This is The Kit

In today's fast-paced mid-apocalyptic world it can feel like a waste of time to speak about time at all. Why dwell on the past when we could just live in the present because the future won't shut up about how bad it's going to be? But with This Is the Kit, the pseudonym of songwriter / banjo strummer / pinhole camera lover / Winchester UK born Paris dweller Kate Stables, we're going to have to give time just a modicum of consideration. Because not only is Kate still here and making albums of cataclysmic honesty and welcoming tonal embraces, but they are also continuing to grow, which is probably the only smart way to move forward through time.

This Is the Kit’s music places companionship at a premium, so being welcomed into its space feels like an obvious privilege, on record and in concert hall with her stellar supporting cast of Rozi Plain (bass), Jamie Whitby-Coles (drums) and Neil Smith (guitar). And at this current point in our confusing history, continuing to be here at all, to stand tall and make music to gather to, that’s a heroic act. Joyful survival as an act of time-wasting, I’ll take that any day of the week. Look to This Is the Kit to spend at least one day of your week this year, I guarantee it will be time well wasted.

Nadia Reid

Nadia Reid–Enter Now Brightness Lately, Nadia Reid has been thinking about the past decade. “Ten years of documenting my life in song,” is one way she describes it. “The highest privilege” is another. With the release of her fourth album, Enter Now Brightness, has come a reassessment of so many moments across those years. “You have points in life that when you look back you see were a time of almost cellular change,” she says; a realisation now that so many of these new songs have been drawn from the times when “all my cells were changing.”Much had changed since Out of My Province, the album she released in early March 2020, just as the Covid pandemic sent the world into lockdown. In her native New Zealand, restrictions were some of the toughest in the world, the country’s borders remaining closed for over two years. Reid toured the record as best she could, she put on hold her plans to move to the UK, attended to the steady rhythms of living. In July of 2021, she gave birth to her first daughter, Elliotte; her second, Goldie, arrived this past Spring.