13th September 2024 // Peiraios 260
If there’s one question that informs Tor Maries writing as Billy Nomates more than any other it’s this: whose voice isn’t in the room?
A beacon of brutal truth in an industry built on inconsequential bullshit, the Bristol-based singer-songwriter gives voice to the silenced, the disillusioned, the broken-hearted, and the burnt-out, assembling brilliantly biting dispatches from the fringes of a society mired in austerity, inequality and insularity. Or, as Maries puts it, with trademark bluntness, “There’s too much music in the world already, so everything I make has to count.”
“Make everything count” might just as well serve as Maries’ creative mantra. From the impactful imagery powering her soulful and bleakly humorous songwriting, to the economy of sound she achieves with her defiantly DIY approach, there’s not a superfluous detail in the entirety of Maries’ output as Billy Nomates so far. It’s this very combination of authenticity and searing insight that made 2020’s self-titled debut such a revelation, winning Maries admirers such as Iggy Pop, Juliette Lewis and Florence Welch. And as she prepares to release the excellent follow-up, CACTI, Maries is more focused on her mission than ever.
Though every bit as unrepentant as its predecessor, the 12-track collection comes from a much more exposed place emotionally, finding Tor navigating her inner thoughts and confronting uncomfortable personal truths around past relationships and her own mental health as she moves into her 30s. As she puts it, “70-80% of being bold is about being vulnerable as hell.”
‘balance is gone’ tackles those struggles head on, charting Tor’s attempts to find purpose as the rug is ripped from under her. On ‘saboteur forcefield’ she lays bare her propensity for self-sabotage, an admission she hopes could be “the first step” towards unlearning some of those destructive patterns. Meanwhile ‘spite’s “Don’t you act like I ain’t the fucking man” refrain serves as both a reproach to anyone underestimating her, and as a personal pep talk. As she explains, “How are you going to deal with anything if you don’t have that self-belief?”
The album climaxes with a trio of tracks examining the eerie sense of apathy that still haunts Tor post-pandemic. Perhaps most stark amongst these is the album-closer, ‘blackout signal’, which sees her pining for a life beyond both the endless scroll and financial struggles, in lines like, “I dream of shutdowns now”.
“If we’re being honest with ourselves, I think a lot of us didn’t really want things to return to normal [after lockdown],” Tor says of the song’s context. “It was terrifying thinking about going back to that hustle, because we got a glimpse of a very different life, outside the walls of capitalism. And I don’t think we’ll ever know [that life] now. But that was a close moment, you know?”
And yet, for all the anguish and uncertainty that inspired CACTI’s creation, its very existence is a symbol of hope, testament to Tor’s ability to survive – and indeed thrive – in the least hospitable of environments. It’s an idea summed up in the title-track, which pairs apocalyptic imagery with honest reflections on just how many hurdles she’s overcome, as exemplified in the resolution, “I’m never coming back again.”
Certainly, Maries’ path to this point has been anything but easy. Raised in a working-class household in the Midlands, Maries inherited her love of music from her music-teacher father, whose twin passions were smooth Americana and acerbic punk – from John Denver and James Taylor to The Stranglers and Stealers Wheel. Struggling with severe, undiagnosed dyslexia, she spent much of secondary school butting heads with teachers, only finding sanctuary writing music in her dad’s office, singing in the school choir or playing guitar in a succession of bands with friends.
Today, Maries credits her relentless drive to those oppressive, small-town surroundings. “When you’re at a comp in the Midlands, you need some form of escapism,” she laughs. “It’s like, please tell me there’s something better than this!” After being rejected to study music at BIMM alongside her bandmates, Maries moved to Bristol at the age of 16 to continue the band. But when the band eventually split in acrimonious circumstances, Maries swore off music entirely, burned by the experience.
“From the ages of 23 to about 28, I just had no interest in music,” she explains matter-of-factly. “I didn’t write, and I wouldn’t even go to gigs, just because I was so fed up with it not working. Music felt like a rich person’s hobby, to be honest: it just wasn’t something that people like me could afford to do. I vividly remember feeling like music was a club that I was never going to get into. So I just thought, well I’m not standing outside anymore: I’m gonna go do something else.”
