Dublin three piece For Nina told David Hennessy about their new single, Swallow.
Dublin three-piece For Nina have just shared new single, Swallow.
It follows the previous single Low, Rolling Punches and Hounds which saw them featured on RTÉ, Rough Trade and Hot Press among many others.
A buzz has long been building around the young band since they released their debut single Too Proud in late 2023, selling out gigs at Whelan’s and Dublin’s Workman’s Club and being booked as the newest band at 2024’s Irish Music Week.
For Nina is made up of Holly Owens, from Mylerstown in Kildare on guitar and vocals, Ben Watson (Marino/ Drumcondra in Dublin) on guitar and Max Kaye (Dublin city centre) on drums. All are aged 20- 21.
The trio met while studying jazz in DCU. While they didn’t see those studies through, they’re now pursuing an indie sound as a three piece.
What inspired Swallow?
Holly: “I actually wrote Swallow when I was in secondary school.
“Weirdly I don’t remember writing songs a lot of the time.
“It’s like I pass out and then I wake up and the song’s been written.
“This particular time, I wrote it before school.
“I haven’t woken up that early in a while.
“I was really angry about something and I wrote it in this rage and then went to school.
“I remember playing it for a friend of mine in school being like, ‘I wrote this this morning’.
“And she was like, ‘That’s actually quite good’.
“And then I moved on and I started college and I wrote other songs. It kind of got lost in the pile.
“And then we were all sitting here one night and I was scrolling through my voice memos from way back in the day when my voice was much more high pitched and I found that voice memo and we were all kind of like, ‘Okay’.
“And Max was adamant that, ‘We have to do this song next. We have to do this one. It’s great’.
“And Ben and I were like, ‘Oh, I don’t know’.
“We kept writing other ones and then eventually we came back to it.
“I wrote a new first verse for it.
“We completely flipped it on its head and changed lots about it.
“It took a while to kind of figure out.”
Max: “It took a long time.
“It was originally quite fast and was upbeat and up tempo and now it’s much more like a Low almost.
“It’s not the same obviously but tempo wise and stuff.”
Holly: “It’s a lot slower and a bit more pensive.
“I think actually we played it for the first time at our anti- Valentine’s Day gig back in February and you could kind of feel people latch on to it even in the sense that after the gig, all the clips we saw online of people’s stories were all of that song.
“We were like, ‘Okay, this is obviously working’.”
If you wrote it in a rage has it lost a lot of that if it has slowed down now?
Holly: “I’d say it’s angrier slower.”
Max: “You can feel the emotion a little bit more that way.”
It is different to anything you’ve done before, right? Hounds, Low. I wouldn’t describe any of them as angry…
Holly: “Fair enough. The songs that are out probably don’t give that vibe.
“Live a lot of people ask us if we’re okay.”
Do you have a bit of an angry live style or do you have angry songs you haven’t got around to releasing or what?
Holly: “Yeah, you’ll hear them at some point and then you’ll go, ‘Geez, they seemed very nice on the phone’.”
It was in college you came together, right? What were you studying?
Holly: “We were studying jazz music in DCU which is not like the music For Nina makes at all.
“The lads knew each other before college.”
Max: “We were in a band for a little while together.
“Myself and Ben had played together loads, and then, how long was it into college? Was it a year even?”
Holly: “Yeah, it was after first year.
“I eventually acclimatised to Dublin.
“I spent so much time going to gigs in first year and I was just mates with a lot of people in bands.
“I was so adamant I didn’t want to be in a band and then I watched a documentary called Meet Me in the Bathroom and I literally walked out of the cinema and I was like, ‘I have to be in a band’.
“I happened to know two fantastic musicians.
“I approached Max and I was like, ‘I want to start a band but I want it to be small’.
“I had The White Stripes in mind and he, like a movie montage Rocky scene, was like, ‘I have just the guitarist for you’.”
Who are your big inspirations when you’re writing?
Holly: “It kind of darts around the place.
“I think any Irish band is always going to be influenced by U2 and The Cranberries because it’s kind of just foundationally in it but it’s very much in this band because Max is a huge Cranberries fan and myself and Ben have been listening to U2 from a very young age.”
Max: “It’s also funny though because we all kind of started off in very different places.
“We were all very different styles of musician before.
“I was a big, big thrash and heavy metal guy so I spent a lot of time doing a lot of that type of drumming.
“The other guys not so much in that regard.”
Holly: “I was just acoustic guitar the whole way, folk music.
“I am a big Laura Marling fan, and Lisa Hannigan, and Damien Rice and all them.
“I think that that style of songwriting, you don’t realise how much it actually lends itself to rock music until you have a metal head and a rock guitarist go, ‘No, no, it needs to sound like this’.”
What inspired the previous single, Hounds?
Holly: “I think we were all in that second year of college thing where you’re starting to go, ‘I’m about to go into the second half of my degree and I’m still not entirely sure if this is what I want…’
“I think that that kind of fed into it a bit which I think a lot of people can relate to anyway.”
Is that the reactions you are getting when you’ve got to play it?
Holly: “In a way, yeah.
“People like to dance to that song which is always fun.”
Max: “There’s a lot of movement that goes on with it because we have some just slower in tempo songs and you don’t get as much reaction, lucky enough people like it but it’s always great to have kind of a hard hitting, up tempo, upbeat one that can get the feet moving.”
Is the reaction very different to other songs of yours like Rolling Punches and Too Proud?
Holly: “We actually don’t play Too Proud anymore.
“We haven’t played that in ages.
“We put it out before we’d ever played a gig.
“It was like one of the earliest songs we wrote together and we just kind of wanted for our first gig, to have a song already out.
“And then we just kind of grew and the songs changed shape and that song didn’t fit anymore.
