Medium Build uses music to create the community he was always searching for

Medium Build was in the fourth grade the first time he got a taste for the spotlight. It was his church’s Christmas concert, and he’d landed a solo singing ‘O Come, O Come, Emmanuel’. “I was like, ‘I’m a star’,” he jokes wryly over a video call with NME from his home in Alaska.

Growing up in the suburbs of Atlanta, the artist – real name Nick Carpenter – was heavily involved in a nondenominational church he describes as “Baptist lite”, the congregation becoming some of his first audiences. But inklings of a deeper passion for music came to the fore after watching a teen’s acoustic set in his hometown, helping a 10-year-old Carpenter to realise his own dreams of one day doing the same. “From then on, I was like, ‘This is the goal – play in front of people and make them laugh and cry and feel stuff.”

Throughout his teenage years, Carpenter learned guitar and started writing his own songs, cutting his teeth by playing local coffee shop gigs. He would go on to study songwriting at college in Nashville, but such an overtly commercial outlook wasn’t conducive to the rugged authenticity of artists he admired like Damien Rice and Glen Hansard. “It took me like a long time to figure out my identity,” he says.

Now settled in Alaska – a “fertile” ground for uncorrupted creativity – Medium Build’s vulnerable and rough-edged outpourings inspired by love, queer identity and spiritual restlessness can be heard throughout his four albums. Drawing influence from genre niches ranging from bedroom pop, ‘80s new wave and folk rock, his one constant is a bold and unfiltered approach to lyricism, helping to land him major support slots with kindred spirits like Lewis Capaldi and Finneas last year.

Ahead of a support stint with Holly Humberstone this month and another big announcement coming very soon, Medium Build takes stock after a “surreal” 12 months as he prepares to head out on the road again. “It’s gonna be a great year,” he says optimistically.

What was it like when you started to break away from the church and explore your own musical instincts?

“It was definitely a huge spiritual conflict, because I really believed it. I was super in. I thought I was the best of both worlds. I was like Hannah Montana. All day Sunday I was at church. And then on the weekdays, I’d be at school and I’d be hanging in orchestra and chorus, and I’d be going over to my stoner friend’s house, and we’d be in a jam band.

“I basically had a split personality, and around 18 or 19 I started realising that there was a crack in my beliefs. And I was like, ‘I don’t think I actually believe this stuff. I think I just really like being in a community’.”

What was the music scene like growing up in Atlanta? 

“In the early aughts, it was all about emo hardcore. [There were] all the skinniest little emo boys, they all had high voices. And it’s weird because I was this chubby kid with a lower voice and I really wanted to be in that scene. So I would go participate, but I didn’t know how to make music like that. Most kids my age were doing Fall Out Boy, Weezer type of stuff. But it was just kids noodling in a basement.

“I don’t think I found community until I started playing coffee shops, and it was kind of in that folk revival thing, like The Avettt Brothers, Mumford and Sons, Laura Marling. So I kind of left the emo thing and realised you can pretty much just be emo with an acoustic guitar.”

Much of your artistic identity is closely tied with living in Alaska. What does it bring out in your work?

“This place is just so far removed from America. Because of its physical distance, it gets forgotten spiritually, politically and socially. It’s just this very weird place where there’s shitty American maximalism right next to the most beautiful unity with the land. And that’ll fuck with your head so hard. I just grew here. I was so insecure from coming out of that college scene in Nashville, it was kind of pretentious. And I didn’t know how to be myself. Alaskans are more like, ‘Are you phoney or not?’ They don’t really care if it’s ‘the best’. It’s like, ‘Do you mean it?’”

What was it like taking your technical education from college and combining it with your own artistry in a way that felt authentic?

“[I went to college] highly interested and then was given tools to sharpen. My mentor was like, ‘Show, don’t tell’. If I showed up [in Alaska] and I was like, ‘Here’s how a song goes’ and I gave them that assembly line shit, I think that Alaskans would have been like, ‘Boo!’ But I showed up and I was like, ‘I hate the music industry. I’m burnt out. I’m lost. I’m trying to figure out what I’m doing’, and I just worked through all my material and they could tell I really liked singing and I meant it. It was just such a fertile place to be broken and work on my shit.”

What can fans expect from your new music?

“This has been one of the coolest years of my life, but also one of the loneliest, weirdest years of my life. There’s a lot of sadness on the [new songs]. I kind of fell in and out of love a couple of times, and I’ve had my life kind of turned upside down like three or four times this year, with all the touring and being gone, so there’s just a lot of feelings. But to me, when I listen back it feels cohesive, it feels cosy. It feels warm. It’s close to my heart, so I think people will definitely be knowing some shit about me at the end.”

What are you hoping to bring to the stage this year?

“I think this Holly tour is going to be so good. Her UK fans are just so intense. Being able to do the Apollo with her in London in March is going to be crazy. But also, she can do huge rooms in the UK, but then when we go to like, Luxembourg, it’s like 300 people, so we both get to go in and out of trying new stuff. Shaking up your markets is good, it humbles you. You should just show up, play the show, remember that it’s a show, it’ll end, everyone will go to sleep, everyone will forget it, have fun.”

What’s something you’d like to achieve in 2024?

“I just want to relax. I need to lower my heart rate and remember that I didn’t really architect all of this, and it will come and it will go. I need to loosen my grip. I want to achieve acceptance that I am living right now, and if I sold Zach Bryan or Noah Kahan level of tickets, I’d still have to deal with my own head.

“So I’m trying to get to a level of peace now that I think I haven’t been able to find the past couple years as I’ve been trying to grind it out and get to the next hurdle. All this shit will go away. I’ll be 70 years old one day and no one will care. I want to enjoy this shit. I need to get out of my head and just be present.”

Medium Build is currently supporting Holly Humberstone on her UK and EU tour through March 16. Head here for tickets and further information

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