From solitary piano to Berlin dancefloors, their debut album Nocturne finds Wasia Project discovering just how many things they can be at once.
The debut album comes with a pretty terrifying expectation: somewhere across forty-odd minutes, a young artist is supposed to explain who they are. This is inconvenient when you’re still finding that out for yourself.
“At our age, every year feels like four,” Will Gao quips.
Over the course of making Nocturne, the debut album that he made with his sister Olivia Hardy as Wasia Project, Gao had come to appreciate how much could be squeezed into a single year: relationships and breakups, friendships ending and others beginning, discovering clubbing and realising that sometimes you’d rather just tuck yourself back in bed.
The record, released 18th September via AWAL, took more than a year to finish. Long enough, in other words, for the people who started it not to be quite the people who had to finish it.
I had seen some evidence of the change already. In May, Wasia Project played beneath Waterloo Station at 26 Leake Street, where “Vogue” arrived amid strobe-lit concrete tunnels and Hardy’s ethereal vocals. It was colder and harder than the Wasia Project of before, strings ricocheting around an electronic pulse that made considerably more sense underground in the dark than it probably would have at lunchtime.
I remember thinking immediately: Oh, this is new. Then they played “ur so pretty”, and I still shed a tear (or a hundred). Reinvention, mercifully, had not required an exorcism.
When I meet Hardy and Gao a few months later, London is still in the merciless clutches of a never-ending heatwave. This is unfortunate for an interview about a record called Nocturne, whose visual vocabulary Hardy will later describe as using frost and frozen salt flats.
The three of us instead crowd around my tiny handheld fan, which by now is a band-aid to a bullet wound, but which nobody seems willing to surrender. Between questions around the night, conversation drifts to our favourite places to catch a gig, grab a drink or have a boogie around East London. Gao is moving house and deciding what colour to paint his new flat. Somewhere amongst this, we unpack a record that took the siblings more than a year to figure out themselves.
“We would get a bit lost in the world-building,” Hardy admits. Their longtime producer Declan Gaffney oftentimes had to remind them of a fairly basic requirement.“We just needed songs.”
Wasia Project’s classical and jazz backgrounds have followed them through most descriptions of the band. By Nocturne, they had grown restless with the shorthand. “We wanted to do something different,” Gao says. “We just didn’t want to do the same thing again.”
Their Instagram story would later put it better: “Love jazz. But that’s not what we are doing here.” What they were doing proved harder to answer. Gao entered the process with what he calls a “slight naive sense of confidence”. Having toured 2024’s EP “Isotope”, an album seemed simple enough. “We’ve got to do an album, let’s write ten songs. Bang.” Hardy had placed slightly more existential importance on the matter. “For Olivia, the album was this big thing in her mind,” Gao adds.
The trouble with making the record that is supposed to define you is that eventually you have to settle on a definition. Gao wanted to let ideas exist before deciding whether they deserved to; Hardy was already asking where they belonged before they had properly begun. “We were shooting ourselves in the foot creatively,” Gao admits.
Most of the first attempt disappeared. “Strike Me Down From Heaven” thankfully survived. It began as an old piano idea of Hardy’s before mutating into something they now describe rather differently.
“Demonic,” Gao pinpoints.
He isn’t wrong. The song begins relatively politely before strings bend and warp around Hardy, the arrangement seeming to lose its composure alongside her as she appeals to a higher power. It turns out the way forward was to get worse at sounding like the Wasia Project they already knew.
Piano remained where they instinctively began, but then they started taking loose demos and pinning them against rigid trip-hop beats. “That’s so against our instinct as songwriters,” Gao says. “But I think that’s the sweet spot in a creative process, when it’s not quite comfortable.”
“Vogue” moves with a newly physical pulse, the definitive showcase of the new Wasia Project, whilst “2515” is colder and darker. On “Even If I Tried”, Gao’s voice sits low inside a skittering arrangement.
I show them my notes from the first listen of it: “Kind of Massive Attack Mezzanine vibes?? Teardrop-sounding??”
They both laugh. They had, it turns out, been listening to quite a lot of Massive Attack. Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool was another fixture. Hardy, meanwhile, had fallen into The Sundays and Faye Wong’s shoegaze-style Cantonese covers of Cocteau Twins. But she isn’t interested in claiming Nocturne as shoegaze; it was more the “dreaminess” and “obscurity” she liked that “weaselled its way” into their own music.