“We’re all very nostalgic and we love that song but it just doesn’t fit.
“I think if we were to play it to a crowd in the middle of our set now, people would be kind of unsure where it was coming from.
“In a live context, it doesn’t really match up but Rolling Punches is very much-“
Ben: “It’s locked in in the set list.”
Holly: “Locked in, that one’s there and that one’s a bit of fun.
“Weirdly, a lot of people have latched onto some of the lyrics of that one.
“Our last few gigs anyway we’ve played it and I’ve started singing and people have sang it with me which is the coolest feeling ever.
“I’m not sure what it is about it but Max wrote the first verse and he must have done something right.”
What is it about the lyrics that strikes them?
Holly: “I think it’s better when people attach their own meaning to a song.
“I find it quite difficult to articulate what something’s about because a lot of the time, we all just write it and we subconsciously all know what it’s about and we just move on from there.
“I think it’s more people are singing them and I’m aware as they’re singing them that they have their own meaning.”
Max: “Yeah, it’s a lot of different interpretations because even for other songs that we have, people have mainly come up to Holly because she’s singing them and she writes most of the lyrics obviously but they’ve been asking about life experiences and things that have inspired the lyrics and stuff.
“There’s actually very little reason sometimes but they sound cohesive and people attach a meaning to it which is really nice.”
Tell us about your song Low..
Ben: “It was literally the first song we ever wrote the first time we sat down.
“Holly had written pretty much the bones of everything and it was just one of those ones where it just seemed to kind of click, we were probably working on it for a little while, just playing through it and then just all seemed to slowly kind of come together and be a bit more cohesive and then we kind of just fell in love with it.
“It took us a while to record it because we wanted to really do it right and get it done properly.
“When we play that one, a lot of people say that that’s their favourite song of the set.”
Holly: “I would say I think Low, until very recently, was probably all of our favourite For Nina songs, Low was the one.”
Max: “Yeah, it’s been our set closer since the beginning.
“It seems to really resonate with people a lot of the time.
“It’s very nice to see how much of an impact it does have on a lot of people when they see it, they say very nice things to us about it which is really good to hear.”
Is that another one that they attach their own meaning to?
Holly: “Weirdly I’ve never really had someone talk about Low because I think it’s a very hard feeling to describe.
“We recorded it with an amazing man called Daniel de Burca and when we recorded it with him, even he was like, ‘I don’t know how to describe what it’s about, I just get it’.
“And so people don’t really say much other than if they really enjoy it.”
You’ve played Whelan’s and The Workman’s, what has been your favourite gigs up to now?
Ben: “For me personally we put on an anti-Valentine’s Day gig back in February with some of our friends and some other bands around Dublin and that was just a very special night.
“We managed to sell it out and the room was packed and really sweaty, all those things you want from a good gig.
“Everyone just seemed to really enjoy the night.
“It’s always nice playing a gig but when you put on a gig and organise everything involved in it and it goes really well, it just gives it that extra bit of satisfaction, I feel.”
Holly: “We also played Irish Music Week last October and that was buckets of fun.
“We were really nervous and we kind of had to make the decision to leave the nerves side stage and to just play the songs like we always play them.
“We were really lucky that a lot of people turned out to the showcase and it went really well for us.
“It was definitely at that point the most important thing we had done and it just felt like we’d made a big achievement or a milestone playing Irish Music Week.
“That’s a big favourite for me in a very different way to the Valentine’s Day gig we played because we put that on and it was very like, ‘We brought all these people here’, whereas Irish Music Week was like a challenge that was brought to us and we were like, ‘Okay’, and then kind of took it on.”
Max: “I think people kind of paid attention and respected us a lot more from seeing that we were up on that lineup.
“I think, in a way, we also had a bit of almost self respect there as well.
“We were going, ‘This is something that we have achieved and we really felt good about that’.”
The Irish music scene is thriving at the moment with so many acts making waves internationally, is it an exciting time for you to be emerging into that?
Holly: “It is, yeah.
“It’s fun to feel like you’re part of something.
“I think everyone has that experience and especially when it’s something like music.
“We’re playing a really great festival this August called We’ve Only Just Begun.
“It’s in Whelans and there is a really cool line up for that.
“It’s one of those things where the poster came out and we were just happy to be on it let alone that we actually have to then play.
“It was nice to be in such good company.”
Has it always been music for you?
Max- “Yeah, I started drumming when I was five so it very much has always been music for me.
“That’s all I wanted to do in college.
“That’s all I wanted to do in school as well.
“I think it probably will always definitely be music for me as well.
“I couldn’t do anything else.
“Whatever form it comes in, I think it will definitely be music.”
Holly: “I think I’ve been the same.
“I just only really gravitated to music as a kid and probably wrecked my parents’ head with it and I was very lucky that they were like, ‘Ah, Grand. Yeah, go on’.
“They were kind of like, ‘Do it. We’ll see what happens’.
“I don’t actually remember a time ever deciding that I wanted to do music and I don’t ever remember a time wanting to do anything else so yeah, it has always been music.”
Ben: “Yeah, it’s same for me as well, close to Holly, where I started quite young.
“I think I started properly playing guitar at eight but my parents were always very supportive and bringing me to lessons and stuff like that.
“Then as I got into my later teens, there was that extra element of being able to go out and play gigs and meet people and everything that comes with it.
“I think that kind of opens up a whole new excitement or kind of interest in it as well because I just love playing gigs, love meeting people.”
Swallow is out now.
For Nina play The Grand Sociall Ballroom with Delivery Service and Stella and the Dreaming on 8 July, they also play We’ve Only Just Begun at Whelans 7-9 August.
For more information, click here.
