Nervus: Unlocking The Mind
When you’ve spent eight years building your band’s identity around just that, there’s nothing like a global pandemic to shake things up. For NERVUS guitarist and vocalist Em Foster, her entire identity changed overnight. They downed tools, didn’t book a single thing back in, and found themselves hundreds of miles apart.
“We usually spend so much time together in a van on tour, but we live far apart from each other, so when we go home, we’re 100 miles away from other members, so we didn’t see each other. Not having my closest friends around, that was a weird one,” sighs Foster on a sunny afternoon spent driving round Central London. “I couldn’t afford to be a full-time musician with no music so I ended up getting a different job, and Paul’s [Etienne, keyboardist] a parent now.”
“I wouldn’t say anything is worse than it was which I feel very lucky for saying, but it is very different, we’ve all shifted around a bit in terms of where we are, who we are, and what we’re doing.”
Whilst everything was up in the air, it wasn’t such a bad thing for the band. It’s shaken things up, sure, but it could be for the better as Foster, Etienne, bassist Lucinda Livingstone and drummer Jack Kenny enter the era of The Evil One. “I think that’s why the album sounds like it does, because when we tried fitting back into the NERVUS mould, it wasn’t the same shape anymore. It was like we became a different band whilst being entirely isolated from one another.”
From the sun-rising harmonies of indie-pop opener Iconoclast to Absolute Yuck’s chirping birds’ Americana finale, The Evil One sounds like a different band to the one that made 2019’s Tough Crowd. With so much time on their hands, they must’ve found themselves swimming deep in new musical influences. “Coming out of the pandemic, I didn’t want to listen to much of anything. It was strange because obviously music is such a big part of my life, of everyone’s life, but there wasn’t much I felt like I wanted to listen to.”
So if the records weren’t spinning round their heads, how did NERVUS level up their next evolution? “During the writing process, I worked with Dylan Baldi from Cloud Nothings, doing guitar lessons with a focus on song writing,” Foster muses, fondly remembering the sessions. “We spent those sessions going through NERVUS tunes, bouncing ideas back and forth. I’d come with half a phone demo, spend an hour with him on it, and end up with something quite different to build a song out of from there.”
With a new perspective on writing tunes, Em suddenly started listening to music whilst writing. Along with Cloud Nothing’s indie-infused emo, The Evil One is soaked in the sounds of the seventies. Apart from taking it’s title from a ROKY ERICKSON album, Foster admits she was “listening to a lot of EAGLES, NEIL YOUNG and 70’s psychedelic stuff.”
Not only did they have a new perspective on how NERVUS should sound, Foster formed a new perspective on what they should say. Follow the breadcrumbs back to Tough Crowd, and you’ll find the seeds were beginning to sew. “It was a deliberate choice to zoom out. Tough Crowd was more macro than Everything Dies, but it was still specific – there wasn’t room to let people think what they wanted to think about the songs, they were plainly about a or b, or x or y, it wasn’t great for people to interpret.”
To NERVUS, Tough Crowd felt “nailed to a time and place” whereas The Evil One sees “time as elastic, so by not being quite so explicit in the way I speak about issues allows it to not be nailed to a certain point. Lyrically, too, it’s more to do with communal experiences and responses to the way we experience time.”
It’s not NERVUS’ guide to time either, it’s made for you to listen and apply your own perception to it. Zoom out on its themes and you’ll find everything from capitalism and climate change to colonialism and fascism goes under the microscope. But it all goes back to The Evil One. “It’s a riff on how capitalism is deeply individualistic,” Foster states clearly, before taking the wrong turn lost in thought. “You’re taught to prioritise your own personal gains over the welfare of everyone around you, it’s about hustling and grinding until you’re the top of the pile, which means neglecting your own needs, and other people’s needs. It’s a zoomed in, hyper-focused view of yourself in an unhealthy way.”
“I think the idea of The Evil One as a title was this concept of there being no such thing as a self-made person, because the fact is we’re all highly interdependent, not only on each other, but on our environments and ecosystems, the nonhuman parts of the world, and capitalism depends on us being able to isolate ourselves from that in order to exploit it. But it’s also just a stupid title we stole cause it’s always sounded funny.”
Sounding funny aside, The Evil One wraps up serious conversations in festival-ready sing-alongs. It’s meant to be accessible, an album that allows room for critical thinking. It’s something Foster is keen to encourage in their fans because it felt like it fell away when reality’s wheel began to turn again. “I think the rush to get back to normal, to have the ability to socialise, meant they forgot all the stuff that just happened. But with the cost of living going up and the way people are being treated by the home office, we’re seeing this massive increase in awareness of that, and people standing up for their rights at work and their rights as tenants and so on.”
Whilst people’s eyes are opening again, it’s a painful process of critical, independent thinking. For Foster, the “‘general anger’ we’re seeing is because ‘people don’t have a shared language to express why they’re angry, they can’t see that these experiences to an extent are universal, yet unevenly distributed.”
Wrapped up in all this is an old-age debate that floats through the album: freedom of speech. “People don’t have the language to accommodate their feelings, they’re deprived of language. If you have everyone speaking the same language, you have a cultural idea of what is or isn’t acceptable to say and speak, and I daren’t invoke the phantom of free speech, because it’s bandied about by every idiot under the sun right now, but there is a limit to how we can think about things.”
The Evil One is a challenging album. Whilst you’re welcome to come for the bops, NERVUS hope you walk away with something to think about. Because as far as Foster’s concerned, right now we’re not allowed. “If you said to someone policing is incredibly violent and doesn’t achieve anything, the first thing they will say is ‘what do you propose instead?’ because people can’t imagine an alternative to being oppressed, so they presume it’s the only way,” she suggests, pausing to ponder. “Society and culture teaches us that it’s totally normal to think you’re left with a limited set of options, because a bunch of people think a certain way about stuff, so everyone else is only allowed to talk in a certain way.”
Ultimately, The Evil One questions our perception of the very fabric of our societal norms. It doesn’t shy away from challenging everything you’ve ever known. And it’s happy to offer alternative ways of thinking. “We only view human intelligence as being valid, we don’t think of collective intelligence that you see in ant colonies or beehives as being intelligent; it’s not given the credit it’s due in terms of how incredibly complex, organised, intelligent and efficient it is. I think we’re blind to that, because of our disconnection to those things cause we’re kept in a cycle of having to work to survive.”
Foster feels like a future fix for the political mess we’re muddying through these days, yet they’re not about to stand up on a soapbox and preach to the choir. But with a growing platform on which to speak, do they feel a responsibility to use it well? “Yes and no – our platform is tiny! I feel like I have a role in the same way anyone else has a role. I have the benefit of studying environmental science, where information and knowledge is ring-fenced and has a price on it, so I feel like taking that knowledge out of those places and sharing that is one of my responsibilities.”
“But in terms of an increased responsibility than anyone else, I don’t think so – we all have our own platforms, we all have people we speak to, we’re all in communities with other people. Everyone’s got social media with a few followers, so if I’ve got a platform, everyone’s got a platform.”
Just like NERVUS changing the fabric of their band, The Evil One is your opportunity to change your perspective. Even if you disagree with what they’ve got to say, they want you to escape the echo chamber capitalism has built around us.
“I just hope they engage with it critically, think about stuff beyond the songs. It’s about what they do externally from the album, if it affects the way they think about things, or even if they disagree, that’s cool, it’s good to disagree. I’m not saying this album will actually help in any way, but if anyone does engage with it and they think longer about something they haven’t thought about, or even if the tune just gets stuck in their head, that’s cool.”
The Evil One is out now via Get Better Records.
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