Nomates

Billy Nomates’s eponymous first album (2020) and subsequent EP, Emergency Telephone (2021), introduced a singular new talent. Based in Bristol and fiercely independent, this caustic solo singer-songwriter, born Tor Maries, came at most subjects – from positivity to high heels to charity muggers – from oblique angles, her sometimes sung, often spoken delivery full of original phrasing.Best described as a punk with a keyboard and tunes to burn, Nomates has dug even deeper for Cacti, her songwriting broadening its reach. Her…

“The reality of it always felt a little out of reach,” Tor Maries says of making music for a living. Speaking in a Bristol pub in November, two months before the release of her anticipated second album Cacti, she seems gently stunned by the events of the last few years. Not just the obvious – Brexit, Covid, the cost-of-living crisis, take your pick – but the success of her solo project Billy Nomates.Recorded with Portishead’s Geoff Barrow, Billy Nomates’ 2020 debut established Maries as a unique talent. She moved between…

Billy Nomates has always been determined to exist on her own terms. She released her first single in 2020 after a life-altering Sleaford Mods show, christened by an insult thrown at her by a crowd member who saw that she was attending alone. On that song, No, Tor Maries outlined her manifesto with an anthem of calm defiance: “No is the greatest resistance / No to your nothing existence”, the Bristolian declared, finding urgency in hollow delivery. In the vein of post-punk sprechgesang, her stark rhetoric was set in…