Beautifully intimate and achingly raw, BROODS’ Georgia Nott is reborn as Georgia Gets By, unleashing her innermost angst, a heavy heart, and a tender soul on her solo debut, ‘Fish Bird Baby Boy.’ Here, she takes us track-by-track through her breathtaking first EP.
for fans of Daughter, Boygenius, Wolf Alice, Wy
Stream: “Easier to Run” – Georgia Gets By
It’s the most angsty version of me – the part that I try to act like I’ve out grown of, but still rules my big little heart. BROODS is obviously a combination of Caleb and I, but this is my end of the Venn Diagram.
Well, now we know who puts the “brooding” in BROODS’ name.
For ten years now, New Zealand-born siblings Georgia and Caleb Nott have entranced audiences around the world with their seductive, impassioned, and forever vulnerable indie pop music. In their late teens when they first debuted, the Nott siblings have grown tremendously over the past decade, and BROODS has evolved with them – but their songs have never lost that unfiltered human quality that first drew the world’s attention. With four studio albums under their belt, BROODS remain a beacon not just of radiant sound, but of soul-stirring emotion –– and with the release of Georgia Nott’s first solo EP, we can start to understand why.
Beautifully intimate and achingly raw, Nott is reborn as Georgia Gets By, unleashing her innermost angst, a heavy heart, and a tender soul on Fish Bird Baby Boy. Blending the sharp, catchy pop songwriting style she’s refined and finessed over the years with darker, heavier indie rock and indie folk elements, Nott emerges with an identity that is at once familiar, and yet fresh and new – creating a breathtaking, shiver-inducing, and cathartic experience for all.
And still I dream
We’re kids again
To feel your love
Till it turns to pain
And it’s easier
Easier to run
Until I’m running right back to you
To tell you how I really feel
Maybe we can find forgiveness
Maybe we can learn to heal
But it’s easier to run
– “Easier to Run,” Georgia Gets By
Released October 6, 2023 via Luminelle Recordings, Fish Bird Baby Boy is a product of intense self-reflection and unabating inner reckoning. Nott holds nothing back: She is a romantic at heart, but she’s also her biggest critic – unable to avoid (or ignore) the darker recesses of her mind, and all the thoughts that linger there, on the edge but never out of sight.
The foundations of this record began during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. With the world shut down and her bandmate-brother half a world away, Nott had all the time in the world to think, to write, and to sing – to herself. So of course, she did all three.
In short? Georgia got by.
“Caleb and I were living across the world from one another – him in Aotearoa, and me in LA,” she tells Atwood Magazine. “I started writing a lot more on guitar again and experimenting for hours and hours with Noah Beresin, who produced the record. We would just smoke a tonne of weed and then play without putting any expectations on ourselves. It became a really safe space to be silly and vulnerable and go to places that we normally wouldn’t in your average studio session. After a while we realized we’d made a pretty great record that we were both really in love with.”
“I think for the first time in years, I didn’t really have [a vision],” she reflects. “I just wanted to make music for no reason other than to self soothe and explore. It was a nice change to only focus on the thing in front of me. It was only towards the end of the process that I began to really see what I was trying to create. And even then I resisted the urge to build too much of a world around it. I think maybe the vision was to have no vision, if that makes sense. Just trust that I’d look back and see what it always was later.”
Big beautiful wet eyes
Don’t worry I hit him back for you
But he can hit harder
Oh Lana
You cry like a baby
Will you be my baby walking home
Don’t know where to start but
Oh Lana
Would it be so bad
Would it be so bad
To love you
– “Oh Lana,” Georgia Gets By
For Nott, Georgia Gets By – the artist, and the art itself – is a reflection of her truest self.
“It’s the most angsty version of me – the part that I try to act like I’ve out grown of but still rules my big little heart,” she admits. “BROODS is obviously a combination of Caleb and I, but this is my end of the Venn Diagram.”
“I’m making the kind of music that I actually listen to,” she adds. “I listen to all types of stuff but this songwriter-centric heavy feeling music has always been the kind that I feel closest to. It’s exciting to explore making it myself and being a beginner again.”
She describes her new EP as “unrestrained femme catharsis” – and while she laughs as she says teases out her words, there’s something to be said about them.
As for the title?
“I thought it would look good on a t-shirt!” she quips. “I also just felt like that song summarized everything quite well. All the turmoil I’m singing about through the EP kind of boils down to this feeling of being a hopeless mortal, which I’m honestly very fine with. We do our best.”
I’m just a girl who feels like a fish sometimes
Resigning to the current, in and out with the tides
I’m just a girl who feels like a bird sometimes
Falling from a tree so high, but sometimes I really do fly
I’m just a girl (who feels)
Who feels like a boy sometimes (a boy)
Comfortable and confident
So why don’t I win your love
I’m just a girl
Who feels like a baby sometimes
Curling up upon your lap
Hold me ’til I get back…
– “Fish Bird Baby Boy,” Georgia Gets By
Full of that tender turmoil that makes our hair stand on edge, Fish Bird Baby Boy aches from the inside out, its five songs making for a short, yet nonetheless memorable experience.
The fact that you can play these songs four full times in just over an hour ends up working to this record’s advantage, mainly because the music itself doesn’t get old: rather, the more you listen to Georgia Gets By, the more she reveals of herself, and the more you take away from this EP.
