Nick Mulvey

British songwriter Nick Mulvey entered the spotlight with substantial prior training when his debut solo album First Mind earned a Mercury Prize nomination in 2014. Years spent studying music formally in Havana, Cuba and London, combined with his tenure in the experimental jazz group Portico Quartet, helped shape the singular approach he refined across later projects such as the 2017 release Wake Up Now and the spiritually charged New Mythology that appeared in 2022.

His earliest experiments involved piano and drums until, at eighteen, he obtained a guitar while living in Southern Spain. Twelve months afterward he relocated to Cuba, then came back to Britain to pursue ethnomusicology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, immersing himself in diverse traditions with a particular focus on the music of West and Central Africa. In 2005 he encountered his future Portico Quartet colleagues and took up the Hang; the ensemble enjoyed notable success, including a Mercury Prize nomination in 2008, roughly 150 concerts across the globe, and a deal with Peter Gabriel’s Real World Records. Mulvey parted ways with the band in 2011 to concentrate once more on guitar.

Drawing from an extensive range of styles, he fused the sensibilities of Nick Drake, Joni Mitchell, and Tom Waits with varied African traditions, yielding the melodic lines and percussive strumming heard on the 2013 Fever to the Form EP, produced by Dan Carey (Steve Mason, Bat for Lashes). Around that time he opened for Willy Mason, Lianne La Havas, and Laura Marling. His first full-length album, First Mind, surfaced in 2014 on Universal’s Fiction and Harvest labels, reaching the U.K. Top Ten and again earning Mercury Prize recognition. Wake Up Now, recorded live in the studio with his band and producer Ethan Johns before receiving final electronic refinements from Carey, emerged in mid-2017 and addressed subjects such as the refugee crisis. The four-song Dancing for the Answers EP arrived the following year. After issuing the 2019 single “Moment of Surrender,” Mulvey released the serene Begin Again EP in 2020. In 2022 he completed his third album, New Mythology, a soulful and mystically oriented work recorded in Paris by producer Renaud Letang and centered on vulnerability within everyday human experience.