THE FRONT ROW

Some records arrive quietly but end up feeling like they were inevitable. Katie Nicholas’ Chemistry EP is one of them: a four-track collection that dusts off the songs she wrote as a teenager and reimagines them with the clear-eyed focus of a musician who’s had to fight to reclaim her own story.

It’s been a long road here. Back in 2013, a homemade Valentine’s video for the original version of “Chemistry” rocketed Katie into the orbit of the UK country-pop scene, all soft acoustic strums and banjo flourishes that somehow sounded both naive and strikingly confident. The viral success landed her chart spots on the UK/IRE Country Hotdisc, support slots with The Shires and Ward Thomas, and the sort of buzz that usually ends with an industry swoop-in. In Katie’s case, it did, but not in the way most songwriters dream of.

Under the guidance of a “mento”r keen on a “clean slate”, her early music was pulled from digital stores, leaving the fans who’d latched onto her breezy, unpretentious Americana with nothing but bootleg MP3s. For a while, she disappeared from release radars. But she didn’t stop. Instead, she documented it all, 50 songs’ worth, on her Songwriter Diaries video series, quietly building a community who understood that sometimes the best music needs space to grow back on its own terms.

Chemistry is that growth in full bloom. Self-produced and released on her own Ladybird Records (a label as DIY as it sounds), this is Nicholas picking up the thread she dropped a decade ago, reworking her most requested early tracks without losing their small-scale charm.

The opener and title track sets the tone: soft country-Americana where banjo lines wrap around a melody so approachable it feels like the theme tune to a sitcom about a couple fumbling their way through life. The chorus is pure open-hearted simplicity, no trickery, just a tune that lodges itself in your head. There’s something almost disarming about how friendly it all sounds, like it was never meant to be any other way.

“In Your Shadow,” already released as a single late last year, slows everything to a reflective hush. The lyrics land with a kind of blunt sadness that’s all the more effective for it: “please don’t call me yours if you can’t call me at all.” There’s no melodrama, just a clear-eyed line that feels lived in. It’s the sort of sentiment you wish more pop-country would allow itself: a hurt you can’t quite dress up.

“You Kill Me,” the EP’s most streamed track to date since coming back, brings in Robert Vincent, whose warm, steady vocal acts as a perfect foil to Katie’s lighter delivery. The result is a duet that feels less like a collaboration and more like a conversation between two people trying to work out if the damage has already been done. “You kill me with your eyes, you kill me with your smile” might sound obvious on paper, but here it lands as a resigned truth rather than a cliché.

Closing track “Ladybird” is the only song that wasn’t part of that first teenage wave of writing, but it slots in seamlessly. Subtle banjo and acoustic guitar glide along at an unhurried pace, the whole thing sounding tailor-made for an afternoon with the windows open. Like much of the EP, it refuses to hurry to a climax. It doesn’t need to.

What’s striking about Chemistry isn’t some big narrative twist or clever reinvention, it’s that Katie Nicholas has made precisely the record her younger self would have dreamed of. This is music that owes nothing to trend cycles, made by an artist who’s seen the worst of the industry and come back with her voice intact. The production is clean but never clinical, with help from a stellar lineup of musicians including Chris Hillman on pedal steel, Anna Corcoran on piano, and Robert Vincent’s understated guest spot. You can tell it was built with care rather than budget, recorded partly at The Grand Studio in Clitheroe and partly at Sloeflower Studio in Chester, engineered by Anthony Draper and James Wyatt, then mixed and mastered by Rory Ballantyne.

If you were part of the early wave of listeners who watched Katie’s homemade videos or saw her play pop-up stages at C2C London, this will feel like a satisfying return. But even if you’ve never heard her name, Chemistry is worth a listen purely on the strength of its craft. It’s a reminder that country-pop doesn’t have to be polished to the point of blandness, that sometimes, four songs with a banjo and a sharp lyrical eye can hit harder than any big-budget Nashville import.

Nicholas has spent the past decade proving she didn’t need a label to validate her. And while these songs might have been written by a teenager, they land now with a quiet assurance that feels distinctly grown-up. No spectacle, no big promises, just a songwriter reclaiming her own catalogue and proving that the best music is sometimes the simplest to believe in.