Nick Ward has been busy. The Sydney-born singer, songwriter, producer and composer has spent the past few months scoring a film. When we speak, he’s getting ready to fly to the Sundance Film Festival in Utah, where it will premiere. Might we also add, Ward wrapped up 2024 supporting Troye Sivan on tour after releasing his debut album. Australia’s next biggest pop export is just getting started.
What does it take to score one’s first film? “A completely different side of the brain,” says Ward, 23, who is used to creating introspective indie pop, infused with electronic energy, hip hop beats and early-2000s nostalgia in his bedroom. “Film was what I wanted to do originally. I actually learned music production from making short films in high school and not being able to use licensed music, having to teach myself how to recreate things.” Prior to high school, Ward grew up in Sydney playing classical piano and was “always the guitarist in the band and played in the school orchestra. In the last two years of high school I started making beats on my laptop and realised I was running out of friends to sing over them so I realised I had to do it.” He graduated in 2019 and went “straight into [Covid] lockdown”, spending hours a day making music. In 2023, Sophie Hyde, the renowned film director from Adelaide, discovered Ward’s music from her child. She asked him if he could compose the score for her feature film Jimpa, which stars Olivia Colman and John Lithgow. “There was such a synergy between the film and my album, stuff about the past and using a lot of archival imagery, and how that’s a way to explore yourself and where you’ve come from. It felt like a very natural progression for me,” which also sums up what Ward’s debut album, House With the Blue Door, released in October last year, was all about.
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“I feel like growing up in Australia meant I didn’t necessarily see a lot of super original Australian music. It was very much sounds that I could tie a thread to from someone in the US or UK. I think that being an Aussie musician entails trying to fight off the allegations of ‘This is Australia’s answer to Bon Iver’ or someone.” Ward is part of a music collective called Full Circle, which formed from a group chat with his friends where they’d talk about music and film. The collective was created with the intention to contribute to and cultivate a scene they wish they’d had growing up. “I think at the core of it we are just best friends and maybe our purpose is to inspire and push each other. It’s still an ever-evolving thing.” Collaboration and community has been vital in Ward’s creative journey. His visuals are created with his friends and his twin brother, Tom, who is credited as the other executive producer on his album. “He would always sit in my room while I was working on music and tell me if something is good or bad. He’s the first person to hear a lot of stuff.” Finding Ward’s place, his people and his voice in the music scene has been a stark contrast to how he felt growing up at an all-boys school as a teenager.
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“We just couldn’t talk about any of the stuff we enjoyed. I would spend the night trolling through IMDb or Gearspace and then not be able to talk about any of it. When I finally met people after high school and could talk about what I loved, I would stutter and not know how to, even though I was so impassioned and felt strongly about so much. I just didn’t know how to talk about it because I’d never spoken about these things out loud.” Ward began singing his songs in his bedroom in whispers, because his family was next door. “Now I just wait for people to walk the dog,” he laughs.
That passion and forthright honesty is laid bare on his album, on which he delves deep into the question of who he is, explores his thoughts on religion and touches on his identity as a queer person. Created in the comfort of his bedroom studio (“I don’t understand why so many artists who have access to budget just spend it on studios when you could just reserve it for something else. But I do recognise the privilege of having my home studio”), Ward was inspired by picking up therapy again and “unlearned bad habits and the parts of my personality I want to change”. The subject of his sexuality has become a talking point surrounding his work. His earlier music focuses heavily on it but when it came to his debut album he wanted to dig deeper into his childhood. When asked, with awareness of the irony, how he feels about his sexuality becoming part of his story and a continuous talking point, he says: “I’ve realised I just need to be completely honest in every interview. I’m such an open book but I think especially with sexuality, it’s part of my life, but isn’t something I felt like I needed to talk about all over this record. For the next one, I might like to again, but I think for personal reasons, I wanted to look into other parts of myself as well.”
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Religion has also been an unexpected and oftentimes subconscious tool for Ward. It’s a subject he mentions on the deeply personal and emotional title track, where he sings: “Did the preaching give me a fear of God? Only nine years old at school when the teacher caught me with my make-up on.” He says, “Growing up in Australia and going to a religious school, I never necessarily thought it bothered me but whenever I would be faced with anything [like religion] after high school I find myself a bit triggered.” Does he identify with a religion now? “No, and it’s funny because I never would have thought it was a theme in my work but as I’ve been working on this next record, or even looking back over old lyrics, it’s interesting how it comes up quite a lot. Maybe because I want to have something in my life that serves the purpose of religion…” We speak about how each project will serve as a different chapter of growth and exploration and he mentions he has been reading Leah Kardos’s Hounds Of Love book, an edition of the 33 1/3 series. It charts the emergence of Kate Bush as a fearless experimentalist and a visionary music producer. “Reading about how albums are like diary entries and how they emotionally track your tastes or what you’re into at the time… I’ve been thinking about it a lot since.”
