“Love, labour and existentialism”: Nourished By Time’s unexpected rise

Marcus Brown always thought of himself as the kind of artist who would only find fame after his time. Rather than arena tours or platinum records, he fantasises about “kids looking me up on whatever their version of YouTube is in 75 years, or crate digging and finding one of my records and thinking ‘this still works’”, as he tells NME from a catsitting gig in a sweltering New York – one of three cities, along with London and Baltimore, in which he lives a nomadic existence.

The 30-year-old musician’s easygoing charm and habit of sprawling conversational tangents belies a serious drive, “a supreme confidence in myself that I can do anything I set my mind to”, as he puts it. “I always knew that I had potential, I just thought I might be dead by the time it happened.”

Having never come close to troubling the mainstream after over a decade under different guises such as Riley On Fire and Mother Marcus, it’s understandable that when Brown assumed the moniker Nourished By Time in 2019, he thought that things would be no different. Working out of his parents’ basement, squeezing songwriting and recording between a host of day jobs, including teaching tennis, barbering and bagging online orders at Whole Foods, even his greatest ambitions for the project’s future were modest. “I thought, maybe I’ll be able to just go on a UK tour or something, and that would be a really big success,” he says. Those expectations were to be far, far outstripped.

In April 2023, with the release of Nourished By Time’s debut album, everything changed. ‘Erotic Probiotic 2’ was a multidimensional, supercharged swirl of bedroom synth-pop, R&B, lo-fi, freestyle, house, post-punk and soul. Beneath its psychedelic shimmer, Brown’s lyrics nimbly dissected the surreal and contradictory reality of persevering through late-stage capitalism. Within a few months, it was being lauded as one of the greatest releases of that year, and some were labelling Brown a generational talent. All that potential acclaim he’d hoped might be several decades in his future seemed to arrive almost overnight.

“I always knew that I had potential, I just thought I might be dead by the time it happened”

Even now, on the verge of that record’s follow-up, which will be released on UK indie label XL Recordings, Brown’s still getting to grips with just how quickly everything changed. “In a lot of ways, I think I still haven’t processed a lot of it,” he says.

For a while, the success of ‘Erotic Probiotic 2’ even shook that cast-iron sense of self-belief. “The fact I was able to do so much from it was really beautiful, but it also came with the fact that, for the first time ever, I felt that if I did anything wrong, it was all going to be over,” he reflects. “Every show had to be perfect. I was using every dime just to get the show and finding a place to sleep and eat. I was putting a lot of pressure on myself.”

Eventually, things settled. Lessons from the prestigious Berklee College of Music he attended a decade prior, where Brown “learned about certain aspects of the music industry, how manipulative it can be”, kicked in. He established a trustworthy team of musicians and management and started achieving modest financial stability. “I’m paying people for the first time, and seeing us as a team where everyone should be a reflection of each other and that one person can’t be too heavy. I’m having more fun now that I have less responsibility,” he says.

Perhaps that’s why his new album ‘The Passionate Ones’ feels both looser and more assured than its predecessor. The production is beefier and more commanding, but has lost none of its off-kilter charm. The grooves hit harder, the melodies worm their way deeper into the brain. Samples are used more broadly and manipulated more skillfully.

Opener ‘Automatic Love’ delivers a cascade of shimmering synthesisers that provides the rest of the record with an intense emotive charge. Lead single ‘Max Potential’ rides colossal waves of thickly distorted guitar until it reaches euphoria. The recent single ‘9 2 5’ is an irresistible left-field club banger. But it’s also a tribute to those in the grip of menial work who refuse to let their dreams of creative transcendence die – its protagonist a combination of Brown’s 22-year-old self scraping by in LA, and his bass player Carrington Edmonson, who moved from small-town Georgia to New York.

“I want to make it easier for other people who might be in the position I once was, but I’m not trying to be a pop star”

Lyrically, ‘The Passionate Ones’ centres on themes of “love, labour and existentialism, similar to my last couple of records but evolved because the quality of my labour has changed,” Brown says. It also hints at the destabilising effects of that transition from a juggler of retail jobs to working musician. “I talk about addiction a lot on this album,” he says. “I’m not comfortable talking about anything specific, but I have been dealing with my methods of coping during that period. Drinking a lot every day, smoking a lot of weed.

“When you’ve got four to five habits stacked on top of each other that you’ve dealt with your whole life, and now there’s a music career to maintain, it can get worse. I worry about how sustainable certain things are – I see me getting sober at some point for sure.” Brown seems largely at peace with his status now, laughing off the newfound pressure of writing with an expectant audience in mind. “I’m not focused too much on the reaction,” he says. “I only hope people like it because then we can continue growing, I can make the live show more interesting, have more money for my friends to come on tour with me, to have them be creative.”

Nevertheless, as a staunch anti-capitalist, Brown is also wary of conflict down the road. “Most of my beliefs are aligned with the basic Marxist truths that the workers should own the means of their production,” he says. He’s aware that as his increasing success draws him deeper into the capitalist machinations of the music industry, his commitment to those views means that “there will be a ceiling to what I’m doing”.

“I worry, especially the way I feel about streaming, the fact I don’t support the way artists are being paid out. But then I remedy it by thinking, ‘I can speak my mind, criticise who I want to criticise. The minute that would have to become sacrificed, then that’s my ceiling.’” He’s fine with the prospect, he says. “I want to get a house, maybe build a studio, use my platform to make it easier for other people who might be in the position I once was, but I’m not trying to be a pop star.”

That said, Brown is cautious of being too dogmatic when it comes to the songs themselves, where the existential horrors of modern life are expressed only through the way they ripple through the mundane everyday: “I’m not here to preach at anybody.” Simply writing a straightforward polemic about the atrocities of the Trump presidency would be pointless, he argues. “That’s what the news is doing. I like to think about things like how we got to Trump. I think it’s more interesting to find patterns, to use your imagination.”

On ‘The Passionate Ones’, this involves Brown dissecting belief systems and how people fill the void when they don’t have one. On ‘Cult Interlude’, a collection of snippets from news reports about how people can be preyed on and manipulated by false offers of community, reflects “just how fucking crazy everyone is right now, so passionate about people that do not care about them”.

Then again, as with everything in his work, it’s not to be taken entirely straightforwardly. “I was also winking at the fact that I have a bit of a cult following of passionate fans,” he laughs. “Kanye [West] used to have this thing he’d say at shows: ‘If you’re a fan of me, you’re a fan of yourself’. And I think it’s the same thing with Nourished By Time fans. They’re fans of life, fans of themselves, and fans of love.” They are the “passionate ones” of the album’s title.

It’s important, Brown says, to provide a counterweight to daily drudgery. Many of his songs are set in scenes of everyday banality, but it’s the way that even there, moments of transcendent beauty can still slip through the cracks. “I use love as a neutraliser, a balance for the other things I talk about, like working-class rights and oppression and racism,” Brown says, “because all of that other stuff is getting in the way of love. Our only real purpose as humans is to experience love. Everything else is just imaginary, something we created.”

Nourished By Time’s album ‘The Passionate Ones’ is out August 22 via XL Recordings.

Listen to Nourished By Time’s exclusive playlist to accompany The Cover below on Spotify or on Apple Music here.

Words: Patrick Clarke
Photography: Chris Buck
Label: XL Recordings

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