Audrey Nuna is going with her gut

Since the release of her critically (and commercially) acclaimed first album, 2021’s a liquid breakfast, the main constant in her life has been change. But approaching the release of her genre-bending second album TRENCH, she’s tuning out the noise. Her recipe for success is listening to herself.

When Nuna and I meet, it’s a bustling fashion week Saturday in New York. She’s racing between shows and parties, with barely enough time to catch her breath. Such is the schedule of an artist in album mode after a three year break from it. But in conversation, she’s relaxed. “I think it’s really important to take time away from making shit,” Nuna says of her time out of the spotlight. “We’re not machines.”

Thoughtful and composed — though also incredibly lighthearted — Nuna seems the type who truly invests herself in every person, conversation, and experience. This quality of hers is perhaps why her project has resonated with audiences the way it has. Beneath booming 808s and packed, club-ready backing arrangements, there are meaningful and interesting lyrical foundations.

In the three years since a liquid breakfast released, Nuna has done a lot of growing up. The product of that at-times painful growth is TRENCH, Nuna’s second full length LP. Organized into two sections — “Soft Skin” and “Hard Feelings” — the record plays with the dualities of coming of age, the struggle to stay grounded and open in a harsh world.

“a liquid breakfast is definitely more romantic, like springtime,” she says of the contrast between her two projects. “TRENCH is like the nighttime, darker side, underbelly of growing up and what that’s like.”

The key catalyst for many of the lessons that inspired the writing of TRENCH, she tells me, was moving to LA. Shortly after her debut dropped, Nuna made the move out to the industry hub. But the transition was bittersweet. Having lived on the East Coast her entire life — she was raised in New Jersey and, later, moved to New York for college and the start of her career — her move out west was her biggest jump to date. It meant the first time being far away from family, and it brought with it several painful friendship breakups that she says marked her as much as (if not more than) any romantic fracture. It was also one of her first major brushes with the ferocity of the business of music.

“Moving to a new city [was a rude awakening for me] … The idea that everyone does the art thing for a different reason. Moving to a place like LA, you really have to dig and search for those underground communities,” she says. “You start to realize that there’s a whole infrastructure set up for this that’s not about the creativity per se.”

“There very much in LA is a network and system set up for people to be ingested in, if that’s the route what you want to take. But I never saw myself in that, so it was very confusing for the first few months to be there doing that stuff,” Nuna tells me. While the city is a creative promised land of sorts, some of that creativity is not always as pure as it seems.

When Nuna arrived, she found herself in a revolving door of writers’ camps, sessions, and showcases. “It was really unnatural, and I really didn’t like it,” she says and laughs, reflecting on the experience. The more rooms she cycled in and out of, the less fulfilled she felt creatively.

Making TRENCH, then, was about going back to basics. The record’s roots were planted on a trip Nuna took to Joshua Tree with a group of old friends and collaborators. One of those friends was Anwar Sawyer, the producer who discovered Nuna and has helped nurture her career from the beginning. “In LA, you can get caught up in the matrix of sessioning and meeting all these people that you’re not even comfortable with,” she says. “Going with my people to an isolated place was very clarifying.”

In Joshua Tree — long known to be a restorative and favoured retreat for musicians — Nuna allowed herself to focus only on creating music she liked, not on creating hits or what she thought was expected of her. “We made stuff that I really liked. I remembered why I even made music to begin with,” she admits.

After that trip, the world of TRENCH began to unfold around her. All the experiences she’d had up until that point — even the bad ones and the messy ones — quickly became material she could download and channel into her project. In the writing process, then, she started to hold the emotions that had been weighing on her a little lighter. The trepidation about LA, the unease of growing up, the anxieties that come from being away from home for the first time all started to make sense. “Another thing I realized in the last three years is that almost nothing is binary,” she says. “Everything is a spectrum.”

This powerful realization helped give way to the thematic compass of TRENCH: duality. “I’ve noticed in retrospect, in everything I do, there’s always a sense of duality,” she explains. On TRENCH, she decided to lean into that interest. “At the end of the day, the record is asking the question of: How do you stay human? How do you stay soft through all those hard things? How do you resist bionic temptations all around? How do you not become jaded?” she says.

“It’s really easy to become jaded,” she continues. “When I was younger, I would hear adults be jaded, and I wouldn’t understand that at all. Now I’m in this weird limbo where I completely understand both sides.”

On tracks like “Baby OG” and “Starving,” Nuna addresses these questions head-on. On the former, she uses a sample of an old track from hers to marry her past and present selves. The track acknowledges how much in Nuna’s life has changed while also insisting that, at her core, Nuna is still the person she always was. “That song is really about trying to tap into your inner strength and remembering who you are, who raised you, where you come from,” she says. On the later, Nuna explores a character yearning for a relationship gone sour as a metaphor for the idea that harsh realities can, and should, push one to more tenderness and to more growth.

Ultimately, on TRENCH, Nuna set out created a project that pushed back against the competing pressures of modern life — be those technological, professional, social, or otherwise — that impede our ability to truly connect with ourselves and others. “We live in such a crazy era where getting in touch with your humanity has to be an active practice,” she says. On TRENCH, Nuna has attempted to overcome just that. And she has most definitely succeeded.