Nashpaints, the project of Irish producer Finn Carraher McDonald, first emerged in 2020 with a lowkey tape for ambi-folk label wherethetimegoes (Frog of Earth, Princ€ss, Mel Keane et al) that seemed to bloom into a more widely shared secret. Six years on (time doesn't hang around does it?), we're treated to a second offering, this time on newer imprint MirrorWorld, of lo-fi ambient bedroom song replete with a fair bit more ambition present than the less than prolific rate of output might suggest. In the first instance, Everyone Good Is Called Molly appears to be the product of an artist deeply intune with contemporary sounds and interests, a kind of post-NTS, genre-agnostic exercise in patient home-recording that also displays an obvious understanding of pop aesthetics. In that sense, you might align Nashpaints with the current Copenhagen sound, uniting as it does ambient, dreampop, shoegaze and modern electronic production in a way that privileges the atomised nature of online music consumption - these songs paint not in broad strokes but small details, speaking more to the intimate and the personal than the usual mass scale audience of pop songwriting. Outside of Copenhagen, it's a trick we've also seen pulled by Cindy Lee, an influence that's writ large in the closing half of Everyone Good Is Called Molly (the chiming guitars, the close mic'd helium vocals), which suggests McDonald has made an album that provides its own document of a much wider moment, a product entirely of its time.
FFO: Cindy Lee, Alex G, Horse Vision, Frog of Earth
