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The profile · researched 17 October 2026
From an Anchorage bar band to a 23-date headline tour: Nick Carpenter rebuilds in public
Medium Build is Nick Carpenter, an Atlanta-born songwriter who built a following in Alaska, signed to Island in 2023 and broke through with 2024's Country. His sixth album, King of Having Fun, arrived on 4 September 2026 and he is in the middle of the autumn tour that carries its name.
Atlanta, Nashville, then 3,000 miles north
Nicholas Carpenter was born in Atlanta on 10 May 1991 and moved to Nashville at 21 to study songwriting at Middle Tennessee State University. He interned at Disney Publishing and wrote for an indie rock band called Little Moses, which is roughly the standard-issue route into the Tennessee songwriting trade. What happened next was not standard: in 2016 he went to Anchorage to see his brother, stayed, and started playing under the name Medium Build. The first show under that name was in 2016.
The Alaska years were a long apprenticeship rather than a launch pad. Carpenter has described the early incarnation as a drunken, chaotic bar band, which then passed through an electronic stadium phase before settling into folk rock. The recorded evidence of that drift is a run of self-released albums: Falling Apart in 2016, Softboy and Roughboy both in 2018, and Wild in 2019. None of it travelled far beyond the state, and for several years Medium Build was essentially a well-liked Anchorage live act with a back catalogue.
The year the numbers moved
The turn came in early 2023. Medium Build released an EP, Health, in late January that year, and within months the audience metrics had shifted from local to national: daily Spotify plays rose from around 11,000 to around 30,000, and a TikTok following of roughly 300 became close to 35,000. By February 2023 the band — then Greg Geddes on drums, Nate Cain on guitar, Steve Hartmann on bass and Hollis Bryan on vocals alongside Carpenter — was preparing to tour the Lower 48 from March.
Carpenter signed to slowplay / Island Records in 2023 and toured with Lewis Capaldi. His first chart entry came the same year with "Friend for Life", a collaboration with X Ambassadors that debuted at No. 17 on Billboard's Alternative Digital Song Sales. Support runs with FINNEAS, Tyler Childers and Briston Maroney followed, along with sets at South by Southwest, Outside Lands and Austin City Limits. He was careful about what the attention meant for the town that had carried him: "Me and Anchorage have had this thing for six, seven years, and now the rest of the world is on and... I don't want to ignore the new people, but I also want to thank and still pay attention to the people who helped me get here."
Country, and the major-label debut
Country arrived on 5 April 2024 through slowplay / Island — twelve tracks, about 36 minutes, recorded on Nashville's Music Row with his creative partner Jake LiBassi, who records as Laiko. Carpenter's brief for it was plain: "I want this to feel lived-in... It's sort of me finding a defined place." The title is less a genre claim than an inheritance claim. He has summarised his own catalogue, not unfairly, as "if you slow all of my songs down, they're just three-chord bummer Country tunes", which undersells the R&B phrasing and the guitar-forward production but gets the emotional temperature right.
The record did what a breakthrough is supposed to do. It put "Beach Chair" and "Cutting Thru The Country" into the set permanently, and it widened the circle of people willing to work with him: in 2024 he cut "Yoke" with Julien Baker and appeared on Holly Humberstone's "Cocoon". It also moved his centre of gravity. He is now based in Nashville rather than Anchorage, though the Alaska decade remains the spine of the story he tells on stage.
King of Having Fun and the comedown behind it
The sixth album was confirmed on 26 June 2026 and released on 4 September 2026, again on slowplay / Island. It runs to fourteen tracks and was cut live in the studio with a group of friends and collaborators, including musical director Paul Rogers and engineer Jimmy Manfield — a deliberate break from the more isolated way Carpenter had worked before. The lead single, "Armor", came out with the announcement; he called it "the first song I knew was on the album. The most transparent look into my no filter stream of consciousness." He has also flagged two songs that sit oddly in a catalogue built on difficult relationships: "a genuine love song for my partner and a genuine love song for my mom."
The subject underneath the title is the fallout from the Country cycle — the touring, the rock bottom, and the slow work afterwards. Reviews have landed in a wide band. Dork gave it three stars out of five, finding the earnestness short on musical dynamism and signing off, "The king is having fun. His subjects' mileage may vary." Riff Magazine framed it as a rebuild that declines to pretend recovery is straightforward. Staged Haze was the warmest, singling out "Chill", "Perceived", "Downpour" and "Feed the Boys", and arguing that growth here is presented as complicated rather than as a tidy transformation. That spread is a fair map of the record: the writing is conversational and specific, the arrangements rarely raise their voice for long.
On tour, autumn 2026
The King of Having Fun on Tour is a 23-date North American headline run that opened at the 9:30 Club in Washington, D.C. on 4 October 2026 and continues until 20 November, finishing with a hometown show in Nashville. Tickets went on sale on 29 June. Canadian stops include The Concert Hall in Toronto on 12 October and the Vogue in Vancouver on 26 October. Before it started, Carpenter spent part of the summer opening for Mumford & Sons on select dates from 25 July, which is the largest room he has played to date as a support act.
The openers rotate by leg rather than staying fixed for the run — Ken Yates, Bella White, Merle Law, the Scratch and Eden Joel all take stretches of it. The venues are mid-sized rooms in the 1,000-to-1,500 range: Royale in Boston on 10 October, Turner Hall Ballroom in Milwaukee on 15 October with Bella White opening and Radio Milwaukee's 88NINE presenting. It is a step up in capacity from the Country touring cycle without being an arena gamble.
The show, now
A current Medium Build headline show runs a little over an hour and a half and draws heavily on the new album without abandoning Country. At the 9:30 Club in Washington on 4 October 2026 the set began at 9.10pm, lasted one hour and 35 minutes, and ran to 23 songs: a taped "Every Noise Is You" as the walk-on, then "Do Something Productive", "Perceived", "Birdwoman", "Home Depot" and "It's Not Easy (Falling In Love)" early, with "Beach Chair", "Crying Over U", "Armor", the title track, "Be Your Boy", "In My Room" and "Gimme Back My Soul" later on. Support act Ken Yates came out to sing his own "Superimposed" with the band. The Boston show at Royale on 10 October was also 23 songs but reordered — it opened with "King of Having Fun" and closed with "White Male Privilege" — so the running order is being moved around night to night rather than locked. Openers change by leg: Ken Yates on the eastern dates, Bella White through the Midwest including Turner Hall Ballroom in Milwaukee on 15 October, Merle Law in Vancouver, plus the Scratch and Eden Joel elsewhere. The rooms are mid-sized ballrooms and clubs, the staging is the live band Carpenter made the record with rather than tracks and production, and the between-song talk is part of the draw — his bio describes the show as a mix of concert, testimony and comedy, which matches the shape of these sets.
Researched from en.wikipedia.org · adn.com · mediumbuildmusic.com · universalmusic.ca · exclaim.ca · readdork.com · riffmagazine.com · stagedhaze.com
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