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So what’s defining the era Ward is in now? Well, without spoiling what he’s working on, he’s excited to be moving onto the next project. “I’ve been unlearning the habits of songwriting and certain ways of working that I am bored of. I think I need a lot of time to grow a certain set of tools and then work out what I want to do next. It would probably be a lot more helpful in a commercial sense if I want to be super consistent in terms of my sound but I just don’t want to create that way.” Through writing sessions for Troye Sivan’s last album Something to Give Each Other, on which Ward has a songwriting credit, he learnt about the power of pop music. Although it was two years ago, and Ward acknowledges he’s a “very different person now”, it taught him how to operate in the music industry and emphasised the importance of choosing who to work with. “It was so inclusive and egoless. The focus was always on what is the best choice for this song? Poring over every word and production choice to make it better. It made me realise that pop music is a form of design, where you’re trying to create the most elegant and thoughtful product in a sleek, concise package.”
Pop music is all about a formula and while that recipe has been toyed with, especially in recent years, the best pop music is intricately designed and cleverly formulated. “Also, so much stuff is pop. When I grew up in high school I loved Death Grips and industrial hip hop bands, the kind of artists who would create something really hooky but with the craziest sample or strange sound. Pop is not a dirty word. For me, making pop music is more intellectually stimulating than, say, trying to create an ambient album where there are no rules. It’s a good exercise in sound design, mood and tone, but I like the criteria of, ‘How can we Trojan Horse all of these ideas into something sleek and direct for people?’ Something immediate.”
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The “music snob community”, as Ward calls it, has recently, he says, been hating on one of his favourite albums: The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The Liverpool foursome are his major source of influence and inspiration, because, “well, obviously”. Today, his favourite Beatles song would be A Day in the Life. His top three albums would be “Sgt. Pepper, Abbey Road and the White Album… That’s not a hot take at all. But I’ve recently seen people who are Sgt. Pepper haters or think the album is ‘overrated’,” which naturally, we both disagree with. Ward admits he doesn’t often listen to new music and the only time he experiences writer’s block is when he does. “That’s so ‘born in the wrong generation’ of me but I feel like when I listen to music from the ’60s or ’70s or ’80s I find it more inspiring.” Lately, he’s been listening to a lot of T-Rex, Todd Rundgren and an ’80s synth pop group by the name of New Musik who are “quite underrated”, he says. But really, “Paul McCartney is my hero.” And fine, if he had to choose something modern, he admits he’s “obsessed with the new Clairo album, Charm. And the latest Lemon Twigs record.”
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As he sets off for Sundance, Ward is pleasantly surprised that he has enjoyed reflecting on what he achieved last year. “It’s funny because I’m the sort of person who should really hate [the album]. Like, I would expect to not be able to listen to it by now. But having some distance from it, I actually feel more in touch with why I made those songs and why I make music at all. I’m glad I took the time to get it right.” Perhaps this unexpectedly positive attitude has to do with a quote he heard recently. “‘The world is as you are’, which struck me because I’ve realised that optimism and happiness are an active choice.” For now, he’s writing most days and thinking about his next project, whatever form that may take, learning that “perspective really shifts how you see yourself and the state of the world. I think I’m actively looking for hope and positivity. And true joy. I think it’s something you can find in everything.”
Taken from 10 Men Issue 61 – MUSIC, TALENT, CREATIVE – on newsstands March 24. Pre-order your copy here.
SHOOTING STAR
Photographer BYRON SPENCER
Fashion Editor PETER SIMON PHILLIPS
Talent NICK WARD
Text ROXY LOLA
Hair FERNNANDO MIRANDA using DYSON BEAUTY
Make-up FILOMENA NATOLI at Vivien’s Creative
Movement director JOSH CUMMING
Photographer’s assistants KURT BINGHAM and CHRIS POLAK
Set designer CHRISTOPHER KIDALL PARK
Production R D PRODUCTIONS
On the cover Nick wears GUCCI
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