Nocturne by Wasia Project: Brother-sister duo create dark masterpiece

Wasia Project are siblings Will Gao (also an actor, who you might recognise from Heartstopper) and Olivia Hardy. The young pair are classically trained, ludicrously talented and after a few years of post-lockdown experiments in songwriting have finally pulled together a proper album. The result is quite spectacular, their troubled songwriting propelled into stadium-sized anthems Read More2515 is a spectacular opening, immediately plunging you into this dark world of classical-electro, with Hardy’s spectacular vocals belying a lyric of emotional abuse; ‘Break me down again, then you lift me up, it's so pathetic, you only want to save me, when you see me drown.’ Scene set, we have Vogue, which starts gently, then grows into an expansive string-laden beauty which suggests more bad love, but addictive bad love. No-one’s recommending it, but this is the subject of great pop songs. In fact, Wasia Project do carry on a great tradition of British pop where great hooks combine with torn psychology and self-destructive tendencies, a bit Soft Cell, a bit Human League, with the sense of grandeur in the everyday that both possess. New single Bleeding Gold has Hardy singing, ‘Stuck on a bus and find myself crying, nowhere to go, and it's cold, and I find it hard to call you when nothing's going right.’ But this is more than perfect night bus music, it has that intimate quality that will make it a bedroom heartbreak classic. The relationship break-up song Even If I Tried, with Gao on vocals, could be straight off Amnesiac by Radiohead, and making magic out of despair is where the album ends with Wildfire, where Hardy is awake all night thinking, ‘I take the blame’ but still waiting for a lover, “like a wildfire that burns till it's out.”But it’s Strike Me Down From Heaven that steals the show, a mysterious, God-invoking, piece of existential expansiveness that sounds like Nine Inch Nails with a heart and demands to be seen live. A prime piece of modern Romanticism, Nocturne could well make you split up your own relationship just so you can feel the full weight of its songs. So enjoy, but be careful...NocturneWasia Project