The Sarah Nimmo debut LP How Can I Explain Myself? is out now on all major streaming platforms, arriving as the London-based artist steps away from a decade of collaborative work and into something altogether more exposed: a solo record that asks, with some insistence, who she actually is.
After years fronting Nimmo alongside childhood friend Reva Gauntlett, Nimmo has written, for the first time, a collection of songs that belong entirely to her. The album was born from a period she describes as one of uncertainty, excitement and self-discovery, the uncomfortable, itchy process of figuring out what comes next when a long creative partnership ends and the studio suddenly falls quiet.
A Record Built in Solitude, Released into Community
What she found in that silence, it turns out, was groove. How Can I Explain Myself? is not a confessional record in the sparse, acoustic sense. It draws on ’80s synth-pop and ’90s Britpop influences, wrapping its identity questions in euphoric dance music and production that moves. The lyrics grapple with reinvention and accountability; the sound suggests someone who has arrived, or is at least enjoying the journey towards arriving.
The lead single, ‘The Soul’, is where that tension lands most squarely. ‘It’s a song about returning,’ Nimmo explains, ‘and by returning I don’t mean backtracking, I mean coming back to a place of truth and meaning.’ The track is accompanied by a Cronenberg-esque noir visual, and its chorus has the quality of something wrested out rather than composed: raw, emotionally exposed, precise. Nimmo describes it as ‘probably the first time I was really honest with myself in a big chorus lyric. Accepting my own faults as much as acknowledging the pain I felt.’
Elsewhere on the record, ‘Night & Day’ sits restlessly alongside the dance-inflected ‘I Still Miss You’, both of them circling the ache of a relationship that has ended. The album does not wallow, but it does not flinch either.
The Sarah Nimmo Debut LP and the Community Behind It
The audience that has followed her here did not appear from nowhere. During the Nimmo years, she and Gauntlett ran Nimmo Curates, a series of all-female line-ups designed to champion women in music and promote their work outside the conventional touring model. It built something that looks, in retrospect, rather like infrastructure: a loyal, close-knit community that has stayed put as Nimmo transitions into her solo chapter. A sold-out East London show in February, and the volume of support across her social media ahead of this release, suggest the audience has moved with her without much persuading.
The creative shift has been internal as much as logistical. ‘I think there was, at first, so much room for evolution and so much patience from myself,’ she says of the solo process. ‘My own schedule was very freeing and really opened up the creative pathways in my head and heart again. Suddenly they were like huge valleys.’ She describes the early solo sessions in terms of deliberate aimlessness: sitting on the grass with her dogs, playing a strange cover for three hours for no particular reason, waiting for something to pour out. ‘That is all very new, that way of working.’
Honesty, she says, is the only advice she would give to any artist considering a similar move. ‘The industry is a farce at the moment,’ she says plainly, ‘and I won’t say that hasn’t gotten to me at times. But just honesty with yourself is enough to move something strong forwards.’
The Sarah Nimmo debut LP will be brought to the stage on 7 July, when she headlines The Lower Third in Soho, London. She is already well into writing her second album. The summer, she says, will be much writing of new material and prepping for that show. ‘You should come,’ she adds, with a wink that is hard to argue with. For those looking to start, Adonis (one of the queer spaces she names as a personal favourite) will not steer you wrong in the meantime.
