Nina Winder-Lind plays guitar for you and your mother

“Street Hassle”, the jangly and expressive opener to her debut solo album Wild Love, knows this to be true. “Give me an electric guitar and I’ll play it / I can’t say it,” Winder-Lind’s trademark trembling and forceful vocal explains during the climax. It’s a manifesto for the album at large – dedicated to the idea that rock’n’roll and the electric guitar have always had a liberating force and innate ability to express our rawest feelings. Now it’s Winder-Lind’s turn to liberate those thoughts.

“Urgency is the word,” Winder-Lind explains to me from a remote-looking shed in the Swedish countryside, our chat happily rescheduled to facilitate some much needed family-time hiking in the mountains. Nina Winder-Lind is currently visiting home in Sweden having now become a full-fledged Brighton resident with her husband Hugo. A neat coincidence considering how important these two locations are to Wild Love and the Nina Winder-Lind creative process.

Brighton started as a four-month plan to do a language course on the English coast in the aftermath of a “really toxic and horrible” classical musical college in Stockholm, but turned into a vortex of music and creativity. “I brought my cello and I found people. I got to improvise and jam for the first time. I’d never done that,” Winder-Lind says of those early Brighton memories, learning that it was okay to play things that no one had written down. Such was the whirlpool of the scene that Winder-Lind stayed: “I got sucked into the music scene and the people there.”

Those people include Winder-Lind’s bandmates in The New Eves, the ‘Hagstone rock’ four-piece whose breakout debut The New Eve Is Rising was released last year to critical acclaim. It may seem odd to re-debut so soon with solo material but the process was natural and parallel to the band’s work. As Winder-Lind describes it: “a different channel to let things out into” – another “pot of songs” to The New Eves that acted as a creative necessity.

Even solo, this is not a lonely project. For example, The New Eves’ drummer and flautist Ella Oona Russell works across Wild Love to bring a gorgeous atmosphere. It’s the sound of an intimate bond, of two friends working side-by-side in immediate, necessary work. “There’s a magical thing between us where [Ella] understands my songs and she understands what it is I’m doing,” Winder-Lind says, hyping the impact of her friend’s emotional and creative work during the album’s creative process. Winder-Lind’s album bandmates – Finlay Burrows (guitar), Edward Deeney (bass), and Toma Sapir (drums) – were a “dream team,” she continues.

What started as Winder-Lind just wanting her solo music on Bandcamp quickly and frenetically changed during production. The EP, as it was conceived first, was a self-funded venture on a tight deadline of three days with Winder-Lind working with the “very Bristolian” producer Jack Ogborne beneath the iconic Bristol venue The Louisiana, which has a studio in its basement. Five songs made it. When The New Eves’ label Transgressive heard the result of this frenzy, Winder-Lind found the extra support and excitement needed to scale the project’s ambition. 

She soon expanded the work into an LP. Bristol remained central and in many ways became the third major location behind Wild Love. “Jack was like, oh, my friend has converted a chapel into a studio and it’s a good deal, and so we recorded the rest of the album there,” Winder-Lind continues. “It worked out really well to have the basement [of The Louisiana] kind of punk, like super-fast, no overthinking, and then the chapel with its high ceilings and nice little organs for the rest of it.”

Very suddenly Wild Love had snowballed into life in brilliant ways, almost without Winder-Lind’s knowing. “I didn’t think about it as something that would be successful,” she says. “It was more like, I just want to release the music because I’m exploding.” It’s this being on the edge of explosion, of urgency and necessity even at the point of recording, that best represents Winder-Lind’s solo artistic thesis.

“Urgency is the word – these songs, almost all of them, have come from a really intense place,” Winder-Lind tells me. It’s from this place that you get the electric spiralling of “Headfirst”, its energy supercharged with the essence of classic rock, or the jaunty, folk-pop warmth of “This Is Our Life”, which bursts into a sprawling crescendo. For Winder-Lind, the sound of urgency is manifested with the intense and beautiful sounds of electric guitars, folk riffs, delicate flute melodies, and crashing drums – an album of cathartic, radiant, and alive music with all the energy of Winder-Lind’s emotions being exorcised at the core of each track. It makes for exciting and potent songwriting fuel. “I think I write best from very strong emotions… and that is very personal and very vulnerable,” she says. 

Connection grounds Wild Love’s tracklist as Winder-Lind explores her relationship with the body, nature, and activism. Sweden’s landscape is a focal point, especially as Winder-Lind now lives abroad. “I get very homesick for Sweden when I’m in Brighton. I don’t really connect with the landscape there, but in Sweden it’s such a big part of me,” she explains. It’s a homesickness with a lineage – a yearning that links to the “strong melancholy in Swedish folk music and Swedish culture.” It’s here that sparse-cut “When the Cranes” finds its inspiration – a song born from a “yearning place” for the Swedish springtime’s “life force,” as Winder-Lind calls it. It’s a feeling inspired by the transition from the darkness of winter to the springtime, filled with light and birds coming back.

It’s in this Swedish folk tradition that Winder-Lind expands and perhaps electrifies with her debut. Album closer “Foremothers” relays into the lineage of all the women who came before, a song of recognition and gratitude that Winder-Lind can do much more thanks to their sacrifices. “I am here literally because of these women, and the men, who survived and fought and grew food and looked after the land. It’s a big feeling. It’s overwhelming,” Winder-Lind explains. 

The electric guitar plays a conclusive role on “Foremothers”. Both literally – through winding and massive-sounding riffs and chords that wail out, all distorted and fuzzy – and figuratively, as a point of connection to a tradition of folk music and activism. Through it, Winder-Lind shouts back, “I played electric guitar for you / for you, my grandmother / and your mother, and her mother / and her mother, and her mother.” It’s a full-circle moment foreshadowed from the opener “Headfirst” with its headstrong knowledge of the electric guitar’s transformative power. The sum builds to an evocative spiralling finale that affirms the record’s mission statement of explosive feeling and connectivity right through the very end. 

When Patti Smith stopped in Gothenburg over a decade ago on the fortieth anniversary tour for Horses, Winder-Lind cried so much she fainted and had to be carried out. “It was in the pouring rain and it was incredible,” she remembers. She reflects on this moment now from the other side as a performer. For Winder-Lind, playing live has the unique ability to make you feel more present and embodied. It’s hard, then, to not see this influence on the lead single “Girls”, where we reach “ultimate catharsis,” in Winder-Lind’s words. 

“I didn’t understand my power / Until I completely exploded,” her unmistakable vibrato triumphantly declares, fully embodied. It’s a sentiment elicited across the record but put into words most explicitly here. Wild Love is the explosion that affirms and realises Winder-Lind’s power. An urgent declaration of embodied, cathartic artistry situated around connection and love in all forms – knowingly stepping forward, solo and in control.