Words by Lisa Wright
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Nell Mescal has always believed in the power of manifesting, but recently, it’s as though the 22-year-old singer has tapped into the universe’s direct line. “I have two vision boards in my room and I usually have to update them every year and a half,” she begins. “But a couple of years ago, when I was supporting Florence + the Machine and Dermot Kennedy, I was ticking so much off that I was like, ‘We need to chill!’”
Her vision boards clearly didn’t get that particular memo. In the time since, Mescal has inked a deal with Atlantic Records, played a celebratory summer of festivals and hopped on an arena tour with HAIM. In October, she released a level-up second EP, ‘The Closest We’ll Get’. An emotionally raw document of the end of a relationship, it broadens her sound beyond the indie and pop of last year’s debut EP ‘Can I Miss It For A Minute?’, bringing in fiddle-laden, folkier references.
When Mescal jumps on a video call with NME, she’s in the middle of her own headline tour. It’s her biggest to date, taking in venues like London’s Islington Assembly Hall and Dublin’s Button Factory – a half-hour drive from where she grew up in Maynooth, County Kildare. Maynooth was where Mescal first began honing her craft, singing in the area’s Speak Up Sing Out choir and “writing random stories and songs that [she] didn’t know how to put to music yet”.
When she was 14, she was diagnosed with Scheuermann’s kyphosis – a curvature of the spine requiring potentially life-saving surgery. With nothing else to do during her extended recovery, she began focusing more on songwriting, then put out her first single proper, ‘Missing You’, in 2020, aged 17. “I’ve got no idea what would have happened if I hadn’t had that much time to myself at a time when you’re probably not supposed to have that much time for yourself,” she reflects.
Since then, Mescal has been touring constantly and putting in the hours. The NME 100 alum might still have a way to go until she’s headlining arenas herself, but her fans are already proving the dedicated sort that could well take her there. “Last night in Bristol, I had three girls at the front in identical outfits because I have this one red top I just wear all the time, so they came basically dressed as me,” she grins. “I’ve been playing small shows for years now and there’s people that are on their 14th show when I didn’t even know I’d done 14 shows in their town.”
“Surround yourself with thoughts that are useful because the rest of it is just noise and a load of shit”
It’s easy to see why the musician is already developing such a devoted following. For a start, she’s warm and affable, with a gentle Irish lilt and the gift of the gab (“I love playing acoustic shows because I get to talk so much and share so much,” she chuckles). But most importantly, Mescal’s intensely personal songwriting leaves it all on the table. On ‘The Closest We’ll Get’, she strips her emotions down to their bones, approaching like a close friend settling down for a heart-to-heart. It’s unsurprising that her lyrics mean a lot to people.
“I love seeing everyone after a show and getting to hear about why they listen and the songs they really love. I’ve had a lot of people after shows say, ‘I don’t want to trauma dump on you, but this song really means this to me’, and I never think it’s trauma dumping. It’s special to me because that’s why I put songs out. People ask me for advice and I don’t even have advice for myself, but I’m willing to give anything inside here,” she says, tapping her chest, “to help you through your situation.”
There is one song that feels like a particularly generous gift to her listeners: ’Thin’, a standalone track released as a demo this April. On it, Mescal addresses her own longstanding body image issues with devastating honesty: “I’ll get thin / And let everybody call it a relief / I’ll find love / But he’ll never understand that part of me / He’ll call me pretty now / But I was pretty then too”. Writing and releasing the song was an extreme exercise in facing her demons head-on.
“I’m willing to give anything inside [my heart] to help you through your situation”
“I genuinely threw my phone across the room [when I wrote it]. I was like, ‘I just don’t need to write a song like this. I think this will break my mum’s heart’,” she recalls. “I didn’t feel ready at all to write it, but I feel like that’s when you have to dig a bit deeper and realise why you don’t feel ready. I’ll probably be in conversation with this [topic] for the rest of my life because it’s so deeply ingrained in me, but I think this song was the first step in making that conversation a lot kinder.”
