GROWING PAINS AND HAPPY ENDINGS

OPENING HER HEART IN HER MUSIC HAS HELPED NELL MESCAL BUILD A DEDICATED FANBASE, BUT THERE'S PLENTY OF ROOM FOR HOPE TOO, THE 21-YEAR-OLD REVEALS, AS SHE RELEASES HER DEBUT EP

- NICK REILLY

LAST SUMMER, NELL Mescal found herself on the receiving end of some blunt wisdom from Florence Welch, after she supported the singer at a massive outdoor gig in Cork. “I saw her watching my set, and she came up to me afterwards. She just held me and said, ‘You need better friends!’” the 21-year-old tells Rolling Stone UK in a north London boozer.

“I had to tell her, ‘No, I swear I have better ones now!’” In fairness to Welch, anyone giving Mescal’s music the most casual of listens could be forgiven for drawing that very same conclusion. When the singer, from Maynooth, in Kildare, Ireland, released her debut single ‘Graduating’ in July 2022, it drew on her experiences of bullying and a tough time at school, which eventually led her to drop out without graduating. More recently, the stirring ‘Warm Body’, taken from her debut EP Can I Miss It for a Minute?, is about “growing up and navigating relationships with the worry that the people you love will leave you”.

Tough times like these are a common thread through Mescal’s music, sure, but she says that her debut EP is rooted in the universality of it all — there’s a certain amount of joy to be found in knowing that these experiences are things that we’ve all probably gone through at some point.

“I think the overarching message of this EP is knowing that everyone’s gone through this. It’s not, like, a solo experience, and I’m the only person who’s ever been through a friendship break-up that has felt like the end of the world. All of my friends have been through them, and we’re friends because we talked about it.”