Nott’s seeming fragility is really just her quiet confidence; this becomes abundantly clear as soon as the sensual, slow-burning opener “Oh Lana” kicks off, and Nott sings a soothing assurance to her younger self, conflicted with a queer sexuality she didn’t yet know how to express. “Would it be so bad to love you?” she asks, the answer now in hand.
“‘Oh Lana’ was the first song to be written on the EP, in the midst of the pandemic, with all the time in the world to sit and stare out windows and think about childhood,” she explains. “It opened the door to the record, so that one is very special. [It’s] maybe my favorite, lyrically. I found a way to say things that I’d never written about so directly. I love some fearlessly direct poetry.”
The softness of that entrance doesn’t last long, but its sheer vulnerability remains a constant throughout the record.
“Easier to Run,” described as an ode to “all the avoidant lovers who would sooner evaporate than commit,” is a heated indie rock fever dream: An eruption of charged, perfectly coordinated emotion and sound:
Out of sight, out of mind
I don’t want to rewind
No, it’s easier to run…
So, I won’t get involved
Don’t need this to be solved
No, it’s easier to run…
Until I’m running right back to you
To tell you how I really feel
Maybe we can find forgiveness
Maybe we can learn to heal
But it’s easier to run
The smoldering, passionate upheaval “Happiness Is an 8 Ball” is an instant standout: Nott bares her feelings of intimacy, love, and connection in two a half minutes, every second of which hits with the heavy weight of a bruised heart. “Happiness is an 8 ball; you better keep it safe,” Nott sings, her voice a lightning rod of fervor and rising tension. “I’m just a liar, ‘cause you never tell the truth to me.” Guitars roar and drums rage around her as she dives deeper into it:
Sorry’s a dozen roses
Maybe a tear or two
Don’t know what it is
But I only cry when I think of you
And I don’t think it’s love
I don’t think it’s fate
That gives me the energy to take you
The EP’s back half is as strong as its front, with Nott’s most poetic moments manifesting on the fragile, gut-wrenching “So Free So Lonely” and the drop-dead gorgeous title track, “Fish Bird Baby Boy.”
I guess it’s true, the world shrinks too, like me and you
Night will come early and the clouds will fill the room
And water falls right off your back like morning dew
Nobody cares but do we really want them to
So free, so lonely
From way up high we look at lovers on the street
They don’t know why they wanna stay, they wanna leave
Saying goodbye, tears in their eyes, it never seems
Anything’s right, but every night we get to dream
So free, so lonely
For not, the whole sixteen-minute journey is a highlight. “Every song has been my favorite at some point,” she says. “They all appeal to me in different ways. “‘Happiness is an 8 Ball’ was my favorite to make. ‘So Free So Lonely’ still makes me cry like I’m hearing it for the first time. I love all my children equally!”
Fish Bird Baby Boy is a singular look at Georgia Nott, the solo artist.
We’ve long known her to be a powerhouse of emotion; for ten years, the voice of BROODS has inspired, elevated, and empowered through the art she makes with her brother. The music she’s made together with Noah Beresin, and under her own name, is just as powerful, as vulnerable, and as moving. Once and for all, we know who put the “brooding” in BROODS’ name, and we can only hope that this is far from the last time we hear from Georgia Gets By.
“I hope they just feel how much love went into it,” Nott shares. “Because Noah and I poured everything into it. I hope people can hear that.” Experience the full record via our below stream, and peek inside Georgia Gets By’s Fish Bird Baby Boy EP with Atwood Magazine as Georgia Nott goes track-by-track through the music and lyrics of her solo debut!
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:: stream/purchase Fish Bird Baby Boy here ::
:: connect with Georgia Gets By here ::
‘Fish Bird Baby Boy’ – Georgia Gets By
:: Inside Fish Bird Baby Boy ::
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OH LANA
“O Lana” was the first song to be written on the EP, in the midst of the pandemic, with all the time in the world to sit and stare out windows and think about childhood. I wrote it about my eleven year old self, trying to come to terms with my first queer feelings and questioning the belief systems I grew up with at Catholic school.
EASIER TO RUN
A song for all the avoidant lovers who would sooner evaporate than commit. ‘Easier to Run’ is about the emotional whiplash of a breakup. The push and pull of love and fear. It dreams of closure and the courage to be honest.
HAPPINESS IS AN 8 BALL
This one started in the garden of my old flat in Wellington. It was a soft and unassuming folk song, ’til I shared it with Noah Beresin (Producer). He noticed the underlying anger and had the idea that we express it through the arrangement. So with the help of engineer, Seth Paris, we really went in and layered 10 channels of distorted guitars. It was the most fun I’ve ever had in the studio.
SO FREE SO LONELY
When I was living in Brooklyn, I loved watching the pigeons from the balcony of the apartment. How they balanced so precariously on the skinniest ledges and made home tucked up in the windows next to air-conditioning units. I imagined them to be lonely for some reason, and I wondered whether they watched humans like I watched them. So free so lonely is the product of one of those days. Looking out at the pigeons and letting my mind wander off with them.
FISH BIRD BABY BOY
Though, sonically, it seems like the saddest song on the EP, Fish bird baby boy is about feeling deeply connected. To nature and to my masculine side and the crying kid version of me. It gently accepts that things go back and forth between perfect and devastating and sometimes they are both at the same time. I like to think of this song as a lullaby about surrendering to cycles and seasons of life.
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:: stream/purchase Fish Bird Baby Boy here ::
:: connect with Georgia Gets By here ::
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