Medium Build’s Nick Carpenter continues the confessional excavation of ‘Country’ on the raw and resonant ‘Marietta’ EP — a soul-stirring collection of “therapy trauma tunes” that digs deep into the stories and scars of his past in order to make sense of the present.
Stream: “Triple Marathon” – Medium Build
It’s me continuing to process my childhood, giving some part of myself away, telling stories that we all feel.
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Medium Build has always made music for the emotionally unguarded — songs that ache and shimmer with unresolved longing, filled with the raw humanity of someone trying to make sense of their past and present in real time.
His fifth studio album (and major label debut), Country, saw singer/songwriter Nick Carpenter digging into himself — both figuratively and literally — to make something sweet, raw, and direct. “I wanted this album to have my goddamn DNA on it,” he candidly stated last year — and it did.
With the five-track Marietta EP, Carpenter continues this intimate journey, peeling back yet another layer as he traces his roots, his relationships, and his sense of self all the way back to the town that raised him. If Country was his thesis on identity, lineage, and inherited weight, Marietta feels like its echo: A self-contained postscript that softens, sharpens, and stitches together what came before.
I’ve been making lists of things to do
when you come back to town
I’ve been getting super jealous
of the people you’re around
And I wish that I could breathe you in
and loosen up my grip
But not knowing when I’ll see you next
has got me acting cringe
Does it make sense how I need it?
When I’m blackout, you’re a lighthouse
And it’s so basic, I just gotta face it
Does it make sense how I need it?
Tell me that it makes sense…
Released November 15th, 2024 via Island Records, Marietta arrived seven months after Country, a breakout album that introduced Medium Build’s unflinching vulnerability and confessional, emotionally charged songwriting to a much wider audience. Named one of Atwood‘s 2024 Albums of the Year, Country was hailed as a “masterpiece” upon its release – an intimate, unfiltered, and unapologetically exposed folk rock record that highlights and embraces Carpenter’s humanity. “It’s an album full of real, raw highs and lows – moments of heartfelt confession, human connection, spiritual release, inner reckoning, soul-searching,” we wrote at the time.
While Country told a cohesive story rooted in lineage and identity, Marietta breaks off into its own orbit – a visceral, reflective collection born from the same voice, but built on its own emotional terrain. It’s a standalone snapshot of unresolved memories and ongoing processing that didn’t quite belong to the record that came before it, but nevertheless brings us closer and closer to understanding Nick Carpenter in tandem with his own self-discovery.
His latest set of “therapy trauma tunes” reckons with Carpenter’s upbringing, childhood, parents, religion, and everything in between.
It leans into emotional specificity — mining the past not just for understanding, but for healing. The result is both cathartic and cutting: A confessional collection of stories and scars, wrapped in twangy textures, emo urgency, and unflinching introspection.
“I just wanted there to be some new name-age, I guess,” he says. “A couple of them deal with my childhood and one of my buddies at the label, Graham, has a friend that grew up in my same hometown and he thought it’d be really cool if we went to our hometown. ‘What if you guys went there and shot around your town together?’ I was like, ‘That sounds so triggering. It sounds like a nightmare, but also whatever. Sure, let’s do it.’ So I did, and it ended up being such a beautiful day. I hadn’t lived there since I was 19, she hadn’t lived there since she was 18. We both just drove around, and we didn’t know each other either – we had no mutuals. We just grew up kind of on the edge of each town – it’s a giant suburb sprawl down there north of Atlanta.”
“So we just met up and it all started, all the memories and all the pain and all the stuff that started flashing back and the stuff I was writing about. I’d already written those tunes that talk about my childhood, so we went to some places that would be significant, like the church I grew up in or the mall that my dad used to work at, and the swim team pool, all the triggering spots. It was kind of crazy, and she got photos of everywhere, everything we did. At the end of the day I had all these titles and I thought, ‘What if we just called it Marietta instead of beating around the bush?’ Let’s just call it what it is, so that’s a long way to say that’s how we got there. Just one little creative day that turned into something bigger than I could have imagined.”
What began as a loose day of reconnection and reflection ultimately turned into something far more meaningful.
