Nadine Shah

Nadine Shah’s fifth album Filthy Underneath is out now as the inaugural release on EMI North. The follow up to 2020's critically acclaimed Kitchen Sink and 2017's Mercury Prize nominated Holiday Destination. Three years might seem like a prolonged absence to some people, but it’s also a period of time in which the apparatus that holds your world in place can be dismantled and reassembled so that you can keep living, keep creating. Filthy Underneath chronicles a period of unprecedented turbulence in Nadine Shah’s life. And yet, the experience of listening to it is oddly life-affirming – a parade of ghosts spanning the entirety of Nadine’s thirty-seven years, moving with balletic beauty to the music that Nadine and long-time co-writer and producer Ben Hillier have created around them. On the lead single 'Topless Mother', her double-tracked harmonies converge with a physically irresistible groove. Inspired by a series of comically tense exchanges with a counsellor, the song alights on that counsellor’s unorthodox tendency to burst into tears if she felt she wasn’t getting anywhere with her patient. Speaking of the track Shah says: "It’s a song about a counsellor I worked with that I couldn’t get along with. I’m pretty certain the feeling was mutual. And I’m also pretty certain she’d find this funny. Some people just don’t click and some arseholes like me write songs about it."