Cubicle Dreams: Nymphlord Peels Back Shedding Velvet
- Josh Kitchen
- 3 minutes ago
- 9 min read
By: Josh Kitchen / May 15, 2026
“Guitar pick in my pocket at the marketing all-hands,” Nymphlord sings on “Garden,” the opening track on her debut album Shedding Velvet, out today on Lauren Records. Anyone who’s ever sat through one of those corporate “all-hands” meetings — the office colloquialism for a company-wide staff meeting — knows that if you’re in one too long, there comes a point where it can feel like your soul is slowly being vacuumed out of your body.
It’s a line that, while simple on its face, contains so much promise and possibility. Like the screen door slamming and Mary's dress swaying on Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road,” it serves as a musical and lyrical invitation. "Garden" gets at the beating heart of Shedding Velvet, which literally refers to when a deer’s antlers grow and shed. “When they first start to grow, a deer’s antlers are cocooned by a protective layer of peach fuzz, skin that will peel back once the antlers reach their full size. This surprisingly bloody process called ‘Shedding Velvet’ is this album’s namesake,” Nymphlord says.
Fittingly, across 10 tracks and 30 minutes, Nymphlord takes the listener on a peeled-back and bloody journey through self-discovery, identity, memory by way of the fluorescent glow of modern pop culture — the kind that, if you sit under it too long, can make you begin questioning not only your sanity, but your very purpose on this earth.
On “Garden,” Nymphlord spends four minutes laying out exactly what makes this record so damn great, using her real-life 9-to-5 job as a metaphor for how so many of us slowly discover who we truly are through the monotony of what we do to survive. For Nymphlord, that realization was becoming a musician. “I realized musician already was my identity. It didn’t matter how I filled my time,” she told me.
From references to playing shows at the beloved Los Angeles record store and venue Permanent Records Roadhouse, to “trading in emails for a ballpoint pen,” Nymphlord sings that she’s “a garden that keeps growing, and you can’t fence me in.”
Over the next 25 minutes, Nymphlord lets those vines completely engulf the listener, weaving nostalgic references to Bush-era suburban memory and place throughout the record. Her sound here recalls a Beck-like ’90s folk-grunge vibe with a dreamy Mazzy Star sheen. Nymphlord sings about watching The Matrix Reloaded in “Summer ’03,” explores the emotional price of validation on “Star,” where she tells tales of stolen innocence from leaked nudes, and tackles forgiveness, guilt, and more corporate monotony on the ethereal, heavy, and gorgeous “Filter.”
Nymphlord’s voice is impressive, occasionally recalling Adrianne Lenker, but she occupies a space that feels wholly her own — offering a uniquely millennial blend of nostalgia, anxiety, apathy, and a yearning for authenticity in a synthetic modern world. It’s the kind of perspective that could only come from someone who came of age in the mid-2000s internet era. "Work sucks, I know," Nymphlord playfully sings on "Garden," referencing the kings of her style of institutional apathy, Blink-182. She continues, "but making art is harder when you're broke." In a culture increasingly flattened by algorithms, influencer culture, and empty corporate speak, Shedding Velvet positions Nymphlord as a vital and deliciously caustic antidote.
I know that you have a day job when you're not making music, so I love how the record starts with “Garden." It has this push and pull of wanting to be more than what you're there to do and live your life.
I think, for me, for a long time, I was very private about songwriting and making music. It took me a long time — I was always a big music fan. I had a radio show in college, and I was very adjacent to all this music stuff, but it took me a long time to actually feel comfortable sharing songs that I had made. Once I started doing that, it was like the floodgates had been opened, and I was addicted. I was like, “Oh my God. Of course I’ve needed to do this since the first CD I burned in seventh grade. Of course I’ve been meaning to do this forever.”
Once the floodgates had been opened, it became so hard to care about anything else. But you have to, because you have to live and pay for your life. You have to be self-sufficient. So it became really hard. I had this goal of working toward being able to quit my day job so that I could do music full-time.
I found a way to do that for what I thought was going to be a brief stint. I had this idea that once I quit my day job, then “musician” will be my identity. Until I quit my day job, musician can’t be my identity, and artist can’t be my identity. Then after a little while, I was like, “Okay, well, now what? I have to go back to the day job.” I stretched it out a lot longer than I thought I was going to be able to. I was teaching Pilates. I was doing all these odd jobs. Then I had just played a show at Permanent Records, and then I was literally standing in a meeting — like a 30-person meeting at my office job — when -
"I reached into my pocket and felt the guitar pick. I just felt so self-actualized in that moment, in both identities being true."
I feel like I had finally had that connector moment where I was like, “No, this is who I am. It doesn’t matter how I fill my time. The rest of it doesn’t matter.” Then I started writing “Garden” right away. I think I wrote most of the lyrics to "Garden" on the drive home in my car that day.
That feeling of wanting to be more than just one thing, refusing to fit into one mold is so relatable. It makes me think of that meme: “Nobody here knows I’m in…” But literally like, "Nobody here knows I'm Nymphlord."
