Ally Nicholas

A third-grade song, then a Manhattan control room

Ally Nicholas was writing songs before she had anywhere to put them. In a March 2024 interview she described her first as a third-grade effort about a childhood crush, and recalled singing in a neighbourhood garage as a child in the mid-2000s. The material that followed came out of harder ground: she has spoken openly about living with depression from the age of 14, with the worst stretch arriving around 16 and 17, and about songwriting functioning as a way of processing that rather than as a career plan. 'I'm definitely a personal experience writer,' she said in the same conversation, 'and anytime I have any strong emotions — which is often — I've done story writing.'

She left college in her first year and made her way to Engine Room Audio, a studio in Manhattan, with the specific ambition of becoming a recording artist rather than a writer handing songs to other people. The releases trickled out unsigned and unhurried: a first single in 2020, 'Bullets' in 2021, then a run through 2023 that took in 'I Know You Too Well', 'Seventeen', 'All Summer Long' and 'Fall Into'. 'Bored' followed in 2024. None of it arrived with promotional weight behind it; the audience accumulated anyway, much of it through short-form video, where she posts as slipknotshorty.

The producer who talked her out of being a pop singer

The move to Los Angeles is where the sound settled. There she began working with Diego Ferrera, the producer she credits with pushing her away from the pop-leaning direction other people assumed suited her voice and towards something heavier. Her own instinct, stated bluntly in 2024, was 'I want a real drum kit on there.' The lesson she took from the period she summarised as 'just do what feels right — even if you don't like it, you can live by it', and she has been consistent about not forcing the writing: 'whenever I kind of force it I'm not as happy with the result.'

What emerged pulls on grunge, indie, shoegaze and metal in roughly that order of weight — guitars with dirt on them, a voice that moves between a rasp and a full-throated belt, lyrics about longing, old relationships and mental health that decline to offer consolation. The coinage that has stuck to it is 'grunge-gaze'. Kerrang!, Ones To Watch and Euphoria were covering her before any label was involved, and by late 2025 a handful of self-released singles had passed 20 million streams across platforms. She had also sold out rooms in Los Angeles and New York and taken support slots with Amira Elfeky, Jutes and Bilmuri — which, on the evidence of the past year, is the format in which she has built the career.

Ten days in a desert studio

Position Music announced a global label deal with Nicholas on 14 November 2025. The label's A&R, Chris Tecca, framed the signing around self-knowledge — 'the best artists know who they are' — and said her forthcoming EP was 'fantastic'. Label partner Ryan Adelson called her 'a one-of-one'. Nicholas, who by her own account had been braced for the usual pressure to sand herself down, said that 'when I met Chris Tecca and the team at Position, I softened almost immediately.' Her manager is Meghan Booth; Position's founder and chief executive is Tyler Bacon.

The debut EP, Nevermind the Hurry, arrived a week after the announcement, on 21 November 2025: five songs, seventeen minutes, released through Position. The tracks are 'Red', the title song, 'Right', 'Killing' and 'I Wanna Believe'. They began as acoustic voice memos and were cut fast — around ten days — in an isolated desert studio with Ferrera, an approach that leaves the first-take impulse audible rather than smoothing it out.

Reviewing it on 2 January 2026, Crave Music Magazine called the record 'a must-listen; preferably with headphones and with the volume turned all the way up', and noted that 'each song on this EP is intricate in its own way, instrumentally and lyrically'. Seventeen minutes is a small body of work to carry a touring year, and it has had to.

Brighton, and a year spent in transit

The first significant thing to happen after the EP was British. Download Festival and Kerrang! built a curated stage at The Great Escape in Brighton — Kerrang! Presents The Download Stage, running at Daltons from Wednesday 13 to Friday 15 May 2026, nightly between 6pm and 10pm — and Nicholas was on the bill alongside Native James, Comastatic, Oversize, Frozemode, Eurotripp, Heave Blood & Die and Mudrat. Download framed the stage, in its 23rd year, as support for 'the next generation of headliners' routed through The Great Escape's network of independent artists and grassroots venues. She is represented for the UK and Europe by Liam Spencer at Echelon Artists, which suggests the Brighton booking was not intended as a one-off.

Back in the States she spent the summer on the Nevermind the Hurry Tour, playing headline club dates and festival slots from June into August. Two more recordings landed in 2026: a live acoustic version of 'I Wanna Believe', and a new single, 'A Ditch', released on 25 September 2026 — her most recent release, and the first new studio material since the EP.

The set, as it stands

Fifty-five of her shows are now logged on setlist.fm, and the pattern in them is clear: two different sets depending on whose name is on the ticket. Headlining, she plays long — thirteen songs at Schubas Tavern in Chicago on 21 June 2026, and a full run the night before at The Sanctuary in Hamtramck, Michigan, that opened with 'Red' and the title track, moved through 'Right', 'Bored', 'Killing' and 'Fall Into', then 'I Wanna Believe', 'Whisper' and 'Seventeen', and finished on 'All Summer Long' and 'I Know You Too Well'. The EP front-loads the set; the older singles close it.

Opening, it compresses hard. At Harrah's VooDoo Lounge in North Kansas City on 19 July 2026 she had thirty minutes and used six songs; at The Bomb Factory in Dallas on 2 August she had twenty, and still played six. The songs that survive the cut are the ones she plays most: 'Bored' and 'Seventeen' lead her all-time count at fourteen apiece, with 'All Summer Long' on thirteen.

The autumn is another support run. She is out with ivri on the Evidence of You Tour through October 2026 — Puzzles Deep Ellum in Dallas on the 9th, Paper Tiger in San Antonio on the 10th, the Bronze Peacock at House of Blues Houston on the 11th, New World in Tampa on the 14th, The Masquerade in Atlanta on the 16th, Capone's in Johnson City on the 18th, The Atlantis in Washington DC on the 19th, Adelaide Hall in Toronto on the 21st, The Foundry in Philadelphia on the 23rd, Space Ballroom in Hamden on the 24th, and the Gramercy Theatre in New York on the 27th — with Ceremony Festival in Nashville on 17 October dropped into the middle of it.

The staging is whatever these rooms allow. They are club-sized bills, several hundred capacity at the top end, where the weight falls on the guitars and on a voice that can travel from rasp to belt inside a line rather than on any production. It is the same scale of room that built the audience in the first place, and the material has not outgrown it yet.