Marietta’s songs deepen the portrait of Medium Build as both a project and a person. As Carpenter continued touring Country and watching it resonate around the world, Marietta became a vehicle for fresh connection – a new window into his past, and a new invitation for those just discovering him now.
“Well, I think having ‘Triple Marathon’ be the first single we put out after the record — that was intentional,” he reflects. “It’s how I wanted to be seen. I think the song is that mixture of a little bit twangy, a little bit emo – it has a lot of the things we did really well on Country. It feels like a sibling to ‘In My Room’ or ‘Can’t Be Cool Forever.’ It just feels aligned, and I think this EP is also about giving something new to the real ones – the people who are already in. What I’ve found on this tour we’ve been doing all year is that a lot of people are just now finding out about us, which is totally cool. We play “Crying Over U,” and they’re singing it. We play “In My Room,” they know every word. But then I go back and play “Be Your Boy” or “Misery,” or anything from Rabbit, and people are like, “Oh, never heard this one.” And that’s fine! I don’t have any ego wrapped up in that. I’m just stoked people know anything – stoked they bought tickets, stoked they’re here. Cool. How can I serve you guys, right? “Yoke” saw a ton of new listeners showing up because of Julien, or because a friend from church sent them the song.”
“And that’s kind of the game: Just continually creating new moments for people to enter. I used to not think like that. I used to be more bitter – like, ‘I’m just gonna do me, and if people f* with it, then hell yes.’ I still feel that way when I’m creating; that hasn’t changed, but I’ve realized there are ways to open the door a little wider. And that’s by creating new moments, new doors, new entry points. Every time you release something, you have the opportunity for a new entry point. That’s what this is. It’s me continuing to process my childhood, giving some part of myself away, telling stories that we all feel. ‘Triple Marathon’ is so specific to me, and people are texting me like, ‘Oh my god, this is so much about my longest relationship,’ and that’s the magic! It’s a great power, great responsibility type vibe, you know, just because it forces me to be present.”
Carpenter affectionately describes Marietta as “childhood pain reexamined,” and from the first guitar strums of “Triple Marathon” to the final echoes of “Faded Blue,” that pain takes on shape, sound, and surprising beauty. Each song offers a different lens through which to view the past — some jagged, some tender, all deeply human. Whether he’s reckoning with religious trauma on “Yoke” or channeling his inner bad boy on “Dad’s 4Runner,” Carpenter threads vulnerability through every moment, blurring the line between personal memory and shared emotional truth.
Atwood Magazine previously praised the EP’s beautifully gut-wrenching opener “Triple Marathon,” a song born from pure desperation about a “relationship-situationship-friendship thing” (his words), as a “breathtaking, brutally honest upheaval from Carpenter’s most intimate and vulnerable depths.”
“John & Lydia” is another instant standout – an intensely emotional, achingly intimate, and deeply personal anthem, the EP’s second track sees Carpenter singing to, for, and about his parents, John and Lydia. “Did I grow up into someone that you like? I know that the people you heard from told you it was all black and white,” he roars, going on to create a cinematic, soul-stirring mantra out of an inescapable, inevitable truth: “The things that were shaping you, the things that are shaping me, and we both know you can’t run from family. Would we have been friends if we were born at the same time? Maybe in another life…”
Carpenter himself struggles to pick a single “favorite” out of the bunch, citing how each song has its own near and dear place in his heart. “‘Triple Marathon’ is my heartbreak tune, ‘Yolk’ is my absolute testament – everyone will know me after this, ‘John & Lydia’ is the most real,” he explains. “I’m just excited for this pack. It feels like a maturing of the Medium build thing. There’s something for everybody in this little tiny little pack of tunes. I’m very excited about it. I just want people to spend time with it, and I’m hoping that it gets in people’s ears and brains… and buys me some time to make the next record!”
Meanwhile, it’s the lyrics of “Faded Blue” and “Yoke” – the EP’s softer, slower tracks – that still resonate the most.
“That’s one of my favorite songs I’ve ever written,” he smiles. “Giggling on the couch waiting for the drugs we took to take, hopefully they would make us someone new. If I heard that lyric, I would be like… man. Not to big up myself, but I showed up. I put my entire self on the track that day, and it’s just funny because it was literally us eating mushrooms on pizza and watching ‘The Office,’ but I made it sound way cooler and deeper. I just I love that lyric.”