Exactly.
It feels like this record is sort of you searching for authenticity in a world of synthetic falsehoods. I think people crave authenticity right now more than ever. Lyrics mentioning things like Amazon boxes and Linktrees — there’s so much language that’s so relatable for people in this generation. Talk to me about searching for something real in this day and age.
I just went down such a mental rabbit hole. I forgot about the Linktree reference, but I was just being such a little asshole about Linktrees last week because my team — who knows more than me and is very smart — was like, “Hey, your little abstract website with these buttons that don’t have text is cute, but you need a Linktree.” And I was like, “I can’t have a Linktree. A Linktree is so boring. My custom website that I spent days building means so much to me. It’s so personal.” But in the end, I was still stubborn and just built a Linktree into the website I built anyway.
That’s so funny. Believe me, I get it.
But, I agree, and I appreciate you calling that out. I think there’s just so much crap floating around all the time these days. Even the language I use to describe the ways people are being — I could say “everyone’s so performative,” but saying people are performative is therapy-speak that I learned from watching other people echo therapists on TikTok.
We’re in such a bad internet echo chamber right now. These cultural trends — not just the things you see and consume, but also the way we talk — are moving so quickly.
And I’m somebody who’s very porous to that. I love to soak up trends. I’m obsessed with the Aesthetics Wiki, which is this website that just lists aesthetics. I think it came out of Tumblr culture or something. It’s total garbage, but I could spend hours reading it. I try not to be so chronically online, but I can't help it - I just am. But it’s just gotten to be so much. I wasn’t trying to make a record about that, but it just ended up in all the songs. It was inevitable.
It’s really challenging to unplug and not be doomscrollers. It's almost like Shedding Velvet is the album version of hope for the doomscroller.
That’s the funny thing too. I think a lot of these songs are nostalgic. Some of them are hyper-present and tied to a specific moment — like “Garden” and “Emptiness.” Those were very “I’m here right now and writing about what literally just happened.”
But others are more like memories. I think it’s the classic trap of falling into nostalgia and wanting a simpler time and missing childhood, then getting smacked in the face with reality.
"Except I’m not actually getting smacked in the face — my eyes are just turning red from being online too long."
But then you close the record with “Good Time Diner,” which I find much more hopeful.
That one I decided to treat separately. I think of the first eight songs as one set, then there’s an intermission, and then “Good Time Diner” is separate. Mainly because the production on that song ended up so surprising to me. It’s not the direction I thought we were going to take it in at all.
We had Sean Mullins, who has his own project - Moon Mullins but also plays in a ton of other projects. He was playing drums and hammered dulcimer across the record, and he has an amazing background in jazz drumming. He introduced me to exotica music like Martin Denny, which I’d never listened to before. Him and Katie [Von Schleicher], the producer I worked with, just took that song and ran with it. It went in a totally different direction than I expected, and it sounds so beautiful.
To have a song you wrote end up somewhere you never imagined — I love that. It feels like a reminder that music takes a village sometimes, which is kind of like life.
Yeah. Especially on this record, because everything I’d put out before, I either produced myself alone or with my friend Jeff Peters over email. We’d just send stems back and forth forever. But this was the first full studio record where every song was played live in a room first. Some songs had home demos, but “Good Time Diner” wasn’t even fully fleshed out. I think I finished writing it two days before recording.
So it was a really cool learning experience to take a step back and let other people take the wheel a little bit more. I realized I’m just one person. I have limitations. I felt really lucky to work with people whose strengths were so different from mine.
I love the flute on "Candy."
Yes! I should shout out my friend Erica Levy, who played flute on the record. She crushed it. She and I actually met playing in an improvisational ambient collective here in LA called The Academy of Light, which is also how I met Tyler Ballgame. Everyone would meet up, pick a key, and play a show in that key with no rehearsal, no rules, no restrictions on instruments. It was really fun. We did that for like a year or two, and it inspired a lot of the record. Just being immersed in that ambient world with all this droning music.
I’m glad you brought that up because there are sonic moments on this record — like “Abyss” — that are so fucking cool.
That actually came from recording “Emptiness.” Throughout the recording process, we wanted everything to sound acoustic but unsettled. We were trying to use analog methods to warble things a little bit. I love Broadcast, but I also love folk-era Simon & Garfunkel and Joni Mitchell, so we were trying to find this space where it felt organic but slightly off. We ran almost all the synths through detune and ring shifter pedals, and we were literally playing the pedals live while recording. When we went to switch synths after recording “Emptiness,” I pulled the cable and it started making the sound you hear on “Abyss.”
"Katie and I both just stopped and listened to it for like three straight minutes without saying anything because we were like, “This sounds so cool.”
I’m sure you’re excited to play these songs live.
I’m so excited. We played about half of them live for the first time at Permanent [Record] in January. And we have a big album release show coming up at Zebulon on May 27 where me and my band are going to play the full thing all the way through. I want to pack the house. I want there to be like 350 people, even though the capacity is 300 - we'll cram even more in there.