And then there’s Piero Piccioni. She hasn’t actually seen many of the films Piccioni scored; she mostly listens to the soundtracks. Probably more efficient.
What interests her is how a melody can return transformed: the orchestra becoming solo violin, grandeur reprising back into one instrument. “Moon Goddess”, Nocturne’s only instrumental, once had lyrics. Hardy removed them when she realised they were taking something away. “Adding lyrics and sentiment would almost take it out of that world,” she says.
Hardy is meticulous, but not precious. “Moon Goddess” leaves its piano to say what the words couldn’t, before strings widen around it. On an album born from throwing caution to the wind and trying new ideas, one of its loveliest moments came from simply knowing what to leave out.
Elsewhere, almost nobody on Nocturne seems particularly good at leaving. “Bleeding Gold” is drawn back towards an old home; “Voices In My Head” finds itself “right back” where it started; “Nightingale” recognises a road it has travelled before. By “Wildfire”, even the refrains are pulling in opposite directions.
Hardy likes phrases that “circle around” themselves. “Cycles in general are a big theme in our music,” she says. There is something funny about spending a year trying not to repeat yourself, only to make a record full of people doing exactly that.
As for what holds all these different versions of Nocturne together, Hardy had a system. Sort of. Before they knew exactly what Nocturne was, the siblings had already imagined three different concerts for it: electronic and dance-led; classical and orchestral; and the live-band Wasia Project they already knew. Hardy calls these its three “pillars”.
She also keeps talking about the record’s “pH scale,” which I eventually ask her to explain.She does surprisingly well for a while. Songs occupy different points according to feeling, intensity and sound.
“And then sonics…” she trails off. A pause. “It’s just pH.” Fair enough.
Trying to establish who wrote what proves similarly tricky. “The Venn diagram of our collaboration is, like, a circle,” Gao says. Not strictly the traditional purpose of a Venn diagram, but you get the idea. A melody might begin with one sibling and end up in the other’s song. They also have the advantage, or occupational hazard, of having
known their collaborator for most of their life.
“You know how to piss each other off,” Hardy says. There is one place where the circle breaks. On “Even If I Tried”, Gao takes the lead vocal himself. “I’m afraid of singing,” he admits. Hardy, he says, is unusually good at taking something he has written and finding its emotional centre. But these words still needed his voice.“Sometimes you write a song, and you really need to sing it from your perspective.”
Conversely, for somebody whose clearest ideas tend to arrive alone at a piano, Hardy is surprisingly uninterested in keeping music private. “Live music, to me, is the reason for everything,” she says.
Festival season interrupted the album’s difficult first stretch. Playing again, watching other artists and standing amongst their crowds changed the scale of what they were imagining. Hardy began hearing “Bleeding Gold” as something that could eventually be sung back at them. Her songs seem to require solitude to begin and other people to become complete.
Gao was discovering his own version of that feeling, albeit considerably later at night. For all the mythology and intrigue attached to Berlin clubbing, with its late hours and dark rooms shielding various degrees of bad decision-making, the part that stayed with him was fairly uncomplicated. Strangers were choosing to gather around music.
It makes Nocturne an unusually apt title.
The form is historically intimate: one imagines Chopin or Debussy at the piano, at night, and alone besides themselves. Hardy still understands that version instinctively; Gao had simply discovered another.
“You can’t talk about connectivity and not mention or reference isolation,” he says, “and the other way around.”
Before we leave, I ask Hardy what Nocturne would look like if we could actually enter it. “A frosty floor,” she begins. There is fog. Stars. Something like the Utah salt flats, only frozen over. There might be a
Gothic castle. We would need elegant dresses.
After an hour of slowly cooking in an East London coffee shop, she sold me on the frost alone. Then she remembers something. “There’s probably some kind of ball happening.”
Naturally.
A year earlier, Hardy and Gao couldn’t decide what a Wasia Project debut was supposed to be. Now Hardy can give me its weather, landscape, dress code and social calendar.
Gao is already talking about album two. Apparently, one existential crisis was not enough.
Listen to Nocturne…
Words – Hannah Breen
