Last December, Nick Carpenter had an existential experience onstage. He was standing with the band Dawes, screaming along as they performed their signature song, 2009’s “When My Time Comes.” The moment made Carpenter, who sings and writes songs under the name Medium Build, think about his deepest fears and goals as an artist — namely, about coming to terms with the level of popularity you’ve been gifted rather than constantly worrying about it.
“There’s a huge fear of: If I stopped working, will it all go away?” says Carpenter, 33. “If I don’t have a big enough tune, or I don’t capture the zeitgeist like the last song did, will all these people fuck off? And if everyone fucks off, then the question is: ‘Was I ever good?’ The dream is to be relevant, to add to the conversation. But you have to be able to talk yourself off the cliff. I have to tell myself: ‘Nick, you’re valid, you wrote some tunes…. You said the thing. There’s a kid waiting in line to sing along with you in fucking Copenhagen, you did it!’ But like, then my perpetually Instagram ass gets online and is like, ‘Oh well, Zach Bryan did blah blah blah last night. Fuck me, I guess.’”
Therein lies the anxious, ambitious, imaginative world of Medium Build, a singer-songwriter who feels poised to explode into stardom after spending the past decade self-releasing darkly funny songs on Bandcamp. His 2024 major label debut, Country, exposed his quirky confessionals to a new audience. See “Crying Over U” (“I’m a superstitious bitch/With the little fucking charms on my Crocs”) or “In My Room,” his portrait of pubescent angst: “TGI Monday, I can see my friends again/I quote The Matrix so I seem interesting.”
Those songs have cued up a big 2025 for Carpenter, one that includes a performance at Coachella, an opening slot for Tyler Childers, and a recent co-sign from Shaboozey. When alt-pop singer Holly Humberstone had Medium Build open for her last year, she was struck by Carpenter’s ability to connect with fans who likely didn’t know his music. Each night, she says, “everybody in the room would fall in love with him, because he was so real. That’s a really hard thing to do.”
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Describing Medium Build’s music — which combines the vocal textures of R&B crooners like Omar Apollo and Frank Ocean with the emo tendencies of Dashboard Confessional and Fall Out Boy with the fine-tuned songcraft of mainstream country — can feel like an absurd exercise in genre-hopping. But that hard-to-pin-down sound has earned him gigs with everyone from pop balladeer Lewis Capaldi to alt-rockers Rainbow Kitten Surprise.
The only problem? Carpenter is uninterested in replicating the success he’s found with the stripped-down, accessible sound of his last LP. “I put out an Americana, indie-folk thing, called it Country as a joke, that somehow gets me the attention of the Noah Kahan, Zach Bryan crowd,” he says. “Now I’m like, ‘Yeah, I’d like to scare some people away, or bring in new fans.’ I’m scared to just be a white guy with an acoustic guitar. If I can’t point to my love of Prodigy and Nine Inch Nails or Usher and Joe and fucking Sade, that’s a bummer. The goal is that, in 2026, I’m sitting closer to Tyler, the Creator, where it’s like, ‘Oh, that’s a wacky guy that gives us a crazy record every 18 months.’… I need to pop off on some shit that’s not so easy to eat.”
Part of it, says Carpenter, is that he knows he has been influenced by Music Row, for which he’s (mostly) grateful. “I want to make more challenging stuff than I’ve been invited to make,” he says. “And maybe that’s because there’s a part of me that wants to be like and is aware of Sam Hunt. I don’t know, if you asked Alex G who Sam Hunt was, if he’d know. Maybe that’s my cross to bear.”
THERE ARE SEVERAL touchstones in Medium Build’s backstory that, frankly, he’s grown a bit tired of retreading. Carpenter grew up in a religious Georgia household and lost his faith when he moved to Nashville for college to study songwriting despite having not grown up with country music. “My dad class-climbed and didn’t want us to be rednecks,” he says, “so he didn’t let us listen to anything he perceived as working-class.”
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He made a brief stab at making it in the city’s commercial country music scene, but he never quite fit in. Carpenter was the guy getting blank stares when he started to talk about Randy Newman’s Good Old Boys at co-writing sessions. He joined a band called Little Moses and became part of a underground Tennessee music scene that included Julien Baker’s pre-fame band the Star Killers. “We couldn’t decide if we wanted to be Vampire Weekend, the Shins, or, like, Say Anything,” he says. (Carpenter and Baker reunited for “Yoke,” a highlight from his recent Marietta EP).
In Nashville, Carpenter began writing weird little songs he felt were too strange to sing onstage. Medium Build’s auspicious debut came in 2015 with “Stupider,” an almost off-puttingly forthcoming song that begins with a verse about masturbating into a sock. He refined and developed Medium Build after he wound up living in Alaska in his twenties.
Both his faith and his sexuality are recurring themes in his songwriting, but Carpenter no longer finds it particularly compelling to discuss such topics: “If you listen to the tunes, someone would be like, ‘Yeah, that kid grew up in church.’ Great. I don’t need to say it anymore! And I wear fucking short shorts and dangly earrings. I don’t need to talk about who I have sex with anymore.”
In conversation, Carpenter is funny and self-deprecating, unafraid of speaking his mind and perhaps even interested in ruffling feathers. He asks big questions: “Do I want to scare the money away?” He refers to roots-music purists who’ve criticized his use of drum machines as “troubadour guys who think I’m a cuck.” He has disdain for the idea that his career must be guided by a relentless devotion to growing his fanbase. “There’s always some label cunt that’s like, ‘Nah bro, let them all come; Everyone can be at this party!’” he says. “Well, not really everybody can be at this party. Then it’s not a fucking party. It’s a state fair.”
At one point, I bring up a 2014 YouTube performance of Carpenter singing a shiny, Nashville-friendly song in his early twenties. When I ask him — given how much of his music is about forgiving past selves — what he’d say to the young person singing that song, Carpenter bristles.
“You are a twisted fucker,” he says to me. “That song was, ‘If I can do this game, I’ll get paid. And if I can get paid, I can keep making my little Medium Build records.’”
Less than two months after Carpenter sang that song in an attempt to get a Nashville publishing deal, he debuted Medium Build, releasing “Stupider” online.
“That kid,” he says, referencing his 20-something self, “is so aware that there’s an acceptable version of him that will get paid and people will want to date, and there’s the inside piece of him that’s dark and needs to air shit out. I was so terrified of actually bringing that guy to anything public in 2015 Nashville. I was like, ‘Nobody wants that here.’”
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Six years later, in 2021, after one of his songs took off, Carpenter made his live debut as Medium Build in Nashville, where he’d once tried to make it as a polished songwriter and has since relocated. One hundred kids showed up to see him play his twisted little tunes. The parts of himself he believed for so long needed to be kept separate could coexist, after all.
“Medium Build can literally say anything,” he says. “In a way, he’s bulletproof, because he can be nasty, and he can be sincere, he can be funny, he can be dark. And we all need that.”
