Enter Now Brightness (LP)

Lately, Nadia Reid has been thinking about the past decade. "Ten years of documenting my life in song," is one way she describes it. "The highest privilege" is another. With the recording and announcement of her fourth album, Enter Now Brightness, released 7th February on her own Slow Time Records in Aotearoa and new international label, Chrysalis Records for the rest of the world has come a reassessment of so many moments across those years. "You have points in life that when you look back you see were a time of almost cellular change," she says; a realisation now that so many of these new songs have been drawn from the times when "all my cells were changing."

Much had changed since Out of My Province, the album she released in early March 2020. Reid toured the record as best she could, she put on hold her plans to move to the UK, attended to the steady rhythms of living. In July of 2021, she gave birth to her first daughter, Elliotte; her second, Goldie, arrived this past Spring. Shortly before, Reid finally relocated to the UK, settling in Manchester.

Enter Now Brightness is a record of poise and great beauty, the sound of a cellular shift, of pain giving way to tenderness and joy. Reid was pregnant during its creation, and plagued by morning sickness - there are photos of her asleep on the studio sofa and memories of vomiting between takes. But she found impending motherhood, and, later, the intricate process of raising her daughter, brought a new focus for songwriting. It runs through the tracks on Enter Now - including the exquisite new single 'Baby Bright'.

"When my first daughter was born she had these massive bright blue eyes - she still does. And when she was born I did have this really intense drive to create - I felt very invigorated. Everything felt sharper and accessible and it all came to the surface." Reid reveals of the song.

For the first time in her career, Reid entered the studio (with long-standing guitarist Sam Taylor and producer Tom Healy (Tiny Ruins, Marlon Williams)) without a clutch of songs written and ready to record. There were half-songs and sketches and lyrics untethered from music. "There was a revelation of: it doesn't have to be finished, it doesn't have to be a perfect song before it's taken to the band." The results find Reid moving ever further from her earlier folk inclinations, establishing a sound that is distinctly her own.

"I think for me, becoming a mother brought all of [the issues of] the inner child and all of my own mothering right back up to the surface," she says. "A lot of women say that when they've had babies they've said to their own mums 'Thank you so much!' because they have this revelation of what their mother's sacrificed for them. And I guess I had that in a different way."

Enter Now feels different. It is an album, she says, of departure and questioning, that has reminded her how songwriting can be "the most useful thing to do with pain and joy and thoughts and feelings and anger." That through music we can find great change. "I'm so much better off now that it exists," she says. "Now feels like a new time."