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For most of his life, Nate Amos made music to get him through the day. It was more: self-produced albums and EPs were uploaded – since his This Is Lorelei project was launched in 2012 – on what was then an independent platform called Bandcamp. Now 35, he’s probably Bandcamp’s most famous artist: part bedroom-pop whiz, part alt-country troubadour, part indie rock rascal with a big, heavy heart. His friends see him as an old lost hero.
Amos is sitting in the basement of a cafe in Camden Town, north London, carrying an iced matcha; coffee makes him “feel like crap”, he says, and he no longer indulges in such weaknesses. The title of one of Bandcamp’s albums, OK N8, is painted on its corners. A friend wrote the ink a few years ago, when Amos was drunk. “It’s when you don’t have to make decisions like getting a tattoo on your arm,” he laughs. His blue eyes danced around behind golden-brown fringe and an unruly, wooden beard. In difficult situations he returns to his chair and searches for answers that always seem to be hiding under the table. But every time he stumbles upon the truth, he looks up with a hungry smile.
Amos recorded his new album, The Singer in My Band, at the Brooklyn house he moved into in 2017. It had a “punk house vibe” at the time, but when his housemates moved in, he slowly took over the place. The home studio setup allows him to work quickly, the only way he knows how. He may speak slowly, but his worst work defies any association with laziness. He completed a new record before signing to Matador, but kept it a secret from the label (and home to his other band, art-rock misfits Water from Your Eyes). “I sent them the finished album half an hour after signing the contract,” he says, stirring his sparkling green drink with a straw. “I said: ‘Sure, it’s over!’
The Singer in My Band is a strange one – a classic in the bric-a-brac catalog that ranged from sad music to punk rock to mid-indie music. He drops simple riffs, catchy melodies and bunnyhopping basslines that harken back to his childhood under the tutelage of his bluegrass-maestro father, Bob Amos. If they’d made something so mature and delicious ten years ago, you’d think it was a joke.
To be honest, Amos has always had a hometown spirit. He was born in Denver but felt at home in rural Vermont, where his family vacationed and eventually moved to a hillside home. He was 14 years old, and he was sick at school. He said: “I got angry like teenagers do. By 16, he was skipping classes to hang out on dirt roads, smoking weed and getting sucked by school dropouts. Daunted by the busyness of coming old age, he spent the better part of six months tripping over psychedelics. “I did a good number on myself.”
He graduated, somehow, and settled in Chicago in his 20s. An interest in music grew. He made psychedelic beats for musicians, rocking electric guitars in bands, sometimes traveling to play bluegrass with the Dads. This Is Lorelei emerged from the chaos, with songs that sounded like Animal Collective one month and hit like Hüsker Dü the next.
He was well aware of the evils he now encountered as “material issues”. In retrospect, he sees all his interest in music and drugs as a way to calm the storm. “You find ways to have fun when you’re young, and for me that was using drugs.
Despite dating busy people, she longed for peace and quiet – the kind she left behind in Vermont. “People say they were born in the wrong generation: they mean the 60s or whatever. The closest they got was “making bad noises through things, and fooling yourself into thinking things were easy”.
That bad sound started again in his music. He was briefly banned from online publisher Distrokid for uploading so many drone noise songs that he identified as a bot. A flood of similar experimental projects had the theme of “environmentally destructive technology”, he says, but he presents it less as a creative concept than a sign of anxiety and depression. “Beauty was unknown, because I had a hard time with celebrities.”
His raucous, show-slinging presence caught the attention of Rachel Brown, a fellow music enthusiast in Chicago’s DIY. They became a team and, once he shaved, a family. As Water in Your Eyes, the duo ran the distance making silly, stoned electropop while Brown studied film and television at New York University. In 2017, Amos left Chicago to join them. The team and friendship survived two years later.
At the time, Amos responded to their split by adding Blink-182’s All Small Things on repeat. His quick hooks and goofy charm felt like an icon in a noisy world. However, his mood was low. Doctors prescribed heavy drugs that sometimes helped, sometimes dragged him deeper into a funk. In 2020, she started dating Al Nardo, who is now her boyfriend and a member of both groups. He gave up alcohol and drugs after one year. Weeds filled the place, so that after a year, he also gave up. He said: “I felt like my brain was on fire for three months. “I would do exercises until I passed out.” He would play music for 12 hours a day, fearing that if he stopped, it would start again.
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Lifelong drinker Shane MacGowan, of all people, completed the repair work that Blink-182 had unexpectedly begun. Watching Sinéad O’Connor’s a cappella cover of MacGowan’s deranged song The Song With No Name, Amos rediscovered the music of childhood. He recalls: “I grew up in a bluegrass and folk music environment, so I thought of myself as something to help sleep.”
His music became more subdued, his voice more difficult. In 2024, he released Box for Buddy, Box for Star, his first album. One song, Where’s Your Love Now, has a line so agonized and simple that it seemed out of place in the songbook of one of its progenitors, such as Elliott Smith or Wilco: “The hole in my chest still wants the best.” The song was sung – separately – by two of the most famous songwriters of the time, Cameron Winter and Waxahatchee.
Amos still sees “constant fantasy” from his street youth. “It might surprise me,” he says, “but for the most part I don’t really see it anymore. He likes weed but he’s past the point where, as he puts it on the new record, he “can’t buy a good night to have a good day”. He hopes This Is Lorelei will be a “safe place” for those who have a similar problem: “Use this as a platform and then face the door.” Is it a safe place for him to do that? “It was … before people started listening.” He laughs. “Water from Your Followers he’ll come to me like: ‘Yeah, he’s sick of the guitar.’ From the fans of Lorelei, I have been experiencing devastating horrors. “
Not that he hates the attention – it just makes him smarter. “I know what it’s like to be vulnerable and then encounter art that can change the way you think about things… His gaze returns to the bottom of the table. Something down there makes him laugh. “I’ll try my best,” he says at last. “I promise I’ll try.”
The Singer in My Band is released on 11 September on Matador.
