Nina Winder-Lind might have built her name fronting The New Eves, the Brighton four-piece behind the “Hagstone rock” sound. But Wild Love, her solo debut, is a different animal entirely. Expanding on 2023’s The Spirit Is Carnal EP and her 2025 poetry collection Röd Ska Jag Leva, the latest project finds Winder-Lind stripped of the group’s collective fire and left instead with something rawer, more confessional, and every bit as combustible. Across 11 tracks, she pays tribute to the women and girls who came before her while carving out a liberating vision of her own.
Opening track “Street Hassle” sets the tone immediately with gloriously angular guitar work and a wobbling, unvarnished vocal. Together, they create a kind of authenticity you can’t fake. From there, the spirit of the Velvet Underground seeps through the record’s deliberately unpolished, art-school sound. “Girls,” which started life as a poem, is both bombastic and stripped-back in the same breath. Elsewhere, Winder-Lind channels Patti Smith at her most incantatory.
There’s something almost perverse about how much this record drips with ’70s New York cool. It was made by a Brighton-based Swede and recorded across two Bristol studios. One sits beneath the Louisiana, the other inside a converted church, with longtime collaborator Jack Ogborne producing throughout. But that’s exactly the trick of it: geography be damned, Wild Love sounds like it crawled out of a basement on the Bowery. The electric guitar sits at the center of it all, both instrument and symbol of rock’n’roll’s oldest promise.
What carries the record, though, is its directness. It’s a refreshing landscape that so often favors polish over feeling. The album is also poetic and raw in the same breath, mysterious yet immediate. And that constant tension makes the whole thing such a joy to sit with. Listening back, you’re reminded how long it’s been since a record this scrappy, this attic-or-basement-dwelling, has come along. These are melodic, bouncing, confessional songs served with a sneer exactly when one’s needed.
The project’s highlight is “Grandma and Robert De Niro,” a punk waltz with a ’60s chamber-rock twist that feels tailor-made for a Wes Anderson soundtrack. On the track, Winder-Lind spits out surrealist vignettes in the tradition of Bob Dylan, who gets an explicit name-drop for good measure. Her lyricism often feels closer to poetry read aloud than song lyrics, which tracks given where she started.
Fellow bandmates Ella Oona Russell, Finlay Burrows, Edward Deeney, Toma Sapir, and Francesca Brierley join Winder-Lind across all 11 tracks. Their presence gives the record a lived-in feel, even at its most intimate. .
It’s the kind of record that reminds you that with a few friends and a handful of random instruments, anyone can have a go at making a song, such is its intimate, playful sound. Winder-Lind’s vocal style won’t be for every listener. But those who love their artists with a bit of expression in their voice will find 11 tracks of erratic, tender, wild, and fun moments that soon crawl under your skin and stay there.
Wild Love arrives hot on the heels of The New Eves’ breakout debut The New Eve Is Rising, one of last year’s most celebrated records. If that album proved Winder-Lind could summon collective fire as part of a foursome, this one proves she can do it entirely alone and with even greater intimacy. It’s a hugely exciting solo set to sit right alongside her main outfit’s acclaimed one.