really soft content…”
Nash: “Oh my god, you actually should!”
How is the OnlyFans going, Kate?
Nash: “What’s crazy is you realise how few people you need [to subscribe] to make really decent money. They take 20 per cent and I take 80 per cent, and I’m making more from that than my music even though I’ve got way more fans with music. It’s not just that sex sells – music also makes people loads of money, and if we were getting paid fairly and things were getting split properly, I would be making loads. ‘Foundations’ has over 100million streams – not to sound like a dickhead, but why aren’t I a millionaire?”
Isaac and Laurie, you’ve been open about the mental health struggles that touring life has had on you in the past. What did you think of Chappell Roan’s Grammy speech about artist care, and how are you balancing it all these days?
Vincent: “Every week you see a superstar postponing their tour – Lola Young just did it, Arlo Parks did it, Sam Fender does it. The model is broken but everyone that gets paid off your back wants you out on the road because that’s where the money’s coming from. Me and Isaac are broken from our last tour and we can’t take days off ’cause it’s too expensive, so you’re just stuck between a rock and a hard place.
“God bless Chappell Roan. I fucking rate what she does and I love how she’s speaking out about stuff, even just about how people don’t own her. These conversations need to be had. I was in an airport recently and my kids were screaming, one of them’s nearly getting trapped in an escalator and someone asked me for a selfie and I just couldn’t do it. And I felt awful about it for weeks.”
Nash: “I once got asked for a selfie in the nursing home my grandad was dying in, in front of my grandad. And I took it, and he’s literally in the background, dying, hardly able to breathe.”
Isaac, you recently opened up about your incredibly traumatic experience of losing a baby [Isaac is running an ultramarathon in support of Abigail’s Charity – donate here]. Did you feel supported by the industry in being able to take time to grieve?
Holman: “It was fortunate that it happened during the time that we’d just come off tour, but it doesn’t really stop. I wasn’t ready to go back to work when we toured Australia and I had a terrible time. I didn’t sleep and I was really ill and my mental health was terrible. I was really in the depths of it and we had to go and work and I found it really fucking difficult; I’m still a little bit traumatised from it.
“We’re going on tour in America in April and I’m already shitting it, but that’s just the way it is. When I’m in a bad place, the touring isn’t sustainable and I don’t know how to [manage it]. It’s not like we’re just getting on stage and having a little sing song, it’s so fucking exhausting. When I’m with Laurie, we’re super open and vulnerable with each other and that helps – just being able to go off in the daytime and talk things through. But you can totally see why people just completely fucking lose it.”
There’s a lot of bleakness but it also feels, as you say, like there’s something of a sea change happening with how transparent artists are being about these struggles…
Nash: “That’s so powerful, and there’s no shame in it. If musicians could realise that there’s a lot of power in being open and transparent and coming together… Can you imagine if we had a festival line-up and we knew what everyone was being paid? We’d be able to see that women aren’t being paid as much, or the budgets are different for different artists – I think we should know shit like that. The industry benefits from us feeling like we have to behave and hide anything that isn’t completely shiny, but it’s not a shiny job.”
Soft Play release ‘Heavier Jelly’ on April 18. They hit the road this spring for a run of North American dates, including Coachella 2025. This summer, the band open for IDLES in Bristol, support The Libertines in Margate and play Reading & Leeds 2025.