Nieve Ella on recent EP 'Watch It Ache And Bleed' and the pressures of social media for DIY's Class Of 2025 • Interview • DIY Magazine

Like any fast-rising star, Nieve Ella is still feeling out her boundaries. The 22-year-old says she “can understand so much” why Chappell Roan told fans in August that she needed “to draw lines” between herself and an increasingly large and demanding fanbase. “I’m not at the level where people are coming up to me every single day, so when they do I’m like, ‘Let’s have a conversation. You wanna take a photo? Let’s do it’,” she says. “But if that happened to me everywhere I went, I probably would feel the exact same as her.”

Nieve grapples with her growing profile on ‘Sugarcoated’: a driving highlight from her third and most recent EP, ‘Watch It Ache and Bleed’. Released in October, the eight-song set cements her status as Gen Z’s real and relatable indie queen. When she sings, “I’m burning the candle at both its ends / How can you handle a thousand friends?”, it’s a reference to the whiplash she felt as she embarked on nationwide headline tours and support slots with the likes of DYLAN and girl in red. In September, she opened for the latter at London’s 12,500-capacity Wembley Arena.

“I was so fed up and frustrated when I wrote that song,” Nieve says. “I felt like people on the internet and at shows thought I was this happy, sweet person. And I AM happy and I CAN be sweet, but I’m also so sensitive.” The Shropshire-born musician adores performing, but still struggles with the idea of having “thousands of people staring” at her on stage. “And when you’ve got people on the internet wondering where you’ve been because you haven’t posted on TikTok for three days, that’s just mind-boggling,” she adds.

Social media also evokes mixed feelings in the singer. On the one hand, she likes to unwind by watching Instagram Reels of “people cooking food or giving birth”. But on the other, posting can feel like homework. A week after she created a second, more low-key TikTok account – “It’s not private,” she says, “but I don’t share it anywhere” – it had already attracted 7,000 followers. That’s a fraction of her main account’s 114,000, but it still heaps pressure on her. “When I started my new TikTok, I felt like I could post whatever I wanted,” she says. “But now there’s more people on there, I’m like, ‘Oh crap, I need to post something before people start asking what’s going on’.’’

“I feel like I’ve made a statement with my music now – people know who I am.”

Of course, TikTok has been integral to Nieve’s rise from the start. She built a fanbase on the app during the pandemic, first by posting covers, then her own indie pop originals. When lockdown gripped the country in 2020, Nieve Ella Pickering (to use her full name) picked up a guitar belonging to her late father and learned to play from online tutorials. Songwriting came naturally – “I don’t actually know how I taught myself,” she says – and a Sam Fender gig proved formative. When she made the 30-mile trip from her “tiny” Shropshire village to the bright lights of Birmingham, her hero didn’t disappoint. “I was pretty drunk, but the way he used instruments with lyrics that are so deep-cutting, it just blew my mind,” she says.

TikTok also introduced her to Finn Marlow, her guitarist, songwriting partner and “best friend in the world”. Nieve recently moved to London, but today she’s speaking to DIY over Zoom from Maidenhead in neighbouring Berkshire, where she and “the boys” – Marlow and her producers – are working on new material. Over the last four days, they’ve written “seven or eight songs”, and the creative rush spills over into her conversation. Candid and chatty, she says she’s “not a worldly person” and confides that she initially struggled with “finding the right words to use in lyrics” – an insecurity that stems from “always being in the lowest sets for English” at school. But both in person and in her songwriting, Nieve is a born communicator.

She says that single ‘Ganni Top (She Gets What She Needs)’ – a stirring standout from her recent EP – represents the “part of me that’s crazy and wants to tweet 20 things in a day”. She feels an even deeper connection with her 2022 debut single ‘Girlfriend’, which she still considers “the most important song” of her career because it made the Radio 1 playlist. “That just brought me so much more confidence,” she says. On this ringing guitar ballad, Nieve paints a vivid portrait of a chaotic situation – dating someone who already has a partner. “She took me to her apartment and now I’m wanting her garments instead of you,” she sings with a sigh.