Having grown up in this peak era of social media, Mescal is passionate about providing an alternative voice for her young fans based on compassion and kindness, one that urges them to look to the people around them instead of the ones in their phones. “Every time, before I sing that song, I always say that these thoughts I had that were negative about myself never came from myself,” she says.
“I feel like I’m on a soapbox saying, ‘Don’t let TikTok be the thing that makes you feel a certain way about yourself!’ But I just always want people to remember that the feeling you get from being with your friends and the people that lift you up is the thing you should focus on. Surround yourself with thoughts that are useful because the rest of it is just noise and a load of shit.”
Mescal is obviously not the first in her family to be under the spotlight, and has watched the glare of public interest fix itself on her elder brother Paul (he of Normal People, Gladiator and soon-to-be Beatles biopic fame). “I’ve seen personally what it can be like going from having loads of privacy to suddenly having no privacy at all. It’s so close to home for me,” she considers.
“I think it makes you go, ‘OK, well, maybe this will happen to me at some point, so I need to figure out how I’ll deal with it’. In the earlier stages, a lot of my comments were people just trying to get to him through me, so you’re looking at it going, ‘Well, this isn’t about me at all, so I can just delete it and move on.’ It’s good training.”
Instead, Mescal has been surrounding herself with people that actively push her forward – people like Philip Weinrobe, the producer (Adrianne Lenker, Billie Marten) she flew to New York to work with on ‘The Closest We’ll Get’. Weinrobe – whom Mescal calls “an absolute wizard; a joy” – pushed the singer to relinquish herself to the process more than ever. While making the EP, Mescal and her backing musicians weren’t allowed to listen to anything back until it was done; instead, they had to simply trust themselves and believe it when it felt good. Having grown up in choirs, the group bond and the immediacy felt invigorating and familiar. “It was the most thrilling experience,” she affirms. “There was no time to get in your head about it.
“It allowed for so much more kindness because, if you’re in a studio and trying to record a vocal, you just keep going and going because something isn’t perfect. Whereas if you’re like, collectively that felt good and it was really fun, then it’s probably gonna sound good,” she continues. “Just letting go was really special. That’s how you learn about yourself.”
Over the past couple of years, Nell Mescal has been learning an awful lot about herself: how to grow and flourish as both an artist and a human being; who to trust; what to do when all your dreams start coming true. It’s a journey that she’s tackling with guts and gusto, and one that’s right at the centre of her vision boards. “Over the past year and a half, my goal has been to really think about how I make the songs as ‘me’ as possible,” she says. “I saw Florence [Welch] do an interview where she said, ‘I feel like I’ve got the exact career I wanted’, and it’s because she was just so herself. I feel the same way about Billie Eilish – you’re watching someone who’s just continuously trying to find themselves and be themselves at that time, which is really cool.”
Right now, for Mescal, that means leaning into the community and joy of her live shows, soaking up every mad experience and letting her musical tastes expand in tandem. She’s already excited about how the experience of her latest EP might affect its successor. “After we’d record, everyone would talk about the music they like and I’d add things to my playlist and that will probably inform the next thing I do,” she says. There is one thing Mescal hasn’t shared, which might be the thing that says the most about her. “There was a year where I couldn’t post my Spotify Wrapped because the top three songs were manifestation hymns,” she laughs. The world may have had no idea – but they certainly served Mescal just fine.
Nell Mescal’s ‘The Closest We’ll Get’ EP is out now via Atlantic Records.
Listen to Nell Mescal’s exclusive playlist to accompany The Cover below on Spotify or on Apple Music here.
Words: Lisa Wright
Photography: Hannah Cosgrove
Creative Direction (Artist): Lola Webster
Hair and Makeup: Jemima Greenhalgh
Styling: Lucy Isobel Bonner
Styling Assistance: Roksi Zityniuk
Studio Assistance: Izzy Fletcher
Cat: Bug c/o Rauri Cantelo
Label: Atlantic Records