“And then there’s what might be my favorite line I’ve ever written, in “Yoke”: ‘Out on my own, signing lease agreements, flexing my agency, wondering how I would fail without the invisible man guiding me.’ Every time I sing that line, I can see myself at 19, 20 years old in the office of Apex West Midtown in Atlanta, signing my first apartment lease agreement. I remember that feeling of being in the office, looking at my roommate, being, ‘Are we doing this? Are we real people? Are we even allowed to do this?’ Like, this is crazy! So it’s little Easter eggs for myself. I get to put pictures in, I get to canon my life, which is so cool. It’s such a fun thing that I get to do that. I get to literally take a real thing that happened to me and make it lore, and it’s a gift. It’s such a fun thing.”
These songs may have started as personal catharsis, but they’ve already taken on a life beyond Carpenter himself.
Whether it’s an anthem of healing, a raw release, or an empathetic mirror, each track on Marietta holds space for reflection — both his and ours. The EP’s resonance lies in its specificity: The more Carpenter opens up about his own experiences, the more listeners seem to see themselves in his words.
“Well, I hope listeners know that when I’m giggling on the couch in ‘Faded Blue,’ that I was watching season three of The Office,” Carpenter chuckles. “Well, let me zoom out. As I age and find gentleness for the people around me, I f*ing hope that people can offer themselves that. Like when I play ‘John & Lydia’ live, every time I’ve played it, someone comes up and says, ‘I’m sobbing, I’m texting my mom.’ Or ‘My mom and I actually don’t talk at all, but this helps.’ And that’s all that you can hope for. I’m processing, and I hope it helps you to process, give a little gentleness to the teenaged you that survived, right? We all made it out.”
“And maybe not all of us did make it out. So thinking about the kids that didn’t, thinking about the kids, the people you’ve lost touch with. Maybe your parents are dead, and you can’t have this empathetic shit with them now. It’s gonna catch people wherever they need it, and that’s kind of the gift of writing. For me, I’m just happy… I’m happy to tell these stories and I’m hoping that I can grieve and process and move on. I don’t need to carry around all that baggage. It’s good to get that shit out, out of the head, and then move on.”
Marietta may not have been part of the original plan, but its arrival feels essential – and four months after its release, it remains a necessary, if unexpected, continuation of a story that’s still unfolding in real time.
It’s a record about reckoning and release, about finding softness in the places we once felt sharpest. And if Carpenter is still learning to let go, these songs offer us a way to do the same.
Experience the full record via our below stream, and peek inside Medium Build’s Marietta with Atwood Magazine as Nick Carpenter takes us track-by-track through the music and lyrics of this breathtakingly vulnerable and visceral EP!
Medium Build hits the road this spring for a coast-to-coast tour, kicking off at Coachella in mid-April and wrapping up in late September with two stadium shows in New York City supporting Tyler Childers. Find tickets and more information at mediumbuildmusic.com!
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:: read more about Medium Build here ::
:: stream/purchase Marietta here ::
:: connect with Medium Build here ::
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Stream: ‘Marietta’ – Medium Build
:: Inside Marietta ::
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Triple Marathon
“Triple Marathon” was just one of those tunes that fell out of me last year when I was, I was in LA for some sort of writing trip, kind of just hanging. And I made it with Cooper Holzman, who I made, like “Say Hi” and “Never Learned To Dance” with. So we already had a chemistry that we knew went well. And I think it was actually, we were at a session and the artists left. And so then I was like, let’s keep hanging. Like, well, you know, we got another hour before I got to go like, and we just had those two choruses.
I was like, I got some stuff. And I didn’t think… I don’t know. A lot of the tunes on ‘Country’ are about this one relationship I kind of was in the past couple of years that I was trying to… It was never, it never got to be actualized, you know, it was like a friendship that we kept dancing around and seeing if it could be more. And there’s a lot of love. And there was also just so much tension and a lot of factors that kind of prevented us from trying. And so, yeah, that’s just it.
