Nadia Reid - “Get the Devil Out”

SXSW 2020 - OEB Score: 8; Popularity Index: 6

Pairs Well With…Bedouine, Aldous Harding, Brandi Carlile

Alt country artist Nadia Reid adds light pop/rock inflections into her music, a warm and lush sound that’s stirring both in ballad and breezy, mid-tempo forms. Reid employs a textured, vulnerable vocal, singing mostly soft to match the plaintive mood of her instrumentation. It yields songs both bare and beautiful (“Get the Devil Out”) and breezily moving along like latest single “Oh Canada”. Both are featured on Reid’s upcoming third record Out of My Province (her first on the album’s producer Matthew E. White’s Spacebomb label), a rise from her quiet, folk beginnings without losing the core emotion that characterizes her overall tone. The other preview from Out of My Province so far is “Best Thing”, a song that falls in the middle of stark solitude and comfortably strolling, a moody piece that builds with orchestral grandeur in the song’s coda. It’s a subtle but important range displaying a consistent thread of command from beginning to end within each of these new singles. Out of My Province is due March 6, just in time for a trip to SXSW all the way from Nadia Reid’s home in New Zealand. (Kevin McStravick)