Medium Build’s Nick Carpenter traces the conflict patterns we inherit from our parents and carry into adulthood on the dreamy “In My Gut,” the final single from his sixth studio album ‘King of Having Fun’ – turning intimate family memories into a provocative, soul-baring reckoning with who we become and what we choose to leave behind.

Stream: “In My Gut” – Medium Build

I think I always felt it in my gut / Think I always had the answer…

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This strange thing happens as we get older.

Most of us try to figure out why we are the way that we are, and potentially, untangle lifelong webs that were woven long before we had any real agency. Often, this brings it back to our parents. It’s near impossible to understand the nuances of why people do the things that they do, especially as a kid. You accept who they are and try to move forward without too much thought. Distance and age allow for understanding; you become an adult and the rose-colored glasses come off. You begin to piece together the blurry memories until they become clear. You start to see your parents as human beings instead of the people who are supposed to have all the answers. This can be a good or a bad thing, but the beauty is that it helps you understand yourself a bit better; where you are now, how you got there and where you might want to go in the future.

Medium Build’s Nick Carpenter explores this on “In My Gut,” the final single ahead of his forthcoming album King of Having Fun, out September 4 via slowplay/Island Records. Across a catalog that has repeatedly wrestled with family, masculinity, relationships, shame, and the more uncomfortable corners of his own behavior, Carpenter has made a habit of turning self-examination into remarkably candid songwriting. Songs like 2018’s “White Male Privilege” and this year’s “Armor” find him looking inward without necessarily liking what he sees; “In My Gut” pushes that instinct further, asking not only who he has become, but where some of those behaviors began.

“I wrote this song with one of my favorite artists, Annika Bennett. We were exchanging stories about our childhoods and the way our parents handled conflict. Harping on the way our fathers performed toughness or avoided hard conversations,” Carpenter tells Atwood Magazine.

He continues, “We explored how we inherited these traits and the new ways we meet conflict in our own lives. I still don’t really know what this song is about, but I think it’s my favorite.”

There’s an added intimacy to Carpenter having this conversation with Bennett. An accomplished singer/songwriter in her own right (as well as another longtime Atwood favorite), Bennett is also Carpenter’s girlfriend, meaning “In My Gut” emerged from two partners comparing the ways their respective childhoods shaped how they now meet conflict as adults. We can’t know exactly what their writing session unlocked for Carpenter, but it’s hard not to hear an extra layer of vulnerability in that context: His present partner helping him look backward at the behaviors, relationships, and family dynamics that helped form the person he is today. Perhaps that trust gave both writers room to ask questions that are much easier to avoid than answer.

“In My Gut” begins with a bright guitar lick and a pulsing beat dropping you directly into the music.

A slight build before Carpenter’s voice enters, always singing in a cadence that is a hook, even at the very first word.

I kinda figured it was over
with the windows down
You know you stress me
out fiddlin’ with the stereo

Immediately the scene is set. The picture is crystal clear, diving into a specific image. Carpenter barely needs to give us anything: Windows down, a hand fiddling with the stereo, and the creeping recognition that something between two people is over. We all know how the little things can take on outsized meaning when a relationship has shifted. The stereo doesn’t have to be the problem; it’s the kind of tiny habit that can suddenly become unbearable when a relationship has already frayed. Carpenter’s beautifully simple way of painting that image – of fiddling with the stereo – and what that might beget is poetically precise and instantly relatable.

You’re always talking
‘bout the cap and gown
Can we graduate this scenario?
When the appetizers come,
nobody says nothin’
Just chewin’ on a problem

It’s an immaculate example of Carpenter’s songwriting, with wit and winks baked into every part of the scene. “Can we graduate this scenario?” picks up the literal cap-and-gown image from the line before it and transforms “graduate” into a plea to finally move beyond whatever dysfunctional situation these two people have found themselves in. Then he does it again over dinner: “chewin’ on a problem” transforms the act of eating appetizers into a metaphor for the unresolved tension sitting at the table with them. The wordplay is funny and sharp, but it also makes the conflict feel painfully ordinary – exactly the kind of small, lived-in detail Carpenter excels at finding.

