Introducing: NICK HUDSON

British avant-pop artist Nick Hudson returns with “Khevsureti,” the haunting second single from his forthcoming album Kanda Teenage Honey (out March 15). Largely recorded in Georgia under the looming shadow of the Ukraine war, the album threads together faith, folklore, geopolitics, and personal myth, all captured through a surreal lens of experimental pop. We sat down with Hudson to discuss the inspirations behind Kanda Teenage Honey, the cinematic landscapes of Georgia, and how his polymathic practice — encompassing music, painting, writing, and film — coalesces into one sweeping artistic vision.

Your new single “Khevsureti” explores a remote mountainous region in northern Georgia. What drew you to that place, and how did it shape the song?

Khevsureti was actually the first song I wrote upon moving to Georgia — or Sakartvelo, as it's known in Georgian. I hadn’t initially planned for it to be about a specific region, but as the track unfolded, its panoramic breadth felt inseparable from the wild, transcendent energy of that place. On my very first day in Tbilisi, I saw a frozen waterfall and a cliff strung with icicles, which I saw as meteorological photographs — frozen records of time. That spiraled into meditations on time and faith, the kind of thoughts that came to me as I stood before the frescoes of a 5th-century basilica. I’m not religious — I loathe organized religion, frankly — but there was something about the sacred sublime in that moment that floored me. That tension — between ecstasy and corruption — runs right through the album.

As for Khevsureti itself, it’s become something of a second home to me. It’s a sacred pagan wilderness, utterly humbling. I’ve had near-death experiences there, but far more moments where life felt most fully affirmed. Even the most verbose people fall silent when they arrive there. It commands reverence.

You recorded most of Kanda Teenage Honey in Georgia, against the backdrop of the Ukraine war. How did the political climate and local culture impact the album’s sound and lyrical direction?

I’ve never really been the kind of writer to indulge in diaristic solipsism. Nor do I think we need many more traditional love songs — I wrote one great one and called it done. The lyrics on Kanda Teenage Honey often stem from conversations I've had with people over the past two years — Georgians, Ukrainians, Russians, draft dodgers, refugees, intelligence officers, even ex-Navalny employees and, occasionally, stray Putinists who slipped through the border.

The stories are wild — there’s a lot of geopolitics in this record, a lot of horror, a lot of beauty. I recorded in an old Soviet movie studio with Georgian musicians like Gigi Koberidze and Beqa Minadze, and we used a Neumann u89 mic — the same model Kate Bush and Scott Walker

You have a diverse artistic background, spanning music, painting, film, and literature. How do these different mediums intersect in your creative process, and do you find that each informs the others in unique ways?

Hmmm.  I guess I've always done all of them – film came later of course as one didn't have the resources for independent filmmaking as a child in the eighties, but even then I remember nearly being thrown out of an Austrian hotel when I was ten years old for attempting to remake Polanski's Repulsion with my grandad's VHS camcorder (which involved me sashaying down the main hotel corridor waving a kitchen knife around.)  I have no idea why or how I'd seen Repulsion at ten years old, but the same can be said of Hellraiser and Candyman and Clive Barker has become a pivotal imaginative influence upon my work.

All of these media mutually inform each other – sometimes literally in that there's a song from the record that compresses a scene from my novel, whereby an oligarch fails to kill himself in a Swiss bank vault as seven griffon vultures prepare to enact a sky burial upon him, dumping his freshly-stripped bones into Lake Geneva.  Mostly though the paintings explore a textural relation to the music and film while also functioning as (refreshingly) non-verbal shamanic assemblages – the mask in which I got tear-gassed during the March protest features in one such painting, as do beast mandibles from Khevsureti.  

I wrote prose and poetry before I composed a note of music – though not by much.  I have some short fiction pieces being published this year and I keep a non-fiction blog at www.theacademyofsun.com

The accompanying video for "Khevsureti" was directed, filmed, and edited by you in various locations across Georgia. How did these locations contribute to the visual narrative of the song, and what was your experience like filming in such diverse landscapes?

The instrumental passage that opens it – I'd filmed a poppy field on a river bank just after the reprieve of a thunderstorm up in Khevsureti – shots of this are superimposed with filmed lightning flashes from that storm, as “Khevsureti” is spelled out letter-by-letter in Kartuli script.  When the vocal enters I move to vast, panoramic landscape shots of mountain passes in the region, including the Abudelauri Lakes and the Chaukhi Pass where seven hours into a hike we got smashed by every type of weather conceivable – concentric storms as search helicopters whirled overhead – I lost my hiking mates and found myself falling down a stretch of the mountain, hallucinating bears and screaming. Nature is never to be taken lightly and commands both awe and respect.  Interspersed throughout the prologue is found footage of Khevsureti shot in 1928 – Khevsur nights in chain mail – and Shatili, the medieval fortress complex by the Chechen border.  The final shot of me inside a waterfall was filmed by Berdia Arabuli, a Khevsur painter whose beautiful work graces the cover of the single.  The brief epilogue is of a ring I bought on my first day of living here to replace the one that I dreamed were subsumed into my bones after saving my life when I got picked up by a sandstorm at Davit Gareja monastery complex by the Azerbaijan border during my first visit to Sakartvelo eight years ago.  The original ring caught on the Azerbaijan border railings enabling me to hoist myself back onto the path.  Sorry for such predictable answers haha!

Your work has been compared to a wide range of artists, from Tori Amos to Scott Walker. How do you navigate these comparisons while maintaining your own artistic identity, and who are some of your biggest musical influences?

I just keep my head down and work, essentially.  While these comparisons are of course flattering, they each serve as a shorthand that will be subjective to every listener.  For me in the sense of both I take it to be a nod to my compositional, conceptual, and technical rigour and discipline as a pianist/writer/vocalist/composer – that I'm on the right track in terms of evolving my voice and articulating my obsessions and concerns and sensibilities.  I work hard and every nuance is considered from various angles before being settled upon.  Also I feel compelled to quote Scott directly in saying that “I feel like the Orson Welles of the music industry – everyone wants to take me to lunch but nobody wants to finance the picture” - it's sad but true.  I believe Kanda Teenage Honey to be my greatest work yet, but still every time I release an album I get into even greater debt.  Such are the working conditions of all but legacy artists in 2024, it seems.

Beyond music, you've collaborated with artists from various backgrounds and recently released a book of your lyrical output. Can you tell us more about your collaborative process and the themes explored in your literary work, particularly in "The Land Exists So The Seas Don't Argue"?

If it's an absolute collaboration such was the case with the Toby Driver/Nick Hudson improvised duo album then it's 50/50, of course.  When it's artists guesting on one of my solo records I pretty much write every single component but encourage them to bring their singular energy, phrasing and tonal colour to its expression.  When I've had bands I've been more relaxed with the arrangements in a democratic sense.  But the solo records are pretty purely my canvas.  Of course there's also no such thing as a “solo” record – there are around fifty people involved in the manifestation of this project – and I couldn't have made it were a single one of these heroes not present.  

As for the themes explored in my literary work – well, that encompasses a vast amount of writing so it's difficult to say.  The Land Exists So The Seas Don't Argue collates an entire decade of lyrics.  Life, love, death, madness, transcendence, ecstasy, geopolitics, religion, satirical character studies, Madonna, the residual feudal horror of the UK, lampooning the bourgeoisie, oligarchy, Soviet nuclear history and its attendant catastrophes, cinema, queer cultural icons, the occult, psycho-geography, alchemy, suicide, nature at its rawest sublime.