EXCLUSIVE: Georgia Nott Is Ready to Stand Alone

Georgia Nott has been thinking about solo work for a long, long time. She’s worked with brother Caleb Nott on BROODS—a joyously familial indie-pop affair—for almost a decade now, watching the music world shimmer and refract around her in the process. In 2018, frustrated by the lack of female representation in the industry, Nott collaborated with an all-woman team on The Venus Project, producing the stripped-down 10-track LP Vol.1. The work highlighted Nott’s voice and vulnerability, as she toyed with the boundaries of her own musical roots.

“Easier to Run,” Nott’s first solo song in half a decade, comes out today under a new moniker, Georgia Gets By. The track is a meditation on avoidance–an emotional roadblock Nott works through with her music. “I feel like for me, the songs that I care about the most always come from this place where…I don’t even have my brain on,” she explains one afternoon on Zoom. “Those will always end up being like, my favorite songs, and they always end up being the songs where I look back and think, ‘Oh, I was trying to tell me something.’” In her LA studio, she mimes the cyclicality of it all in air-drawn circles, haloed by drum sets and guitars. Collaborators and friends flit through the screen’s background, repositioning mics and fiddling with instruments. They emulate a sense of forward propulsion that seems to infect Nott when I point it out: She loves being where she is. “I think it’s good to always be writing,” she smiles. “It keeps me sane. I’ve just been going around the studio, saying hello to all the instruments.”

After Vol. 1, Nott returned to work on BROODS, continuing to pump out infectious work. 2019’s Don’t Feed The Pop Monster is a sometimes dramatic, sometimes playful alt-pop celebration, and 2022’s Space Island is an ethereal, genre-spanning breakup record of epic proportions. As it is, the last couple of years have seen Nott go through a number of seismic personal metamorphoses. Married at the age of 21, she got a divorce in 2019–and then, being the cool indie maven that she is, a mullet. She felt herself growing up and out of the reality she’d known since 2013, living what she described as a “nomadic life” between America’s coastlines and her hometown of Auckland. In the chaos of COVID and its ever-rippling aftershocks, Nott began to write alone—though she assured us that BROODS is still well and alive. She and her brother found themselves encouraging each other through individual projects from far away. It was finally time for something different.

“I think being in the music industry for almost a decade, you find yourself wondering how to get back to that place, where you began, why you started writing music, the core of it,” Nott notes. In some ways, she feels herself just trying to “get by” without losing touch with the messy melting-pot of emotions that make her music so relatable. “It feels quite hard after a while to drown out the noise,” she explains of the pressurized side of it all. Nott tried to write “Easier to Run” like it would never be released—“in denial,” she jokes—so that she could do what she really wanted to. It worked, and she knew she had something good on her hands the moment her pen dropped.

“Easier to Run” is less embellished than some of BROODS’s musical maximalism, highlighting Nott’s crystallized soprano and a relentless guitar riff whose thrum underlays light, electric fingerpicking and chorus-centric drum bursts. Suzy Shinn engineered the song with her, tweaking the pulsing rhythms and diaristic, hooky lyrics. “And still I dream / We’re kids again / To feel your love / Till it turns to pain,” Nott sings, the crispness of her vocals intermeshing with a lyrical stab to the chest. The track is being released with an accompanying music video, directed by Silken Weinberg. In it, Nott reads her mail, makes dinner, does the dishes—all while brutally alone, enclosed in a claustrophobic, white apartment.

The history—and the pain—that inspires her new work are well-known to Nott, and she holds them gently. Much of her musical inspiration comes from her parents’ Neil Diamond records and her Catholic church involvement as a kid, a fact she looks on with complexity and compassion. “[Hymns were] the way that I learned to sing with other people, and the way I was around music revolved around playing in church,” she remembers. “You get so many of your instincts from that time in your life, the songs and artists that you were brought up on imprint on you.”

Nott is, at heart, a traditionalist. I bring up that the minimalist, organically oriented shift she’s taking in her own musical career coincides with the “AI music revolution,” her nose wrinkles in the way I’d hoped it might. “I’m such a purist,” she notes of her musicality. “The world’s only going to become more and more overstimulating, and I’m just sitting at this piano. And, as I’m playing it, the whole ground vibrates. You can’t really get that from anything but the real thing.” I ask Nott what’s behind her music, what throughline she carries. “Just love,” she shrugs. “Just like, that deep connectivity to everything that you get. That’s the whole thing.”

Miranda Wollen is Paste‘s music intern. She lives in New York and attends school in Connecticut, but you can find her online @mirandakwollen.

Listen to BROODS’ Daytrotter session from 2014 below.