I was just combining some of our shared thoughts, combining some of our shared anxieties. That is something I like to do is like pay attention to the anxieties of a partner or the anxieties of a friend and put them up against mine and then combine them into one character for a tune. Just kind of helps me… It helps me condense a lot of the emotions that, and it helps me kind of try to see their side, right? Like, ’cause I think they had, they had said, I’m, you know, I’m making a list of things to do when you get here. I was like, you know, so like, just me taking that and being like, okay, cool. I’m gonna start here and then I’m gonna put some of my fear and I’m gonna put some of their fear and put my fear. And like, just having, just trying to feel into it.
And that’s true for a lot of people, there’s just fear around relationships and anxiety. And I think that song is just so anxious, but passionate and obsessed and, you know, the chorus is so desperate, it’s so needy. And then I was just like singing my ass off and I was like, I kind of wanted it to feel like a Post Malone. It was like, I want there to be that, like, just that belt in it, like hard rock vibe, but like a little twangy, a little… Yeah. I was like, “I want this song to feel like a Post Malone song before he went country.” But I think it works either way. It’s just desperation… human desperation.
John & Lydia
“John & Lydia” also came out of a session in LA where I was writing for an artist and then they left, and then me and the producers were like hanging around and it was like, what if we kept working? Because it’s so fun. Writing for another artist is awesome, but it is like this big chore. It’s a task. You need to be present, you’re trying to be present for them. You’re trying to help them get their ideas. And then if they leave and you’re still hanging, it’s almost like you’re on free time. You’re like on company, like you’re getting paid to do nothing. You know, like no one’s getting paid anyway, but like, you feel like you’re getting away with something. You’re like, well, what if we did… What if we did something fun? Then we don’t tell anybody, you know?
Like, what if we made something that’s just for us, which turns out is a really great place to create from. So I made that with these two boys. They’re a unit called Manuka, but they’re just these two British boys called Connor and Will. And they were showing me Sam Fender. I’d never heard Sam Fender. And so they were showing me specifically this song, Sam Fender song called Spit of You. I don’t know if you’re familiar with this tune. It’s beautiful. And, you know, Connor’s playing it for me, and these boys are f*ing British as hell, I love it. And they’re, we’re just like drinking beers and talking about our family and really getting deep. I was like, “By the way, this is just Bruce Springsteen. Do you guys know Bruce Springsteen?” They’re like, no, no, really listening to it. I was like, ha, so funny. I was like, this boy was just doing Bruce. So I played them some Bruce shit. They played me some Sam shit, and I was like, a”Al right, let’s do this. Let’s make one.”
We just started it really simple. I was like, you know, it’s gonna have the driving baseline. It’s gotta be fast as hell. And then I was like, let’s just talk about what he’s talking about. Let’s talk about what we’re talking about. Like let’s talk about our f*ing, let’s talk about my family. Like let’s talk about our dads, let’s talk about whatever. So I wrote the first verse about my dad, and then I was just like, okay, well now what do I do? Second verse has to be about mom. All right… we literally punched the whole thing out in probably thirty minutes. We were just jamming, we were playing the speaker so loud, a neighbor walked over and knocked on the door and we were like, ‘oh no.’ And he was like, “Hey, sounds like such a vibe. Can I hang? Can I come in?” It’s like 11:00 at night, and a neighbor invites himself over. So I’m just cutting the vocal live in this giant Airbnb with like a stranger and two guys I had met twice. It was such a treat, such a weird day. This would’ve been December ‘23. I was so tired. I’d just gotten back from Europe tour and was just trying to dry out in LA, and it’s kinda my last party.
I was just drinking with these boys and digging into the feelings of empathy for my parents and trying to give them, trying to, trying to remember that they’re, it’s their first time and they were kids too, you know, I think that’s the big thing. Like every time I want to like hate someone or destroy them or just remembering that they’re making it up too. And they were handed probably shitty instructions just like I was, and just helps, helps soften the desire to blame or tear someone down.
It was a pretty healing song to write, actually. I’ve started playing it live. I’ve played it twice last week. It was the first I started playing it live at shows, and I’ve found it really does a number on folks!
