HICKEY, CHARLIE 'NERVOUS AT NIGHT'

Release Datum: 20.05.2022
Born into a musical family, as a child Charlie Hickey would obsessively watch videos of his parents on tour in their old band Uma, learning all the lyrics that he loved but didn't understand. This introduction to music sowed a seed, and Hickey was soon writing songs of his own, playing on the guitars that lay around him and singing about the little details of his school days. He continued throughout his teen years, his songs becoming an outlet for the growing anxieties that Hickey now understands to be Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. This journey has led to Nervous At Night, Hickey's debut album which releases in the early Summer of 2022 via Phoebe Bridgers' Saddest Factory Records. Where 2021's Count The Stairs EP was an attempt to capture the rawness of his performance, Nervous At Night comes alive within its production, Hickey and producer Marshall Vore leaning into their perfectionist tendencies to find the best version of each track. Hickey calls it a pop record but admits that sonically it moves in many directions, an amalgamation of his love for the folk singers of yesteryear and more contemporary peers, from Taylor Swift and The 1975 to the Californian songwriter and producer Blake Mills. This shifting of styles - from the album's quiet heavy-hearted ballads to its more gleaming, hookled tracks - mirrors its overarching theme: life's graceless passage between teenage years and adulthood. Nervous At Night comes alive in its juxtapositions, chronicling the constant push and pull of life, both its stagnancy and motion. Chiefly though, this is an album about connection, how even through those struggles we rely on the people around us to keep moving forwards.