Nieve Ella

Change can be volatile, overwhelming, wonderful and heartbreaking – but above all else, it can open a portal into a new season of life. The past few months for Nieve Ella have felt similar, as though everything turned on its head and time started to move faster by the day. Out of all this comes the 21-year-old’s transformational new EP Watch It Ache and Bleed, a collection of invigorating indie-rock anthems brimming with raw feeling; it’s the sound of a young, determined woman ready to go out into the world with a whole new perspective on what ambition and desire mean to her.

In just two short years, the West Midlands singer-songwriter has galvanised a legion of devout fans thanks to her wit and electrifying stage presence. An accomplished self-taught guitarist with a finely-tuned ear for a soaring hook, Ella’s lyrics recall the candid songwriting of Sam Fender. By writing astutely about growing pains, unfiltered impulses and those first real, unexpected breakups with sincerity and flair, she extends a helping hand to listeners going through similar journeys of growth.

Melding Nineties influences such as Liz Phair and Veruca Salt with an innate ear for pop melodies, Watch It Ache and Bleed details the rocky road of heartbreak in eviscerating detail. Yet the EP also celebrates courage, and the bravery required to realise you’re not quite getting what you deserve. “The person I was with… it was quite lovely and wholesome,” she says. “But when I was realising that I shouldn’t be in this relationship anymore, I was like: ‘Oh, I want to do all of the fun stuff’. The things a 21-year-old should be doing.”

Many of Watch It Ache and Bleed’s boldest moments are “power moves” that bask in the joy of taking charge of your destiny. What ties it all together is a newfound confidence from Ella; a sense of contentment and belief in exactly who she is. “It’s a celebration of this idea that she can f**king get what she needs! And if she has to go out and find it, then she will.”

An empowering journey into a self-assured new era, this eight-track release builds on last year’s pair of EPs – 2023’s Lifetime of Wanting and Young & Naive – to unearth Ella’s bravest, most uplifting songwriting to date. Following a sold-out headline tour, an impressive festival season including a celebrated set at TRNSMT, and opening slots for the likes of Dylan and Inhaler, Ella is now gearing up for the release alongside her biggest gigs yet: opening for Girl in Red on her upcoming September arena tour.

Watch It Ache and Bleed was crafted with the dizzying, freeing energy of the stage in mind – it’s the environment for which the EP was made. On the road, she has cultivated a fiercely dedicated and vocal fan following: dozens of online fan accounts later, fans patiently queuing all day and sharing gifts with each other ahead of her shows is a regular sight.

But long before she was selling out headline tours in under ten minutes, or rapidly rising to notoriety with early standout singles such as Car Park and His Sofa, Ella grew up in a “sweet little village” in Shropshire; the sort of place where she felt that pursuing a career in music was unheard of. Growing up, she felt like an outsider; while her schoolmates hung out together, she preferred helping out her mum, who is a hairdresser, in her salon.

“I used to make really silly faces, and I was always the class clown, or at least I thought I was,” she says. “But I grew up so fast because of my mum being a single parent, and not having a father figure. My dad left our house when I was about 3 or 4, and I didn’t really grow up with him: it has always been my mum and my two brothers. That’s what’s normal to me.”

The arrival of lockdown skewed Ella’s teenage journey, and she never experienced the usual rites of passages like hitting the clubs when she turned eighteen. Instead, she entered adulthood in a far more introspective headspace, learning who she really was largely by herself, alone in her room, armed with the guitar left to her by her late dad.

Often, Ella explains, her relationship with her father crops up in her work, and she finds herself drawing on her grief following his death a decade ago. “It has been 10 years since he died, and I see everything so much more beautifully,” she explains. “He was a musician, too. I am living his dream, because it’s what he wanted to do. That makes me work so much harder, and write so much more passionately.”

Ella now understands that her own story holds real power, her voice as a writer becoming more specific over time. Accordingly, Watch It Ache and Bleed’s narrative drifts away from the hollow ache of loss, and instead finds clearer focus in self-empowerment. Though recent single Sugarcoated sees Ella yearning for her childhood and simpler times, the buoyant Sweet Nothings finds her basking in the blissful, rejuvenating glow of an early relationship. “It’s a celebration of happiness and feeling lovely in those first two weeks of dating somebody. I’m fantasising about somebody new falling in love with me,” she says of the latter.

Ganni Top takes a more hedonistic approach to new beginnings. Here, Ella envisions all the fun to come once she’s cut loose: “you can fill me in the back of your limousine,” she quips on the

playful, grunge-inspired ode to newfound singledom. “Everything in the song is a metaphor for sex,” she says. “I wanted to make it funny, and quite cheeky.”

The Things We Say, meanwhile, deals with another kind of emotional fall-out: a friendship break-up. Though platonic splits get far less airtime in popular culture, Ella felt it was just as important to address. By the gnarly Stop Me!, Ella lands on a quiet form of healing; if somebody isn’t willing to put up a fight to keep a relationship alive, it was probably doomed to fail all along.

The EP was written and recorded between Finsbury Park and Maidenhead, with collaborators Iain Berryman, Finn Marlow, Jamie Rendle and Hugo Hardy. While the group made a lot of early headway in London, the latter recording space – a DIY-styled location packed with instruments – gave Ella the sense of comfort she needed to complete the release, and reminded her of how she started out: playing guitar in her bedroom, with no expectation for what would happen next.

“It’s like therapy,” she says of her songwriting. “After writing, I feel so much lighter. When I write songs, they become these other parts of me, and when other people can relate to that too? It’s like magic to me.”

And on Watch It Ache and Bleed there’s certainly plenty to relate to; Ella has an effortless knack for skewering the thorny tangle of early adulthood. Emerging artists rarely arrive so fully formed, with such a masterful command over their emotions – she is a powerful, needed figure in British indie, one who makes young people feel seen and heard.