Nate Amos, the artist behind This Is Lorelei, has released a new album reflecting his path to sobriety and personal growth. His prolific output spans various styles, shaped by his experiences with addiction.
Since launching This Is Lorelei in 2012, Amos has built a reputation as a versatile musician rooted in indie and alt-country influences. His latest work was completed shortly after signing with Matador Records.
For most of his life, Nate Amos made music just to get through the day. There was plenty of it: dozens of self-produced albums and EPs uploaded – since his This Is Lorelei project launched in 2012 – to what was then a plucky, independent platform called Bandcamp. Now 35, he is perhaps the quintessential Bandcamp artist: part bedroom-pop whiz, part alt-country troubadour, part indie rock rascal with a big, heavy heart. His peers treat him like a lost folk hero from a bygone era.
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Amos is sitting in the basement of a cafe in Camden Town, north London, cradling an iced matcha; coffee makes him “feel like shit”, he says, and he no longer indulges such foibles. The title of one of those Bandcamp albums, OK N8, is tattooed on his knuckles. A friend inked it a few years ago, soon after Amos got sober. “Exactly when you’re not supposed to be making decisions like getting a tattoo on your hand,” he jokes. His active blue eyes dance around behind a golden-brown fringe and an unruly, woodchip beard. In a tough spot he will swing back in his chair and search for answers that always seem to be hiding beneath the table. But each time he stumbles upon the truth, he looks up with a hungry smile.
Amos recorded his new album, The Singer in My Band, at the Brooklyn apartment he moved into in 2017. It had a “punk house vibe” then, but as housemates moved on, he gradually took over the place. The home studio setup allows him to work fast, the only way he knows. He may speak in a slow drawl, but his torrential work ethic belies any affinity with slackerdom. He finished the new record before signing to Matador, but kept its existence a secret from the label (also home to his other band, art-rock misfits Water from Your Eyes). “I sent them the completed album within half an hour of signing the contract,” he says, stirring his bright green drink with a straw. “I was like: ‘Actually, it’s done!’”
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The Singer in My Band is alarmingly jaunty – an outlier in a bric-a-brac catalogue that has noodled from sad chamber pop to murky post-punk to midsize indie anthems. He knocks out twangy riffs, hearty harmonies and bunnyhopping basslines that hark back to his childhood under the spell of his bluegrass-maestro father, Bob Amos. Had he made something so ripe and bucolic a decade ago, you might have assumed it was a joke.
In truth, Amos has always had a country soul. He was born in Denver but felt more at home in rural Vermont, where his family holidayed and eventually moved to a house on the side of a mountain. He was 14 then, and getting sick of school. “I lashed out, like teenagers do,” he says wryly. By 16, he was skipping classes to hang out on dirt roads, smoke weed and absorb the influence of more seasoned truants. Daunted by the busyness of impending adulthood, he spent the best part of six months tripping on psychedelics. “I did a pretty good number on myself.”
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He graduated, somehow, and settled in Chicago in his early 20s. Music fascinations proliferated. He made psychedelic beats for rappers, throttled electric guitars in bands, occasionally shuttled around to play bluegrass with Dad. This Is Lorelei emerged from the chaos, with songs that burbled like Animal Collective one month and thrashed like Hüsker Dü the next.
He was still well acquainted with vices he now lumps together as “substance issues”. Looking back, he sees his all-consuming focus on music and drugs as a way to defer a brewing storm. “You find ways to be excited when you’re younger, and for me that was through drugs. I settled into what, at the time, I was sure was going to be a pattern of just being a lifelong addict.”
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Despite courting a hectic social life, he craved peace and quiet – the kind he left behind in Vermont. “People say they’re born in the wrong generation: they’re talking about the 60s or whatever. I honestly feel like I would have been a happier person working on a farm 300 years ago.” The closest he could get was “drowning out bad noise through substances, dumbing myself down to a point where it felt like things were simple”.
That bad noise re-emerged in his music. He was briefly banned from the online distributor Distrokid for uploading so many epic drone dirges he was flagged as a bot. A deluge of similarly experimental work was themed around “technology corrupting nature”, he says, but he portrays it less as an art concept than as a symptom of anxiety and depression. “The beauty was in the unknown, because I was having such a hard time with the known.”
His shaggy, lurking presence at shows became a source of intrigue to Rachel Brown, a fellow music obsessive in Chicago’s DIY scene. They became a band and, once he got a haircut, a couple. As Water from Your Eyes, the duo ran a long-distance operation making silly, stoned electropop while Brown studied film and television at New York University. In 2017, Amos left Chicago to join them. The band and friendship survived their breakup two years later.
At the time, Amos responded to their split by mainlining Blink-182’s All the Small Things on repeat. Its quick hooks and stupid charm felt like a signal in a world of noise. Still his low mood lingered. Doctors prescribed heavy medication that sometimes helped, sometimes dragged him deeper into a funk. In 2020, he started dating Al Nardo, now his fiance and a live member of both bands. He gave up drink and hard drugs a year later. Weed filled the void, so another year later, he quit that too. “It felt like my brain was on fire for three months,” he remembers. “I would do push-ups until I collapsed.” He made music for 12 hours a day, terrified that if he stopped, he would relapse.
A documentary on lifelong drinker Shane MacGowan, of all people, finished the repair job that Blink-182 had improbably started. Watching an a cappella Sinéad O’Connor cover MacGowan’s distraught folk ballad The Song With No Name, Amos rediscovered pure folk melody. “I grew up surrounded by bluegrass and folk music,” he recalls, “so I felt like a sleeper agent being activated.”
His tunes got more hummable, his lyrics more acute. In 2024, he released Box for Buddy, Box for Star, his first sober album. One song, Where’s Your Love Now, features a line so suffering and simple that it seemed to go missing from the songbook of one of his ancestors, such as Elliott Smith or Wilco: “That hole in my chest still wishes you all the best.” The track has since been covered – separately – by two of the era’s eminent indie songwriters, Cameron Winter and Waxahatchee.
Amos still gets “pretty constant visual hallucinations” from his tripping teens. “It can take me by surprise,” he says, “but for the most part I don’t really notice them any more.” He dabbles in weed but is long past the period when, as he puts it on the new record, he “wouldn’t trade a good night for a better day”. He hopes This Is Lorelei will be a “safe space” for the similarly afflicted: “Use this as the platform and then check it at the door.” Is it a safe space for him to do the same? “It was … before people started listening.” He laughs. “Water from Your Eyes fans will come up to me like: ‘Yo, sick guitar playing.’ From Lorelei fans, I’ve had some crazy trauma-dumping situations.”
Not that he resents the attention – it just makes him cautious. “I know what it’s like to be vulnerable and then encounter art that can change the way you think about things … but the idea of being responsible for that art is really scary. I don’t fully understand why, out of all the people I know, I’m the one who is given this opportunity.” His gaze burrows back under the table. Something down there makes him chuckle. “I will try my best,” he says finally. “I promise I’ll try my best.”
The Singer in My Band is released on 11 September on Matador.
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