Hailing from Omaha, Nebraska and based now in Nashville, Noah Floersch has been releasing smart and stirring pop music since his college years at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. When the single “Ghost of Chicago” from his second record Noah unexpectedly went viral, racking up millions of streams just about overnight, it allowed Floersch to quit his job at an ice prep factory and head out on his first major tours — including a support slot for Ricky Montgomery, and a headline tour at the end of last year.
Now, taking on board the lessons he’s learned about connecting in a live setting, he debuts a new era with the sad-boy singalong anthem, “Growing Everything Out”. Inspired by the rougher side of his new on-the-road lifestyle, it’s a track about looking in the mirror, realizing you look like shit, and not even caring. Beneath its playful “na-na-na”s and its earworm melodies is a genuinely poignant mix of sadness and exhaustion, relatable to anyone who’s found themselves the worse for wear in a bathroom stall a few too many times. “Growing Everything Out” and the new music still to come sees Floersch grappling with his least flattering emotional impulses, at the same time as crafting the most undeniably fun songs of his career. It’s a combination of vulnerability and charisma that builds on the meaningful connection he’s already built with fans, and completes his transformation into a bona fide pop star.
Gatlin’s music captures the fullness of existence—meditating on life’s pain while celebrating the joy too. “Whatever emotion you’re feeling? Feel it deeply. Don’t numb it out.” she says. The Florida-raised singer-songwriter had that epiphany after a whirlwind couple of years that included a move from Nashville to Los Angeles, opening shows with Ashe, Pale Waves, and VÉRITE—and her first heartbreak, an experience that led her to dive into pop that communicated deep feelings while allowing for communal catharsis. The seven tracks on her new EP, I Sleep Fine Now, prize vulnerability first and foremost, she’s unafraid to speak truths about romantic love’s highs and lows.
I Sleep Fine Now condenses an emotional rollercoaster into sharply rendered pop songs like “Paris,” a plea for a lover to get out of her life, which swells from fluttery synths into a splendidly wounded guitar-pop track, and the wrenching “How Do You Sleep at Night,” which resolves desperate wailing in a tumultuous, cathartic coda. As a whole, the record contains moving depictions of grief and rebirth, feeling the pain, without wallowing.
Raised on Stevie Nicks and Taylor Swift, Gatlin has been cultivating her musical acumen since she was young. After heading to Nashville to study songwriting, she released her first solo music in 2020, and has been thrilling audiences with emotionally open pop songs like the swirling “2000 Miles” and the strutting “Talking To Myself,” and her breakout 2021 single “What If I Love You,” which has amassed more than 36 million listens on Spotify since its release.
I Sleep Fine Now comes from a more mature place, with the bulk of it inspired by her emotional state while grappling with her first big breakup. “It was the first time I lost someone that I cared a lot about,” she says.
I Sleep Fine Now combines the realizations inspired from that experience with immediate hooks and plainly stated, sometimes lacerating lyrics. Take “When You’re Breaking My Heart,” a simmering track about an emotionally unavailable partner. “Is it really love if it don’t tear you apart?” Gatlin muses as the beat quickens and synths swirl around her voice before she admits, “I like you better when you’re breaking my heart.”
The combination of kinetic beats and open lyrics make this new track a spiritual successor to “What If I Love You,” but now, Gatlin realizes her role in love’s constant maneuvering. “It’s about this cycle I have with people of putting up a front of being bored when someone else is all in and wanting the game of modern dating,” she says.
“Lonely Life,” the chronicle of living inside that fortress, grapples with a person who holds on to that power too tightly. It depicts a past Gatlin who walled herself in because, as she sings, people “can’t hurt me if I don’t play.” Its lyrics possess the knowing perspective of someone who lived that way before snapping out of it—and who wants to warn others to not shield themselves against potential hurt too forcefully.
“When I talk to fans at shows, I always want them to know that feeling a lot is a good thing,” she says. I Sleep Fine Now does exactly that over its seven tracks, and one listen is proof that Gatlin’s honesty with herself has invigorated her art.
