Nell Mescal is, by her own admission, chronically online. “The last time I took a break from social media was at the Gaeltacht [an Irish speaking summer camp], when I was 14,” she says over Zoom. “I’ll delete an app and be like, why did I do that? I really enjoy this app! It’s difficult because when I used to work as a barista, I would take a break at work and go on my phone and go on social media, because that was a break. But now what do I do when there’s a break? Read a book? I don’t think so.”
If like Nell — and me — you are also chronically online, then you might be aware of her music. The 19-year-old has a cult following on TikTok and Instagram, the platforms she’s been using to post her music. It began with clips of her singing covers; Billie Eilish’s “Watch” and The 1975’s “Somebody Else”, back when she was still in school. “They’re so bad”, she says. “I had to archive them. I didn’t delete them because I think I need to look back at myself and laugh, but I’m keeping them in the archive so the world doesn’t have to laugh at me.” At the time, posting her videos publicly felt like the most daunting thing in the world. “I guess it’s like, if you posted a photo of you playing a football match, no one’s gonna be like, ‘What the hell?’ But when you do something like this, it’s very intimate and vulnerable. It’s so scary.”
From there, Nell moved on to the mammoth TikTok live sessions she’s become known for. In her first, she simply sat down and talked to strangers for three hours. “Like why did I do that? What was I talking about?” she laughs. “I used to go live and there’d be 10 people there. And then the next time it would be 12. And now they’re like, I could go on and there’s 150 people there for the three hours. That’s so silly and so crazy. And people need to get a life, including me. Like we need to not be doing that.” Just before the beginning of the pandemic, she decided to start posting her own songs. “At that point, I was firmly like, I need to not be ashamed of this,” she says.
It proved to be a very good decision, but it was one that took Nell from her hometown of Maynooth in Ireland, where she played Gaelic football and camogie and sailed in the summer, to London — where she suddenly found herself alone in a big city, in the middle of a public health emergency. Although she says she’s now found a community there, and lives in a houseshare with friends, she’s not immune to the homesickness that comes for the diaspora. I point out how silly it feels to be homesick when Ireland is so close to us both. “Yeah!” she laughs. “Like, I’m sitting here crying, and I could literally go home tomorrow.” It’s helpful having family close by though, especially family as supportive as Nell’s.
When she told her parents she wanted to pursue music full-time, she expected some pushback. Instead, they rallied behind her. “They’ve always been ridiculously supportive. I was the only sibling who was into the arts from a really young age. That came for Paul a bit later,” she says. “They were like, okay, let’s draft an email to the principal. I was like ‘Oh okay, I didn’t mean to do that!’”
If it happened quicker than Nell expected, the three years since, has been more of the same. She’s skyrocketed in social media popularity, and now has over 45k TikTok followers, and 60k on Instagram. The success of debut single “Graduating”, followed by indie thriller “Homesick”, had a hand in this. Since then, she’s performed her first live gig on Ireland’s The Late Late Show, performed with Phoebe Bridgers in Brixton (“one of the craziest moments of my life”) and is about to embark on a festival circuit tour. She’s also releasing her anticipated third single, “In My Head”, a moody, nostalgic track co-written with friend Kai Bosch, that ruminates on a universal experience: being drawn back to someone we know is bad for us, or the one person we can’t seem to shake out of our head or heart. It comes with a nostalgic, Cranberries-style video directed by Dora Paphides, which also drops today. “We always try and reach for nostalgia,” Nell says.
“It’s a step away from what I tend to write. I write about friendships a lot. And this is the first song about relationships. We all have that one person that we’ll go back to and continually fall into the loop of like, this is bad for us. But is it our fault? I definitely talk a lot about trying to criticise myself and trying to figure out and pinpoint all the bad stuff that I might be doing. I feel like the song is quite sad. The bridge feels like this revenge point, or the point where it’s like, okay, it’s not our fault. We’re in this loop because of this person. And we need to break away from it. And so we kind of end the song on this high. It’s all a lesson too. But it’s nice when there’s a bit of hope thrown in there, I think. And it’s not just miserable for three minutes and 30 seconds of life.”
“In My Head” is very much sad girl music, there’s no escaping that, but with a hopeful surge in the bridge, Nell’s telling us we can break the pattern today so we won’t repeat it tomorrow. The sad girl influence comes from her own musical faves: Lucy Dacus, Gracie Abrams, Birdie, SZA and patron saint of the sad girls, Taylor Swift. Luckily, she’s also a huge musical theatre fan, which alleviates some of the ennui. It’s hard to be online without being exposed to sad-girl-jams though, especially on TikTok. “I don’t feel well-known on those apps,” says Nell of her online and offline following. “It’s very weird. I feel like the only time you kind of feel the effect of their eyes on you, or when you see them in the flesh, is in a show. When you go and see those people in person, it’s like, oh, this makes a lot of sense. Looking at numbers on a phone is just draining. You can’t be doing that all the time.”
“I definitely don’t deal with burnout very well,” she adds. “I do need to get better at it. And I need to go away and figure that out. Because the song’s out on Friday, I’ve been on my phone all week, just making sure everything’s right and perfect. Right now I can afford to do that. But like, I’ll definitely need to stop and figure myself out soon.”
It’s possible though, that you might know Nell Mescal without knowing her music. Nell’s brother, after all, is Paul Mescal. It’s impossible to escape mentioning this, not least because she recently went viral for a video reacting to his Oscar nomination, and she’s just returned from LA — an experience she can only describe as “bizarre” — where she celebrated that nomination with the rest of the Mescal family. Her feelings on the presence of Paul in coverage of her own music career are clearly conflicted. “I mean, I can’t be too mad at it, because it’s been my fault,” she says. “Like, I can’t hide how happy I was for my brother. I guess I didn’t think [the video] was ever going to be as big as it was, and that very quickly changed. And I was like, oh, shit, I don’t know what to do here. But I think that, when it comes to stuff like that, you kind of just have to grit your teeth a bit and just say, okay, it’s fine. And hope that one day, people don’t use my brother’s name as a headline. But people just don’t really know what to do. They’ll be like, just pair them together. It’s fine.”
“Hopefully over time that will just go away,” Nell adds. “The thing I always say is that if people find me because of Paul, that’s great. I just hope they stay because of me.”
Credits
Photography Lewis Vorn
Styling Molly Ellison
Hair and Makeup Charlotte Kraftman using Vieve makeup