King of Having Fun

by Medium Build

Nick Carpenter has spent a decade making Medium Build out of the thoughts most people would rather hide.

On King of Having Fun, he finally turns that same unflinching gaze toward the habits that kept him alive – and the ones that were keeping him from living. The singer/songwriter’s sixth album, out now via slowplay/Island Records, is explosive and intimate in equal measure, channeling panic, desire, self-loathing, humor, family history, romance, and hard-won freedom into a world that feels unmistakably his. It’s also an immediate album-of-the-year contender – not because it ties any of those contradictions into a neat bow, but because Carpenter lets every one of them stay messy, loud, funny, painful, and human.

King of Having Fun - Medium Build — King of Having Fun – Medium Build

For Carpenter, the record arrives with the weight of an ending as much as a beginning. “This feels like a letter from rehab,” he tells Atwood Magazine. “Even though I didn’t go to rehab, it feels like a postscript a little bit.” Later, he goes further: “Don’t quote me – well, do quote me – but this might be the end of the Nick who doesn’t think he belongs.” King of Having Fun lives inside that possibility – not erasing the person who made all those earlier Medium Build records, but looking at him clearly enough to decide what still deserves to come along.

“This album is maybe the best and most important thing I’ve ever made. I got all my favorite people in a room and we had fun. It’s a celebration of life,” Carpenter shares. Few songs capture the record’s intensity better than “Do Something Productive,” one of King of Having Fun’s most viciously funny and unsettling moments. Carpenter begins with the familiar choreography of self-improvement – wake up, run, meet a friend, eat well, clean the house, write a song – only to watch the whole routine collapse beneath the compulsions it was supposed to control. The song is relentless because Carpenter’s mind is relentless: Wellness becomes another benchmark, another performance, another way to discover he still hasn’t fixed himself.

“Wake up, go for a run, coffee with a friend
Go home and make some lunch
Do something productive,
clean the house, and write a song
But you know it won’t be long,
you know it won’t be long
*’Til I gotta get super f**ed up…”*

“I think I was fed up with myself,” Carpenter says of the song. “No one’s meaner to me than me. That’s my rule.” The cruelty is part of what makes “Do Something Productive” so difficult to shake: Its humor doesn’t soften the spiral so much as expose how absurdly easy it is to disguise punishment as discipline. Beneath the running, supplements, clean house, and carefully managed routine is the same person still trying to outrun himself.

“Perceived” cuts even closer to the bone. Here Carpenter turns his attention toward Medium Build itself and the strange bargain at the center of an autobiographical career: He has built a life by saying the private thing out loud, only to realize that constant exposure can become another form of confinement. “So I turn my private life into entertainment / Commodified all the thoughts I’d ever had,” he sings, before the song reaches its bruising refrain: “I don’t wanna be here / But I don’t wanna be gone / No I don’t wanna be perceived at all.” It’s one of the album’s sharpest contradictions – wanting the stage, the songs, and the connection while recoiling from what it costs to be watched.

Carpenter understands exactly what that bargain has given him – and what it has taken. “I recognize that what Medium Build offers people is I say the thing out loud that people haven’t said,” he explains. But somewhere along the way, the refuge he created began demanding its own performance. “As part of creating my character, I started selling Nick up the river,” he says. “So when Medium Build started being my own oppressor, when I created my own handcuffs, it’s like, we’re out.” “Perceived” gives that reckoning a pulse: a song about craving connection while wanting desperately to disappear from view.

That push and pull gives King of Having Fun its astonishing range. “Bird Woman” churns and erupts with raw, almost feral release, Carpenter seeing himself in the mockingbird making noise because it wants something. “Home Depot” brings twangy charm, empathy, and genuine ache to its portrait of a man who can fix nearly anything except himself. “It’s Not Easy (Falling In Love)” burns with heat and romantic urgency, while “In My Gut” glows dreamily as Carpenter traces learned behavior and family conflict backward through generations. “Chill” smolders until its electric fuse catches, complete with a guitar solo that hits exactly where it should; “Downpour” barrels forward with emotional and musical force; and “Armor” turns intrusive thought into pure catharsis: “There I go again / Projecting on you / And I hate myself / So, I turn it into art.”

