Nick Mulvey

Nick Mulvey pulled up to the roof solo for two songs, the title track off Dark Harvest, his fourth album, and the long-time fan favourite Fever to the Form. Nick Mulvey has been making records for over a decade now, and the thing is that each one has sounded like it came from a completely different life.

He started in Portico Quartet, a Mercury-nominated jazz outfit, playing hang drums and working through ideas that owed more to West African polyrhythm than anything in the British singer-songwriter lane. He left. First Mind came out in 2014, fingerpicked and intimate, got shortlisted for the Mercury again, cracked the UK Top 10, and made Fever to the Form the song everyone knew him for.

Dark Harvest arrived in two parts across 2025: Pt. 1 in June, Pt. 2 in October, both self-released on Supernatural Records, his own label through AWAL. The title came from a friend. Mulvey was on his knees, everything in his life dismantled, and the friend told him: “there will be a dark harvest, there will be treasure from these struggles.” He has called the years that followed “tenderising”, brutalised and softened at the same time, and somewhere in the middle of it he gave his life to Christ. He has been open about it, and the way he talks about it is not what you’d expect from a Cambridge-educated ethnomusicologist: “he came and saved my sorry ass.” Whatever it did to his worldview, it blew the doors off his writing. Four albums in two years, after a decade that produced three.

The production credits on Dark Harvest read like Mulvey raided someone else’s Rolodex. Jimmy Hogarth, who produced Amy Winehouse and Paolo Nutini. Leo Abrahams, Brian Eno’s go-to guitarist, who has also worked with Jon Hopkins. The Parisi Brothers, who have credits with Ed Sheeran and Fred Again. Eg White, who has produced Adele and Sam Smith. Players from the Anohni and the Johnsons orbit. All of them on a self-released folk record with spiritual bones. Pt. 1 tracks the descent, opening with Solastalgia — named for the philosophical concept of feeling homesick while you’re still at home — and moving through Hey, How Was Your Day?, which runs a voice recording about “rejection is God’s protection” through the middle of the song, and into a cover of Annie Lennox’s No More “I Love You’s” that strips the original down to something shimmering and devastated. Pt. 2 is what Mulvey has called “the first fruits after a deep winter” — songs about prayer, about dependence, about the strength you find when you stop white-knuckling it.

The title track is the album at its most still, bare guitar, bruised vocal, electronics pulled back to almost nothing, and one line holding the whole thing together: “in this dark harvest, the king will return.” It has already been called the most profound song he has written, and hearing it on the roof you understand why. This is what it sounds like when a fingerpicking ethnomusicologist from Cambridge starts making music about the Creator of the universe and means it completely.