Yoke (with Julien Baker)
My parents were missionaries. I grew up around pretty much exclusively people that were working in the ministry. My aunt and uncle ran a church. My other aunt and uncle were like leaders at this missionary training camp. Like they raised my cousins on this like basically Christian commune. Like, it’s just the only thing that everyone around me did. God was it in my family. My parents literally didn’t… I remember my mom being like, “Don’t worry about your GPA. You’re going to work in the church. No one cares what you did in lit class or science class. It’s all good.”
And so growing up in a household where God was kind of over health, physical health, education, it’s taken me a long time to dismantle that. When I think about me as a teenager, I was super overweight and apathetic and lazy and didn’t go outside and didn’t really read. I was a really curious kid and I feel like a lot of my… As life started getting more serious, I became less curious. And when you think that you know the source, the creator of the universe, and that all you got to do is like, you know, please him and pray to him and read his book and shit, you stop asking questions. And yeah, so when I turned 18, 19, I lost my faith. I was really bitter. And I spent a long time being bitter and angry.
And again, as I’ve grown, I have more empathy for the people that gave me these beliefs. I have a lot of softness for the youth group leaders and the f*ing rich Christians that I grew up around that, you know, never helped anybody except for themselves and like I have empathy for my parents. And, you know, they’re just trying to do what they thought was right. And so as I process this, it just seemed like it… Actually, I’ve had this song for five years, I think almost five years, maybe I wrote it in 2020, maybe 2019. Just one of those things I wrote and I was like, I’ll never be able to play this for real ’cause it’s so heavy. It’s almost like medicine: You don’t need it every day. You just need it when you need it. And I’m glad it’s out. I’m so glad it’s out.
As for working with Julien, she and I met a long time ago when we were teenagers, or maybe I was 21, she was 17. I’ve been a fan of her since I met her. And this was before she blew up, we went on tour with our little shitty punk bands in college. And she… Julien possesses this… Julien possesses this energy, that is so undeniable. It is a presence. I mean, you’ve interviewed her, she has this presence that is… It’s like, she’s like, so scatterbrained. She’s running around mile a minute, everywhere.
And then all of a sudden, she just sinks in like says something so f*ing beautiful and tender and thoughtful and she’s been like that. I mean, she was like, sitting on my porch, like reading Nietzsche when she was like 18, and like smoking cigarettes, and then like reading the Bible and like quoting scripture. And I was just like, Who the f* are you? Like, who is this like weird punk wood nymph like that’s sitting at my house? [laughs]
She had this crazy band, and they were just the best. And so she and I have spent a lot of the past, you know, 10-15 years of our friendship, talking about God, and processing God stuff and listening to a lot of Pedro the Lion, Dave Bazan. And listening to, you know, just asking each other the big, big questions about the meaning of life. I recorded this song like four or five times in the past five years. This version of it was slated to be on ‘Country’ without Julien, and one of my friends was like, “Hey, I love this tune, but it doesn’t feel like this is where the album should end.” We actually had it slated to be after “Stick Around,” and I was like, “You’re so right. It’s a bummer. We don’t need everyone to sit at the end of the record on this.” I made that in the same room I made ‘Country’ in,but it was smart to leave it off – and we did!
And then I sent it to Julien and I was like, would you be, from the bottom of my heart, do you have any inkling that you could add something to this? She’s like, maybe I’ll add some guitar. I was like, okay. And then she’s like, well, I added some harmonies. I was like, great. I was like, cool. And then we got it all back. And I was like, yeah. And then I sent it to the mixing engineer. I was like, turn her shit up, like put her on this. So it was just good. It’s good to have a friend on there. A real friend. You know a lot of features in the business, someone you just met, or you put on a bill with someone and say, let’s get a picture of you guys being best friends. Julien is actually one of my best friends. Like a sister, like a cousin. It’s like we know each other’s funk. Having her on it is just the best. She gets it, and she knows the God shit.
Dad’s 4Runner
“Dad’s 4Runner” was probably the biggest conflict, or not conflict… This one was probably, I was like, “Will people follow me into this zone?” You know, I think that’s the big question now that there are new people that are like, “Oh, you’re the ‘Crying Over U’ guy,” or “You’re the ‘In My Room’ guy.” Well, this is what people think I am. I’ve changed a million times since we started making Medium Build stuff. I just always wonder if someone will go to the next lily pad with me. And I made this last year. Actually, the same Europe trip that I went and did “Can’t Be Cool Forever.”
