Nervus perform exclusive session including tracks from forthcoming album ‘Everything Dies’

Vocalist / guitarist Em Foster gives The Independent an exclusive rundown of each track

Nervus, from left to right, Karl Woods (Derek Bremner)

Things have begun to look up admirably for Em Foster ever since she sat in her bedroom and began to compose the deeply personal songs that would become 2016’s excellent debut album Permanent Rainbow. Since then, her band Nervus, bassist Karl Woods, keys player Paul Etienne and drummer Jack Kenny, have all been benefiting enormously from these melodious cathartic chronicles of addiction and gender dysphoria. Recently signed to Big Scary Monsters, the band have wasted no time at all in writing and recording a follow-up of 10 equally cathartic confessionals in the form of Everything Dies.

In late February, the band convened at Broadfields Studios in Watford to record an exclusive session for The Independent. The three-track session consists of ‘Nobody Loses All the Time’, ‘It Follows’ (both of which are from the forthcoming Everything Dies) and ‘Bones’ from their debut. Audio recording and mixing was by Thomas Mitchener, whilst filming and editing was by Jenny McCord for The Broadfields Sessions. We also spoke to Em to give us a detailed in-depth analysis of each song.

Nobody Loses all the Time

Nobody Loses All the Time is about queer love and queer life. It’s actually based on a poem that I love by E.E. Cummings which is about a guy who’s born a failure. He f**ks up his whole life, everything he ever does is unsuccessful and then when he dies and gets buried, it celebrates the fact that he’s started a worm farm. Essentially, it’s about trying to see the bright side.

It's written from the perspective of a Trans woman in a relationship with another woman and trying to navigate life and the trials you come up against. It’s the societal pressures that come from getting married or having kids for example, but those things aren’t really all that simple if you’re a Trans woman. As much as some of those pressures come from external forces outside of a relationship, there's also internal pressures because these things can't play out in the way that I’ve been brought up to expect them to happen. That's something that is engrained in you from birth I think and it's learning to let go of the things that society dictates are important rites of passage, or making them work for you in whatever way you can.

A lot of these external forces can set you back if you’re in a gay relationship but the song is meant to be a positive reminder that even when there’s a lot of crap that you have to deal with, one day you’ll make an excellent worm farm.

It Follows

It Follows is about how trauma can follow you around and manifest itself in different ways if you leave it unaddressed. The lyric I tried to leave / with no place to go is about trying to leave something toxic behind and wanting to be better but not really knowing what better is. If you don’t address the things that have caused you pain in a constructive way, then you run the risk of it following you. It’s about escaping traumas rather than dealing with them; without doing the real work of getting better, you run the risk of being followed by them until you do that work.

When I first abstained from drinking and drugs, the deep-rooted issues I had were still there, I was just dealing with them in a different way. At first, I didn't really know how to deal with them, so I was binge-eating or I got really addicted to Diet Coke for a while. I knew I wanted to be better, I just didn’t really know how to better. If you abstain from drinking heavily, that's great but if you don't actually address why you were drinking heavily in the first place, then you run the risk of falling back into a pattern of dependency. Getting sober was a weird experience but I feel like I started to become more who I actually am rather than the faux confident, drunk version of myself that I presented when I had been drinking.

Bones

Bones was one of the first songs I wrote for Nervus. It's about realising and accepting that you don't belong in the role that you've adopted or allowed society to coerce you into and the desire to not have to pretend to be that person anymore. The line you've got that natural glow / it makes me sick to my stomach is about that weird sensation that I think a lot of Trans women go through when trying things out. So a Trans person might have a nagging feeling that they want to try putting on make-up and so they try it and the first thing they think is ‘holy f**k!’ because, more than likely, they’re not necessarily any good at putting make-up on. Suddenly, you’re exploring this new side of yourself and it’s exciting but conflicting at the same time, because there are these incredible feelings of shame and guilt that are foisted upon us because of the way society tends to present Trans people in the media. More often than not, Trans people are presented as the butt of the joke, including in things that I used to like as well, which is the most confusing thing. So Barbara the cab driver in The League of Gentlemen or Lois Einhorn / Ray Finkle from Ace Venture: Pet Detective. Those things stick with you in a very weird compartment of your brain. I can remember every single transphobic thing that anyone I've met has ever said, even before I came out. It would set off those alarm bells which would make me push back who I really am even further into a corner of my mind. So it makes me sick to my stomach is a reference to seeing a physical reflection of who you are and the mental reflection that society might deem unsavoury and coming to terms with the fact that you are this person that everyone makes fun of.

There's an enormous amount of pressure on Trans people to medicalise their transition in order to validate their gender, which I think is really damaging. There's a lot of transphobic rhetoric about 'procedures' and there's this mythical thing that people refer to as 'the op'. To start with, there is no single ‘op’, there are far more complexities to it than one operation working for everyone. There are many different options but you've got to tick the right boxes to be able to access what you need. You may want some things but not other things, you've basically got to go in and order a full English Breakfast in order to get a couple of hash browns and I think a lot of Trans people feel pressured into medicalising their transition in a way that suggests that the only thing on the menu is the full English breakfast.

People will know themselves if having an operation is for them or not but the amount of pressure that gets put on people to physically change their body is really dangerous. People talk about the born in the wrong body rhetoric but I don’t think that’s helpful when talking about Trans people; it’s more like being born in the wrong life. Whilst I’ve used the wrong body rhetoric to explain stuff to people before and it has served a purpose, I feel like it’s not necessarily helpful going forward.

If you're affected by any of the issues brought up in this feature, there are people you can talk to; Gendered Intelligence, Mermaids, and Mind can all offer support and advice. 'Everything Dies' the second album from Nervus, is released on Friday 9th March and is available to pre-order now