They’re among Carpenter’s own favorite lyrics on the forthcoming album. “It felt like I showed up on some rapper shit,” he says. “I love that lyric.”

It’s also central to how Carpenter understands his own songwriting voice. “That’s always been my superpower,” he says. “When I found my pen, when I found my voice, it was saying the thing exactly how I would say it. And that’s what I try to do.”

You know, I wonder if
I’m the thing we dance around
I might be crucial to the solving

The best songs take something extremely specific and find the universal meaning buried inside it, and Carpenter complicates the scene beautifully here.

After cataloguing another person’s behavior and the small irritations between them, he suddenly turns the lens back on himself: What if he is the thing they’ve been dancing around? What if understanding his own role is crucial to solving the problem?

There’s a lightness to Carpenter’s delivery that keeps all of this introspection from becoming heavy-handed, but beneath it is an important act of self-interrogation. He isn’t simply trying to understand what other people have done to him; he’s asking what he has carried forward himself.

The song flows straight into the chorus,

I think I always felt it in my gut
Think I always had the answer
Think I always felt it in my gut
Think I always had the answer 

Annika Bennett’s backing vocals lead us into the second verse which takes us out of the present and dives further into the past,

You tried to buy us off
with trips to the Palisades
A tiny photograph pinned to a corkboard
I know you had to sell the house in ‘08
I wonder if you got what you paid for it

The back half of the second verse packs a punch and Carpenter’s vocals turn up a notch, singing the most impactful words of the song with, well, his full chest,

You got this thing when
you wanna be taken serious
You get loud, say it with your chest
You еver wonder where
you learned to do it that way?
You ever wonder how I could learn best?

This is the heart of the song. Carpenter is looking back at his childhood acknowledging that this behavior is generational. Has his father acknowledged why he is the way that he is? Will Carpenter end up being the same way? Is everyone doomed to be like their parents? These questions seem obvious, in a way, but most people go their entire lives without asking them. They accept who they are and where they came from whether they like it or not rather than digging deeper and doing the work to be who they actually want to be and live how they actually want to live. Carpenter and Bennett had the honest conversation. They acknowledged the things that a lot of people bury deep, and because of that, we now have a song that may help some of those people feel a little less alone in the heaviness of it all. The chorus and the outro take us home with gorgeous guitar licks and melodic singing that echo into the distance.

Carpenter has recently been thinking explicitly about where inheritance ends and personal agency begins.

“There are things that are in your control. That’s your reaction to stuff. That’s how you treat people. It’s your beliefs about yourself. Then there’s things you can’t control, and that’s everything else,” he says. “I am a product of my parents – in my brain chemistry, my upbringing… It is part of my DNA… it maybe colors the path, how it gets to you, but it’s not actually coloring the moment.”

This distinction sits at the center of “In My Gut”: Carpenter can acknowledge how profoundly his upbringing shaped him without accepting those inherited behaviors as destiny.

I think I always felt it in my gut
(Think I always had the answer)
I think I always felt it in my gut
(Think I always)
I think I always
(Think I always had the answer)
Think I always! 

The impulse to understand what shaped him extends beyond “In My Gut” itself. Carpenter has described this period of his life and writing as “the closing of that chapter, and opening of a new chapter,” adding, “I’m wondering if maybe this might be the tale of me processing all this shit that got me here.”

After Carpenter has traced this adult conflict backward through childhood in the second verse, the line repeated in the outro starts to mean more. Maybe the answer isn’t something he has suddenly discovered as an adult; maybe his body understood these dynamics long before he had the words to explain them. And once you recognize an inherited pattern, you finally have the opportunity to decide whether you want to keep carrying it.

“In My Gut” is out everywhere now. King of Having Fun is out September 4th.

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Stream: “In My Gut” – Medium Build

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