On the Rise
Nix Northwest

It would be corny if it wasn’t completely by accident: Nix Northwest is framed on either side by massive black-and-white portraits of Louis Armstrong and Bill Evans that hang in the background. “They’re my housemate’s,” he laughs. “Her hero’s Louis, mine’s Bill.” He is telling me about his experiences absorbing jazz—first unconsciously through the records his mom played, and then formally through school and with an “enigmatic and truly inspirational” piano teacher. “A lot of it is sitting there, listening, transcribing… learning the stuff yourself,” he says pensively.

You’d be forgiven for overlooking Nix’s piano-playing at first listen—his music generally centers around his nimble and charismatic rapping, and the accompanying instrumentals usually prioritise mood over any pyrotechnic showmanship. A video from a few years back finds him backing a freestyle by London rapper (and frequent collaborator) Enny. Although he’s her only accompanist, he hangs back, restrained and sensitive. “The thing that Bill Evans really gets down is that it’s the most beautiful playing ever, but there’s a hidden darkness behind it—you know he’s got some shit going on,” Northwest says.

Northwest is doing well these days—“feeling pretty solid in life, man,” he smiles, lounging on his sunlit beige couch. But there remains an unmistakable streak of darkness running through his music. It’s a gritty, metropolitan sound borne of his deep connection to London (his stage name is a reference to both his initials and the location of his lifelong neighborhood of Kensal Rise); the churn of the city is what propels his music forwards. His adolescence found him immersed in the city’s graffiti scene: “It’s the friends you meet, the shit you get up to… I probably wouldn’t be rapping if I didn’t have those experiences—you see some mad shit. You see the darkest parts of the city that way… any big metropolitan city has that. I’m glad I have because I think it’s informed so much of my music now, so much of my view of the world—being able to not judge people based on what they have done or the upbringing they may have had.”

Northwest’s music is, accordingly, as accommodating and diverse as the city itself. It’s sprawling in its scope, and densely populated with scenes, textures, ideas, characters: the odd, double-time percussion tumbling around “The Occasional L” slots in beside “Satan Doesn’t Swim,” which glides by on a lazy bossa-nova as gusts of strings and sunbaked guitar blow through. “The sound of London is quite gritty—there’s a lot of drill and boom-bap— but it’s also got this huge jazz scene,” he explains of the city’s influences. Nix is positioned at the heart of Root 73, an “open-door” community space and a loose collective of artists and producers that, as Northwest describes it, sounds absolutely utopian. “You can just walk in and jam,” he says.

Like his piano-playing, Nix’s easygoing humility undersells what is, in actuality, a remarkably ambitious vision. His 2019 debut, Life’s a Bitch, I Just Need an Early Night is a concept album. It’s filmic and complex, packed with diaristic storytelling and colorful, knotty beats that evoke the work of Pivot Gang or even Flying Lotus at his most crowd-pleasing. Northwest produced it himself. His new album, Xin’s Disappearance, is another cinematic work with an arcing narrative that follows its titular character (X-i-n… get it?) as he becomes disillusioned with the confines of his city life and attempts to escape, only to discover that he cannot run from himself. “The whole time he has this paranoid feeling the devil is trying to bring him back… and then he gets to the end and realises that no amount of running from a physical place is going to allow him to escape what’s going on inside. So it’s more about accepting and coming to terms with yourself.”

The pursuit of self-discovery guides Northwest’s recorded output. “I’m pulling deep, from way back in my childhood and teenage years… and with this album I’ve gotten to a point where I’ve realised you’ve gotta not push too hard and force things— what naturally comes out is what should come out.” Recording, as he sees it, is an introspective and internal process, in contrast to the external experience of live performance. But like the paradox at the core of Xin’s Disappearance—in which Xin ventures “so far outward he’s forced to go inward”, performing for a crowd can end up with the same revelations. “It’s a buzz, the adrenaline—you learn about yourself that way too.”

There’s a sense of mysticism that surrounds Nix Northwest: his Instagram handle is @youthful.wizardry (where he’s also billed himself a magician). His videos find him alone, crouching over a fire or glowing in the moonlight. The threshold between mysteriousness and candidness is a crucial precarity in his work, but in conversation, he’s totally unguarded about his process and influences. In addition to a slew of 2000’s-era artists who made sophisticated, off-kilter R&B—Neptunes, Timbaland (“those beats are truly weird”), and Anderson.Paak—he admits to “spending months unpeeling the albums” of Kendrick Lamar. The rapper is perhaps his clearest influence: the two share a wordy, dextrous approach that uses world-building and scene-setting to tactfully (and sneakily) share the writers’ raw anxieties, insecurities, shortcomings. Both use characters as proxies to refract their own experiences and both are auteurs with a generous and inclusive spirit.

What makes Northwest especially compelling as an artist is his collaborative flexibility, despite having the ability to do it all himself if he really needed to. Part of this is the tight-knit community that Root 73 provides. “When you’re in sessions together you just learn from each other, try different things, different roles.” His secret weapon is his versatility, his ability to shift between a rap star and side player. “After this album I think I’d like to focus more on production for a little while,” he tells me. Nix Northwest is gaining traction, but the goal is not empty notoriety—it’s to be in dialogue with the artists that have inspired him. After all, fame is, at its most rewarding, simply a byproduct of having contributed meaningfully to a conversation. “With rap especially, I’ve always wanted to be sure I’m not just taking from it, that I’m also contributing and putting something on the line,” he says.

His most popular song on Life’s a Bitch opened with a vulnerable question: “Is it wrong for me to be scared or worried about what the future holds?” The existential inquiry certainly continues on Xin’s Disappearance. But this time, the magic is more focused—and more powerful—than ever before.