Introducing: nyck

Late last year saw Melbourne duo nyck (pronounced n.y.c.k) upload their debut single Decision to triple j Unearthed, a track that captured the hearts/minds/ears of many in a very short period of time. What followed was a sold out single launch and an Emma Louise support, and with 2017 well underway it's time for the twosomes to keep the ball rolling.

With a full national support of Amy Shark on the horizon, we got to know them better following the release of gorgeous follow-up single, Speak My Mind:

Tell us about yourselves?

I'm Nick Acquroff together with Dominique Garrard we’re friends from Melbourne who make music under the nyck moniker. We met over email, because Dom was singing over a score that me and a friend made for another friend’s film. And then a few months later all sorts of stuff started going to hell in my life (first-world), and I wrote these songs that were brutally honest about how pathetic and lively and lonely and happy and useless and drunk it was. An EP of songs that played out in chronological order that I didn’t want anyone to hear. And it just felt like Dom would make them so much better. And she did. She made them way better.

Now we work together on everything, from singing to writing to playing live together. Regular pals.

What kinda music are talking?

It’s super honest lyrically. Stories that are really literal and to the point and raw. Then we sing over them in harmony, trying to leave all the lyrics enough room to breathe. But there’s this other thing we love and it’s the scrappiness. We’re both pretty shit at our instruments so there’s this looseness to everything we do. In the beginning, we tried to hide our little scraps and mistakes, but then we started leaving them in our recordings and it made everything so much better. So on our releases you’ll hear all these little mistakes and little snippets of songs and conversations from when we accidentally left the microphone on in the studio. You just don’t hear mistakes that much in music anymore. And we think mistakes make it more real.

Production/writing process:

I wrote the songs on our first EP and then Dom and me would work them up into demos in my studio in my miniature bedroom. Then we worked together with a few producers including Ben McCarthy and Dragan Roganovic. For the most part we worked with Hayden Calnin, who has become a really close mate. He’s got a beautiful studio in Collingwood with a big old grand piano and we recorded most of it there late at night and early in the morning. And he’s also brought something deeper and more real to the songs.

Can you tell us about your latest single, Speak My Mind and your upcoming EP?

Our EP tells a snippet of a story about my life over 12 weeks last year. It’s about the way that for some reason every so often, everything wholesale goes to shit and you’ve got to start again. So every song on our EP tells a story within that 12 week period last year when everything went a bit awry. The first two songs are mostly about a break up.  Our first song, Decision, was about the way you feel in the days immediately after you break up with someone you’ve loved for years and years. The sadness and relief. Our second single, Speak My Mind, is about the few weeks before that. When you both want out but don’t quite know how to make it happen. That breaking point that you reach and the decision that you finally make to speak your mind in the face of how fucking worried you are about the other person.

What’s the rest of the year have in store?

We’re about to go on a few months of epic touring, which will be fun. We’re going around the country with Amy Shark and Timberwolf, to Brisbane (twice), Melbourne, Sydney, Perth, Tassie. Then we’re doing a regional Australia tour (which will be sick) with Felix Riebel. Then we’ve got our own Speak My Mind singe shows in Melbourne and Sydney.

Then we’ll sleep. Then release our EP in the middle of the year. Then finish our album. Then tour again. I haven’t told my manager yet but I want to go to Europe for a holiday. What a great year!

Where can we hear more of your music?

We love SPOTIFY, use it every day. Thats probably the best place to hear what we’ve done. But we also have our songs on iTUNES and SOUNDCLOUD.

Follow nyck: FACEBOOK