Swapping Bristol for Bournemouth, Maries settled into a quieter pace of life, making rent via a series of unfulfilling but stable office jobs. But when – following the collapse of a relationship – Maries was left broke and sleeping on her sister’s sofa while still working multiple jobs, she fell into a deep depression.
“The end of my 20s was kind-of terrifying, thinking about what I’d achieved and what I’d not achieved…,” she sighs. “I just freaked out, and it was like you’re either gonna leave the country with every bit of money you’ve got and do something crazy, you’re going to take a bottle of pills, or you’re going to make an album. Either way, you need to choose how you’re going to direct this energy because otherwise you’re gonna explode.”
Setting up a makeshift studio in her sister’s kitchen, and borrowing her brother-in-law’s equipment, Maries started writing her debut album as Billy Nomates, a pseudonym inspired by a heckle she once received attending a gig alone. Her only goal for the album was “total honesty”, and she was amazed to find a lifetime of frustration pouring out of her, as she skewered dead end jobs (‘Supermarket Sweep’, ‘Call In Sick’), hipster culture (‘Hippy Elite’), sexism (‘No’), and an array of societal inequalities.
Perhaps most powerful, ‘FNP’ found Maries baiting the powers-that-be in her defiant sprechgesang, over a skeletal arrangement of motorik beats and staccato synths. “I will not quietly exist over here in a corner of society that they hope disappears,” she sneers, adding, “That has more soul than their tiny minds could handle.”
Around the same time, Maries saw Sleaford Mods live and sent demos to the band; she then met Geoff Barrow, who promptly signed Billy Nomates to his imprint Invada Records. With some final production touches from Barrow, her debut album was released in August of 2020.
Looking back on the experience now, Maries feels deeply conflicted. “Holding the physical record in my hands was such a highlight, like, fuck I made that! But [with the pandemic] 2020 was such a fucking clusterfuck that I don’t necessarily associate the album with good things: I associate it with all these panicked phone calls. At one point, it almost wasn’t going to even be released at all, and when it did come out it was pushed back.”
Nevertheless, ‘Billy Nomates’ was a critical success, and with songs from the record receiving heavy airplay across BBC Radio 6 Music, Maries’ star was firmly in its ascendency. Maries toured with Sleaford Mods as their main support and in April 2021 she released an acclaimed EP of lockdown compositions entitled ‘Emergency Telephone’. But, as Maries explains, behind the scenes things were far from rosy.
“I was deeply depressed. I spent the third lockdown holed up in the spare room at my dad’s on the Isle of Wight, just counting the days and feeling very, very detached from all this cool stuff that had happened around the album. All I could think was that this career that I’d waited all my life for had just totally crumbled.”
It was in this mindset that Maries wrote ‘blue bones’, the lead single from her second studio album, CACTI. A gentle, 80s-influenced, synth-pop bop, it is – ironically – a celebration of life, finding Maries staring down dark urges with the refrain, “Death don’t turn me on like it used to.”
“It was the first thing I wrote when I got back to Bristol,” she explains. “For me, Invada Studios is just such a hopeful place to be. The fact I’m even in that room, I’m constantly like, fuck! How did I make it here? So I wrote the song instinctively, like, come on, snap out of it.”
If lyrical candour was a watchword for album number two, so too was breaking out beyond the post-punk parameters of her debut. Consequently, CACTI represents a huge leap forward, both in the breadth of the songwriting on display and in the quality of its execution. Self-produced with some input from James Trevascus, and taking influence from 80s pop, folk and homemade mixtapes of forgotten 00s bands, songs range from seasick, fairground waltzes (‘roundabout sadness‘) and Americana (‘fawner’) to spiky, synth-powered indie (‘spite’, ‘balance is gone’). But while the medium and the message have evolved, Tor’s motives as an artist remain very much the same.
Insightful and meaningful are the operative terms, for in Tor Maries we have a documenter of post-Brexit malaise quite unlike any other, capable of scything through the BS armed with little more than a sticky, five-key synth and a brilliantly barbed couplet. And in CACTI we have a fearless body of work that does justice to the complexities of its creator.
Links:
Facebook – www.facebook.com/billynomatestor/
Instagram – www.instagram.com/metalhorse_tor/?hl=en
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