‘It’s Not Enough’: Four Albums Into Her Career, Nadia Reid Is Far From Done

In 2021, Nadia Reid was renting a modest studio in King Edward Court, a striking three-story brick building in the heart of her hometown, Dunedin. During her days there, sometimes accompanied by her then three-month-old first daughter, she found the space to write at an unhurried pace. “I’d go in there, she’d sleep in her little seat, and I’d write and play guitar,” she says. “It was a moment of feeling like I’d arrived at adulthood.”

Of all the room’s features, the one Reid remembers the most clearly was a nautical, stained-glass window. “When I looked through it, I could pretty much see the house I grew up in,” she says. “Hanging around the streets and places I was as a child brought up memories that were quite intense and complicated.”

These memories and the feelings inextricably intertwined loom large over the tightly woven tapestry of diaristic truths, fictions, metaphors and allegories that make up her fourth studio album, Enter Now Brightness, recently worldwide released through the storied British label Chrysalis Records and at home by Reid’s Slow Time Records.

Recorded with the producer Tom Healy, her longtime musicians Sam Taylor (guitar, piano) and Richard Pickard (bass), and newer collaborators Joe McCallum (drums, percussion), Ben Lemi and Finn Scholes, the album represents a significant shift for Reid. “I think for my first two records, I was really serious, heavy, angry and sad,” she admits. “This album feels lighter.”

In conversation, Reid sometimes speaks indirectly, making statements that feel loaded with emotional weight but don’t necessarily give the game away. It’s a quality that translates over to her songwriting, allowing listeners to use her music as a tool to process the feelings that lie below the surface of their lives. “Throughout this record, I was letting go of a lot,” she says. “I’ve written all these songs of heartbreak about former boyfriends. I think anyone I met in my mid-twenties had to contend with this quite damaged young person. Some of them weren’t perfect either, but I really took a lot of shit out on them.”

Rendered with a sense of freedom and self-confidence, Enter Now Brightness addresses personal transformation, motherhood, family, and the ghosts of former heartbreaks with a light and playful touch that feels new in her oeuvre.

The album’s title, an interpolation of a phrase from the foreword of the American rock poet Patti Smith’s memoir Just Kids (“brightness entered the study”), is as good a statement of purpose as any for what follows. “Baby Bright” is a slice of orchestral folk that feels straight out of the early ‘70s playbook. Several songs later, On “Changed/Unchained”, Reid soars over driving drums and fuzzy guitars, singing about the emotional tension between stasis and motion. Later, “Woman Apart” sees her riding a rollicking country-line groove while expressing gratitude for grace and light. 

The throughline here is making peace with the past and moving beyond the way our memories and traumas can trap us. As she sings on the album opener “Emmanuelle”, “Can I finish what I started / Can the good I see in me / Be the good I see in you.”

“Sometimes circumstances are really unfortunate for people, but they do the best they can,” Reid notes. “There’s some underlying stuff on this album that has been bubbling away for years, but I’ve realised it gave me my drive.”

Alongside Tiny Ruins, Aldous Harding, and Marlon Williams, Reid is a key figure in a generation of celebrated New Zealand singer-songwriters who emerged onto the international stage in the 2010s through the conventions of pastoral folk music and Americana-indebted country – often delivered with a close bedsit intimacy – before following their own musical impulses over new horizons.

Born in the early ‘90s, Reid grew up in Dunedin and the nearby harbour town of Port Chalmers, where she learned to play guitar and began writing songs. Aged eighteen, she moved to Christchurch and began making her name on stages throughout the Garden City. Following the Canterbury earthquakes, she called Auckland and Wellington home for spells, periodically departing to go on long DIY tours that took in New Zealand’s main centres, small towns, and rural locales. Venues, bars, cafes, private parties in people’s homes – if there was a space to sing from, she was there.

Credit: Marieke Macklon

In 2014, Reid took a bet on herself and her then small but growing audience and crowdfunded her delicate debut album Listen to Formation, Look for the Signs through the PledgeMe platform. Recorded and produced by award-winning New Zealand engineer Ben Edwards at his The Sitting Room Studios, Reid’s debut was a game-changer. “When I was doing that album, I was just completely going on gut feeling,” she reflects. “It was so grassroots, but it was received.” Reid pauses for a moment before continuing. “Even though we’re not in contact much now, I owe Ben a lot. He really took me under his wing and saw something in me that I don’t think I saw at times.”

Within a year, Reid’s spare, melancholic and mournful country, folk and blues-tinged sensibilities saw her debut licensed for release in Australia, the UK, US, and Europe. Recalling Laura Marling, Mazzy Star, and Sharon Van Etten in tone, colour and character, her music opened up a pathway for her. “I remember coming to London for the first time,” she says. “I was just about to turn 25. It’s a bit cringey to say, but I felt like I’d arrived on the world’s doorstep.”

A decade, four albums, multiple international tours, and a British passport later, 2025 finds Reid and her young family of four living in Manchester. When we speak in late January, she’s sequestered in her new studio space inside a former mill in nearby Salford. “Sometimes I struggle to look back and acknowledge the ten years,” she admits. “I had some good moments. I just didn’t stop and kept going, but I don’t feel like I’m done. It’s not enough. The other side of me is like, ‘How long does someone do this for?’ I don’t know.” 

In moments of doubt, Reid draws from interactions with listeners who’ve leaned on her songs during hard times, and her memories of moments of pure connection with her audiences. While we talk, she tells me about a tough looking guy who approached her after a solo show in the West Midlands. “He told me that my [second] album, Preservation, was the soundtrack to his grief after his wife died,” she explains. “Music is such a mysterious and powerful language. I’m just trying to be present in the moment and realise how cool and special it all is.”

Back in 2017, Reid spent a stint touring through the UK and Europe to promote Preservation, Reflecting on that golden moment, she remembers feeling an abundance of possibility. In the aftermath of the pandemic, however, things feel more competitive. “I had to really check myself,” she says, speaking with a tone of measured optimism. “I’ve had to reshape my expectations. The stakes are higher now, and I’m going into a phase of having really difficult conversations with people.” 

When she was living in Dunedin in the early 2020s, Reid took some time out to reacquaint herself with the life and works of the late great New Zealand author Janet Frame. Perhaps best known internationally through Jane Campion’s cinematic adaptation of three volumes of autobiography, An Angel at My Table, Frame was a master of modernist prose and Antipodean magical realism. Over her career, she used her skill with the written word to transform tragedy and mental illness into award-winning poetry, short stories, novels, and autobiography. 

For Reid, the influence of Frame hangs heavy in the air when she thinks about the time she spent writing Enter Now Brightness. Having lived through the first act of her own artistic career, she found revisiting Frame’s work to be not only deeply moving but instructive about how to conduct herself through whatever comes next. “Janet Frame said an artist must stand on the rock of herself, or she’ll get swept away by the tide,” she says. “I have a pretty strong intuition that I have honed over the years, but there have been situations where I can see how that would happen.”

Nadia Reid’s Enter Now Brightness is out now. Read our review of the album here.