Early song ‘Blu Shirt Boy’, which was partly inspired by Harry Styles, has fared less well in her estimations over time however. “What people don’t know is it’s not just about Harry Styles,” she explains. “I wrote it during this whole phase of being obsessed with Harry, but also being obsessed with this [other] person. But all that stuff I wrote about [in the song] is gone now. I’m just so over it – I don’t want to talk about it and I don’t want to sing it.”

“My goal is to be that woman producer who brings in younger women and makes them feel comfortable [in the studio].”

Nieve only played her first gig in August 2022, a couple of weeks after she released ‘Girlfriend’ on AWAL Recordings, the indie label she signed to after building TikTok buzz. Early on, she was paired with an older male producer who told her she should be making “girly pop music”; a sexist suggestion that the rock-loving musician rejected. But now she’s found collaborators she feels comfortable with, Nieve is more open to expanding her guitar-led sound. “I feel like I’ve made a statement with my music now – people know who I am,” she says. “So if I want to be ‘girly pop’, I’ll be ‘girly pop’. I have so much more freedom to do that now.”

Nieve was drawn to performing from a young age, but whenever she tried out for the school play, her lack of confidence scuppered her chances. Still, she had enough childhood chutzpah to audition twice for Britain’s Got Talent: first as a solo artist, and then as half of a duo called Inseparable. The first time, aged just six, she got “so scared” ahead of her audition that her mum let her pull out. The second time, a slightly older Nieve and her guitar-playing bandmate made good progress until they fell out with one another. “We didn’t really live up to our name,” she notes wryly.

Nieve says throwing herself into the reality show jamboree was the first time she ever experienced imposter syndrome, although she “didn’t know what that was” at the time. “Everything you see on TV is real,” she recalls. “You’re in this big waiting room with people doing magic tricks all around you and [producers] coming over to interview and slap a sticker on you. It’s such a weird experience.” Overall, though, she looks back at the show positively because it made her realise she wanted to be an artist. “I didn’t make it onto the actual TV show, but I’m glad about that now, because if I’d been on TV, I wouldn’t be making this music.”

Even with the constant pressure to sate her online following, Nieve is happy with where she is now. “I love this job so much and I’m grateful, but it’s just hard sometimes,” she says. Her main aim for 2025 is to “keep releasing new music and showing people who I am”, though she wouldn’t mind another plum support slot. “But I only want to go on tour with artists that make sense – artists with fans that I can imagine liking my music,” she says. Currently, Sam Fender and Wolf Alice are top of her wish list. “And I’d get to watch their show every night!” she adds with a laugh.

Beyond this, Nieve has “big dreams” of teaching herself to produce her own music. She also wants to expand her palette of collaborators so it isn’t just “the boys” downstairs. “Maybe in LA there are way more female producers and writers, but I feel like I don’t experience that a lot here,” she says. “My goal is to be that woman producer who brings in younger women and makes them feel comfortable [in the studio].” Having been in songwriting sessions with older men she didn’t gel with, she knows first-hand how stifling this dynamic can be. “It’s really difficult to open up to anyone about your feelings – even the people I write with now, who are my best friends,” she says.

Building a musical community is clearly important to the singer. Before she moved to the capital a couple of months ago, her London base was the family home of fellow indie wunderkind Fred Roberts. “We’re two musicians who found each other at the right time. We make different music but have the same dreams and goals, which is so inspiring,” she says. Nieve also appreciates that she was lucky to have somewhere to crash when money was tight early on. “If I ever win an award, they’ll be the ones I thank,” she notes.

Now, when she returns to her Shropshire village, she realises she’s on the right track. “I don’t care if people stare at me because of my hair and eyebrows, which they do because it’s that kind of place,” she says. “I want to be that person who’s so free and does whatever she wants. I want to be the most me I can be.” It’s still relatively early days, but no one would deny that Nieve Ella is well on her way.

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