Cellular change

“10 years of documenting my life in song,” is one way Nadia Reid describes the past decade. “The highest privilege” is another.

With the recording and announcement of her fourth album Enter Now Brightness – set for release on the 7^th of February 2025 on her own Slow Time Records in Aotearoa and new international label, Chrysalis Records for the rest of the world – comes a reassessment and reframing of so many of the 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”.

Indeed, much has changed since the release of her third album Out of My Province in 2020, including postponing plans to move to the UK amidst the pandemic and the birth of her first daughter Elliotte in July 2021. Her second, Goldie, arrived this past spring. Finally moving to Manchester, Reid’s experience of motherhood runs through the tracks on Enter Now Brightness, which sees her move further from her earlier folk inclinations as she establishes a sound all of her own.

It is an album, she says, of departure and questioning. One that has reminded her how songwriting can be “the most useful thing to do with pain and joy and thoughts and feelings and anger” and 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.”

Reid will play Meow on the 15^th of November.