Nada UV Perspective on Trust

I’m cheating because rules make me itch, so I’m picking three. “I’m Keeping the Moon” feels the closest to a personal motto, or maybe a tiny insane prayer. “Sex Is Where We Hide Things” is us sneaking a frisky little Carolyn Elliott-style existential kink idea into something that wanders around in a Bacharach dress. And “Die All the Time” sort of completes the triangle. It says a lot about how we see the world, while also fully working as a banger, which I respect.

If we as a committee had to choose one artist for the rest of our lives, which already feels unconstitutional, the current answer is Cocteau Twins, Electric Youth, and Future. Yes, that is three. We’re still in talks. Luckily “the rest of your life” is a long meeting.

We think “intellectual property” is one of those phrases that starts sounding crazier the longer you sit with it. Like, sorry, you own an idea? You put a fence around a feeling? Very Baltic Avenue energy, deeply unserious. Art is supposed to circulate. It’s a live wire, not a deed.

A lot of what passes for art discourse now is really just branding with a scarf on. Engagement, visibility, personal myth management, all this pressure to turn making something into maintaining a storefront for yourself. I don’t think that’s healthy for artists, and I definitely don’t think it’s healthy for listeners.

To us, the art doesn’t fully happen when we make it. It happens when somebody hears it and something in them shifts, or opens, or gets named. That part belongs to them. That’s the real event. Compared to that, who made it is... not irrelevant, exactly. Just much less sacred than people pretend. That’s a big reason we stay mostly anonymous. Also I’m nosy about other people and weirdly private about myself, which I think should still be allowed.

Nada UV is steamy, dreamy post-vaportrap noir for wounded lovers, overthinkers, and people with suspiciously good taste in exes considering the actual outcomes. A lot of our songs are about power, which is annoying because power is in basically everything once you start looking. Romance especially. You can examine that honestly, or you can let it roam around your house like an unsupervised pet snake. Neither path is exactly painless. One is just less likely to kill you.

Laura Vargas. One of the three people who started Nada UV. She sings, she instigates, she has intense emotional relationships with synthesizers, most of them positive.

When did I decide to be a performer? I don’t know, I think I keep deciding. It’s not one dramatic moment with a spotlight and a cigarette. It’s more like waking up and being like, okay, fine, again. I’ll go first.

We came out of vaporwave, and I think that never really leaves your bloodstream once it gets in there. Trust is probably the closest thing we have to synth-pop, if people need a bin to put it in. Then Gnosis on the Low End is more like postmodern G-funk, which sounds fake when I say it out loud, but it’s true. We’re not consistent people. We contain multitudes, regrettably and majestically.

Future, easily. Partly because I think emotional precision is sexier than emotional honesty, and he understands that in a very deep way. He can make decadence sound bleak, make nihilism sound gorgeous, make one line feel like a text you should not answer but absolutely will. That’s rare. Also I think there’s a real elegance in how committed he is to the bit, except it stops being a bit because the music is too alive. Touring with him would be educational. I’d learn things. Potentially dark things, but still.

We hand you the song, but that’s not the same thing as finishing it. You finish it. Or ruin it. Or misunderstand it so beautifully that it becomes something better than what we meant. Honestly that’s ideal. Please get a little unhinged with it.

"Genuine alien vintage," to crib from one of our favorite reviews.

We were the Cocteau Twins of vaportrap for a minute, which is a very glamorous way of saying we were floating around in a lot of reverb and feelings. Then we got weirdly devoted to Camper Van Beethoven, as one does. Now we’ve stopped trying to act like we’re above the groove. The funk is everywhere. We surrender.

It’s night music, mostly. Steamy but a little frostbitten. Like if desire had really good posture and a minor substance problem. There’s dream-pop in it, there’s vapor in it, there’s a little noir, a little cheap satin, a little expensive sadness. We like things that shimmer and then say something mildly devastating. Or funny. Ideally both. I guess I’d say Nada UV sounds like making one bad decision very slowly, in gorgeous lighting.

I try not to encourage this question because then people start imagining they know where your thoughts live, which is already too intimate. But probably somewhere extremely uncinematic, because that’s usually how it goes. Not on a cliff at sunrise. More like under fluorescent lighting, feeling spiritually unfabulous, when a line wanders in wearing heels. Inspiration has terrible timing and no respect for privacy. I admire that in her.

Honestly I’m very attached to the idea that music does not always need to arrive dragging a body behind it. My dream “performance” might not look like a performance in the usual sense at all. It might be a room that feels slightly unreal, excellent sound, people very dressed up or very undressed emotionally, no one trying to capture proof of themselves having a meaningful time. Maybe something happens, maybe it doesn’t. Maybe the song is enough. That’s kind of my fantasy in general: less extraction, more atmosphere.

I think it’s when you stop treating experience like raw material for productivity and start letting things be strange, specific, excessive, badly timed, full of mixed signals. An artistic outlook is partly attention, probably. You notice the texture of things. You let symbols embarrass themselves in front of you. You take beauty seriously without becoming corny about it, which is hard. It’s also about refusing dead language. Not just in art — in life. Not accepting the prefab explanation when a weirder, truer one is standing right there holding your coat.

That depends what counts as practice. I don’t really believe in overexposing the little rituals because then they stiffen up and start behaving for the camera, which is demonic. But yes, obviously. In some sense I think all artists are either practicing or avoiding practice in a highly developed way.

Mine has gotten less punitive over time, which I’m grateful for. Less “become a machine,” more “develop better listening.” Less proving, more noticing. I used to think practice meant forcing something to happen. Now I think it’s more like making yourself interruptible. You build a room in your mind and try to keep it clean enough that something unexpected will actually sit down for a minute.

This is maybe the meanest question people ask in a very friendly voice. I don’t have one favorite work of art because I’m not a constitutional monarchy. I have rotating obsessions, emotional support objects, things I need at different temperatures.

But the works I return to are usually the ones that don’t close after you encounter them. They keep leaking. They keep throwing off little spores into your life. Certain songs do that, obviously. Some films. Some paintings. Sometimes a book gets in there like a grain of sand and your whole personality grows around it for six months. I’m very loyal to that feeling. Art should rearrange the furniture a little.

Gary Numan / Tubeway Army, Charli XCX, and we'll hold the last spot for some lesser version of us that makes us look good by comparison. We're taking applications.