A powerful embodiment of brooding neon bubbles and simmering indie pop, the brand new track Fucking Your Style from Tasmanian singer-songwriter Nuria bustles with gleaming empowerment and Nuria’s profound vocals. A dazzling follow up to Nuria’s recent track Graffiti, Fucking Your Style is ultimately a full-blown anthem to liberation that we all need in spades in 2022. Nuria graciously took some time for a quick Q+A, check it out!

Hi, thanks for taking the time to chat with Hear 2 Zen, what have you been up to today?

Thanks for having me! I went to work and changed several nappies and wiped significant levels of snot from all my children’s noses. I’m living my best life of glamour here!

Tell us about yourself, how long have you been performing/creating music for? 

I’ve been playing music since I was very little, in particular piano and singing. Music has always been a part of my life and songwriting became a very key part of navigating my adolescence. So many mournful songs of unrequited love written during that time! What I love so much about making music is the opportunity to turn powerful – sometimes painful – emotions into something big and moving and almost celebratory of the magnitude of those feelings. And then the absolute cherry on the cake is that the music might in turn move other people and connect with those big feelings in them – that is the pinnacle of what I could hope to achieve with music.

Who are your greatest inspirations?  Why?

My inspirations change throughout the decades of my life and the stages I am in. But I think my longest standing inspiration has been Missy Higgins. She was my complex internal adolescent world made beautiful and learning and playing her music taught me how to find my own musical voice. I feel like I grew up in parallel with her over the last 20 years. Experiencing similar personal and existential challenges, having a family and growing older. And what I admire so much in her is how unchanged she seems to be despite her world-wide stardom, maintaining the same down-to-earth nature she had when she was a teenager. 

How do you create music?  Are you lyrics/story driven, or does the music/melody come first?  Explain your process.

Usually my music is emotion driven – that being the impetus to write. The emotion is not necessarily hinged on a particular situation or story but is based on the feeling alone. When I sit down at the keyboard with that feeling I explore the sounds until I find something that matches the emotion. After that the lyrics unfold and what comes out is often surprising. It might be a memory from long ago that reflects the emotional space I’m in, or it might be dream or an exploration of a different reality. If I were to use the analogy of a painting its like the image is a feeling and the colours and textures I use to create that feeling might be abstract, not in themselves explicitly linked to reality. I am often amused when people hear my music and ask me if I’m ok and  have to reassure them ‘Yes I’m ok! This was about a break-up 15 years ago. My marriage isn’t on the rocks I promise!’

What has been your greatest challenge so far in performing/creating music?

The hardest part for me is self promotion. The very reason I started making music was because I was a quiet, introspective girl. I had poor self-esteem and constantly questioned myself and my place in the world. I’ve grown with that but that insecure core still remains and so the idea of sharing my music and promoting it on the wide world of social media etc feels in constant conflict with my natural instincts. I oscillate between excitement to share my music with a total cringing sense of overshare!

Tell us about your new release Fucking Your Style, how did it come about?

I can’t remember the specific event but it was some situation in which I felt the weight of being the complicated, imperfect creature that I am. I had that deep regret and a sense of being burdensome on those around me. This was such a familiar space, my default need to ‘better’ myself. And then somewhere from the nether up bubbled a different perspective. An idea that maybe, actually maybe, I am ok just the way I am. And so this song grew, a passionate expression of owning all the bits of myself. It was such a fun song to write. I didn’t know if I’d ever release it, though, and it was my husband who finally convinced me. He loves the track, and all the ‘fucked-up-ness’, which was a pretty beautiful thing to discover really – in owning my complexities I finally realised the people in my life love me just the way I am. So, scary as it feels, here it is. Shit happens. People are weird. But life would be pretty dull if a few of us weren’t a bit fucked up, hey?

What advice do you have to artists who are just starting out?

 It’s never too late to start! I feel like a bit of an old lady these days but I look back to earlier times in my life when I might have thought of starting something new and I remember thinking at age 13, 15, 18, 25 or whatever – ‘Oh I’m too old to become a dancer, or I’m too old to learn to play guitar,’ and I’ve always kicked myself since that I didn’t start then. Imagine how good I’d be by now! So just do whatever it is you want to do and start now. Post menopausal ladies might be the new pop Queens!

Tell us your favourite Zen practice.

Gardening. It is the most nourishing, beautiful, wholesome process. It teaches me patience, hope, gratitude and wonder in the magic of our natural world. It saves me gym memberships, vitamin D tablets, psychology session, improves gut health and the microbiome. I honestly think if more people grew even a tiny portion of the food they ate the burden on the healthcare system would be dramatically reduced. Anyway. Sorry. Bit left field there.

Thanks for the great questions x

MORE ABOUT NURIA

With moody synths, simmering beats and swooning, layered soundscapes, Fucking Your Style collides the effortless stylings of Nuria with producer Sam Phay and Peter Holz mixing and mastering, with the end result presenting as entirely polished, poised and creamier than a New York cheesecake. Embracing inspiration from some of Nuria’s girl power icons, Lorde, Lily Allen and fellow-Aussie G-Flip, Fucking Your Style is an emphatic, passionate and boundless barrel of indie pop and electronic undertones, while also flying the flag for self-awareness and truly being okay with who you are, as Nuria explains, “This is a song about owning my complexities. I’ve spent years beating myself up for feeling ‘a little bit fucked up’ and living apologetically with that baggage. ‘Fucking Your Style’ is a song I wrote when I had that feeling in a big way and I was done with it. I finally thought ‘fuck this, this is the way I am, and you can take it or leave it but I’m going to stop apologising for it now – I’m not going to be anyone’s liability.’ It was a totally liberating and empowering song to write and I still feel that way when I play it”. 

While only releasing into the world today, Fucking Your Style is a track Nuria’s been sitting on for a while, with the latest single following a string of stunning musical collections from the Tassie-based pianist and singer-songwriter. Releasing her debut full length album Alive in 2020, and a follow up in Silver in 2021, Nuria’s free-spirited and finely-honed sonic wiles have seen her gain airplay on ABC and community radio across Australia, while also snagging attention from local and international audiences along the way. Uplifting, exciting and always surging with authentic momentum, Nuria has also had singles from her debut album feature in the Top 10 of the 2020 Australian Songwriters, as well as songs also previously selected in the International Unsigned Only competition semi-finals. 

A mother to three children, four sheep, three ducks and three chickens, when Nuria isn’t weaving musical magic, she can be found in the garden, writing novels, or working part time as a GP. And while her idyllic surrounds growing up in Tasmania’s Huon Valley undoubtedly feed into her entirely immersive creations, Nuria is first and foremost a realist, a straight-shooter, and, most resoundingly, a lover of music, as she concludes, “I’m just a slightly fucked up normal person (isn’t that the very definition of normal?). I’m no teenage pop princess and there’s nothing particularly cool about me but I’ll tell it straight and I’m going to keep making music because it’s the language of my heart”. 

Fucking Your Style is out NOW