Even at its most bruising, though, King of Having Fun wants to move. These songs surge, strut, crack open, and occasionally combust; Carpenter’s confessionals arrive inside arrangements built to be felt physically as much as processed intellectually. “Armor” races ahead of its own intrusive thoughts. “Bird Woman” thrashes against the stillness its narrator covets. “Downpour” pushes anxiety through a full-bodied rush, while the guitar break in “Chill” seems to burn off whatever words can’t. The catharsis here isn’t merely lyrical. Carpenter and his band give all that interior noise somewhere to go.

The vitality running through these songs is no accident. Carpenter made much of King of Having Fun in the room with the musicians who have become central to Medium Build’s live identity, allowing drums, guitars, bass, mistakes, laughter, and friendship to shape the music from the beginning. Where earlier Medium Build recordings often started with beats and were later translated for the stage, these songs already seem to know what they’ll become in a packed room. Carpenter describes the difference simply: “So much less loneliness. Informed by laughter and friendship.” That communal pulse is everywhere – even at the album’s darkest, it rarely sounds isolated.

“Almost everything was recorded live,” Carpenter tells Atwood. Overdubs inevitably followed, but, as he puts it, “the bones were all live.” You can hear those bones throughout King of Having Fun: people reacting to each other, guitars allowed to snarl and soar, drums pushing songs forward, and a singer who sounds increasingly comfortable sharing the weight with the people around him. For an artist whose music has so often emerged from solitude, that change feels profound.

And then there is “King of Having Fun” itself, the album’s emotional center and the song that feels like a capstone to an entire era of Carpenter’s writing. He looks backward toward the curious, rambunctious kid he was before fun became partying, before approval became currency, before every experience came with an awareness of how it might look from the outside. The memories are wonderfully specific – bikes, DVDs, a PSP, stuffed-crust pizza, Mountain Dew – but the real ache comes from recognizing how naturally that younger self once inhabited his own life.

“I was a curious kid and that curiosity led me to the deep woods, not only of Dire Dire Docks or Vice City, but of my own physical world. That curiosity led me to call my local radio station and ask what that song they just played was. It was ‘Two Princes’ by Spin Doctors! That curiosity got me second place in the rocket building class at camp and had me riding the bench during my only season as a basketball player. That curiosity enabled me to take risks and fail and laugh. That curiosity revealed a zeal for life that wasn’t much concerned with how I was perceived. That curiosity is very much the DNA of a kid who could wear the robe and crown, the king of having fun.”

In conversation, Carpenter reduces that whole world to one devastatingly simple distinction: “The king of having fun was me before I learned to mask and code-switch and posture.” The title track reaches backward toward that kid without pretending adulthood can be undone. Its real triumph comes in the song’s movement from “I used to be” to “I could be” and finally “Baby, I’m still the king of having fun.” What initially sounds like mourning slowly becomes recognition.

That child isn’t simply an object of nostalgia. Across King of Having Fun, Carpenter is trying to recover some of his freedom without pretending he can undo everything that came afterward. As he tells Atwood, “Fun is not concerned with safety. Fun knows it’s safe. Survival is a chokehold on control and safety.” That distinction runs beneath nearly every song here: the difference between pleasure and escape, work and presence, attention and connection, making it through the day and actually being inside it.

And perhaps the most affecting change is that Carpenter no longer seems willing to outsource the final verdict on who he is. “Historically, for me, I have given people everything to approve of me,” he tells Atwood. “And now I’m giving myself the gift of approving myself so I don’t have to go seek it.” That freedom remains imperfect and ongoing – exactly as it should. Elsewhere, Carpenter puts the transformation in wonderfully ordinary terms: “I’m chilling. I’m having fun. I’m laughing. I’m taking the stairs. I’m eating more ice cream than ever… I don’t feel scared anymore.”

King of Having Fun succeeds because all of that self-examination still results in a record you can scream, dance, cry, laugh, and lose yourself inside. Carpenter hasn’t made an album about arriving at some perfected version of himself; he’s made one about being alive enough to keep looking, loving, failing, playing, and trying again. It’s blisteringly catchy, emotionally overwhelming, deeply funny, and full of the kind of writing that makes a private thought suddenly feel communal. For a project that has always thrived on turning inner chaos into connection, King of Having Fun feels like Medium Build at his most complete – and one of the year’s most special records.

There may be no cleaner way to describe that arrival than Carpenter does himself: “This isn’t a comeback. But somehow it feels like my comeback to myself.”