It was Thanksgiving time, and it was with a buddy of mine. I’d made some friends on the Louis Capaldi tour, and now that Louis isn’t really touring, lot of those boys, a lot of his bandmates are in London writing songs. honestly, this is so silly. It must’ve been right after Thanksgiving because I was listening to f*ing… [laughs] I’ve never told this out loud, I’m so glad it’s you. I was listening to Mariah Carey, “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” I was on the train, I was on the tube, mate, listening to “All I Want For Christmas Is You,” and I remember, I had my little Cortado and I was just in the station waiting for the train. And I was like, “man, I wanna make a song where the bass is going… [vocalization]” – because that’s the cool thing about that song is it’s constant, you’re just on it the whole time. People don’t even realize how thumpy that tune is. It’s just so fun and moving. And I got to the studio and I was like, “Guys, guys, we gotta make something that’s like… [vocalization]” And they’re like, “Okay.” And so they agreed. And I was like, cool. give me kick drum. Let’s just do kick and bass. So that’s where we got to that…
And we slowed it down a little bit. So it’s not quite as fast as the Mariah Carey tune, but I was just like, I was like, I need some energy. I need some dancing vibes. But as soon as we made it, I was like, oh, this song is like too “blah, blah, blah,” too rocky, too emo, too cool, too dark, too… I don’t know. I get in my own way. I’m really glad that tune’s coming out. The label loves it. They’re like, “This song is so fun from you. We need more fun, fast songs.” Like, okay, okay, okay, chill, chill, chill. But yeah, I’m glad. We fought really hard on that one. We really moved a lot of the pieces around, considered adding another chorus, considered writing a big bridge. It’s just a two minute f*ing rock song, mate. Put it up, put it down, rock it.
I’ve been dating someone very recently and I showed it to them. She was like, “It’s kinda sexy. It’s kinda like, you’re in your cool, bad boy sexy era.” I was like, all right, that’s kinda nice. We were referencing Kings of Leon, The Strokes, Arctic Monkeys, all of that post-Radiohead, ‘radio’ rock. This is my bad boy tune, but it’s funny, ‘cause it’s like sitting next to my therapy trauma tunes [laughs]. I couldn’t possibly commit to writing five bad boy tunes, just one bad boy song next to Nick and his feelings.
Faded Blue
I’m so glad that this is the closer for this era. “Faded Blue” is also an older one. I wrote it in maybe 2021 and I have recorded it probably four times. It’s a song about my ex and I are just walking our dogs. And just the stillness that I found in the relationship, that I had never had. It was, we met in Covid and I wasn’t touring and we just locked in really quickly. And I loved our routines. I got to, I really fell in love with being at home and cooking and walking the dogs and doing the domestic shit that I’d thrown out of my life. I was like, oh, I’m just like this drunk man child that’s always on tour.
And I’ll just eat, I’ll eat lunch meat standing in the kitchen for the rest of my life and I think when I met Grace, we just fell into this really tender routine and learned a lot about each other and gave each other that safety and stillness that we had never really offered ourselves. And so that song is just such a snapshot of how I felt and it’s just like, I don’t know what love is, but I love this. And I think it’s a really, it’s a gentle way to say, I love you. And I think a lot of people will relate ’cause it is just like, sometimes you don’t know if you, or sometimes people use love too fast or they use it as a, I love you, love me back.
People use love as a weapon. And I think just really being with someone is just like, I love this. Do I feel good right now? I was in therapy at the time too, so I was like trying a therapist have me checking my gut. She’s like, when you’re with people, just feel, what does it feel to be in the room with this person? What’s the vibe? What do you, how does your, gut feel? How does your heart feel? How does your head feel when you’re, when this person’s talking to you, when they’re looking at you? And I think that was just me observing. It was also when I started my bird shit. I started recording bird sounds around this time.
I’m now three or four years into my relationship with the birds. So the first line being we woke before the birds, it very much points to me, it’s such a true, it’s such a true song, it’s eating mushrooms, watching The Office, listening to Bullion, it’s all in there. I say everything. So it’s just, it feels very lovey-dovey domestic. I think a lot of folks will feel seen by it.
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:: connect with Medium Build here ::
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