Reductive Nostalgia by Nicky Click

“Freaks, you can call me Mom,” Nicky Click boldly proclaims on her newest album. Given her lengthy career, she’s got the creds to back it up. Born in New Hampshire, she began making music in 2003 and was once described by SF Weekly as a “one-woman feminist electro band.” Influenced equally by riot grrl and pop divas, she released her first album, You’re Already A Member, right as the DIY-electro and queercore boom of the mid-aughts was gaining steam.
Nicky built a fanbase the old-fashioned way, through constant international touring and festival appearances alongside Peaches, The Gossip, Lady Sovereign, Gravy Train!!!, Scream Club, Brooke Candy, Vagina Jenkins, and Kin4Life. Each Nicky Click show is a personal and political queer feminist statement wrapped up in a dance party. She makes many of her own wigs and outrageous stage costumes, and she’s performed and headlined at pride festivals, dives, hotels, bars, and film festivals; catching airplay on radio stations and gracing the pages of art and literary magazines. She manages to seamlessly blend spectacle with introspection, so it’s no surprise that when she released her second album in 2008, the video for the title track, “I’m On My Cell Phone,” became one of Logo’s most-played. The queer community was hungry for what Nicky had to say.
Nicky Click has continued to push herself as an artist, allowing her sound to evolve and often experimenting with different genres, including alt-folk. Her sixth album, titled Reductive Nostalgia, explores the intangible but universal feeling of losing something to time, but not knowing quite what that something is or whether you ever really had it in the first place. The album dips into more reflective territory than Nicky’s previous efforts, and was produced almost entirely by Portland, Oregon’s Mickey Pollizatto, resulting in a truly cohesive sound and tone. Nicky and Mickey began working on this album together in the spring of 2020. Having toured together and collaborated on an album in the past, they already had a deep spiritual and musical connection. On Reductive Nostalgia, the two collaborated remotely to craft a collection of songs that speaks deeply to a time when the world is on the verge of so much change and the temptation to romanticize the past is high.
On “Robot,” which was co-written by Nicky’s thirteen-year-old niece, Emma, Nicky and guest producer Jeremy Gloff layer Nicky’s pop-sweet vocals over a squelchy, dynamic beat. On “Gone Fishing,” Nicky sings about finding love during a time of sobriety, and takes those themes further on “I Just Can’t Touch Anything,” which explores pandemic-specific anxieties about the danger and necessity of connection. Deftly deploying themes of anxiety again on “Life Cycle,” Nicky takes on the topic of mental health with deeply relatable lines like, “the higher you go / the further you come down” and “not on the same page / but it all was a lie anyway.” And on the #MeToo-inspired “Ghosts In the Attic,” Nicky addresses being a survivor with razor-sharp insight, singing “once I learned it / I wanted to return it” over a twitchy beat.
The album as a whole was an experiment in creating and recording during a pandemic. For the first time in her career, Nicky recorded the entire album herself, sometimes in the isolation of quarantine. But Reductive Nostalgia is proof that when one thing is lost, something else is gained. “The pandemic caused so much anxiety for me,” Nicky explains. “But that anxiety led to the deepening of certain relationships, and made me want to create, to do everything to the fullest extent possible, but also look back on the past and appreciate everything that’s happened. I think I’ve learned to feel more content.” She sums this sentiment up perfectly on the album’s title track, bringing us full-circle with the lines, “I want more / I wanna eat the apple to the core / yeah, I really want ya / thinking ’bout you back in the day.”
Throughout Reductive Nostalgia, Nicky’s lyrics are simultaneously playful and poignant, gazing back at the past while also glancing toward an uncertain but hopeful future. Six albums into her career, she understands the undeniable strength of vulnerability.

Queer femme pop diva with a new album out on Disc Drive Records!!

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