“Hold On,” co-produced by R3hab, marks a departure from the vocal chants and pure attitude of earlier tunes like “We’re All No One” and “The Way We See The World.” The sexy track still boasts NERVO’s signature club-ready sound and a dance floor-ready big breakdown, but offers up a more vulnerable side to Mim and Liv. Their vocals here are more “intimate,” as Liv puts it, with the lyrical simplicity and breathiness they began to hone on the recent Nicky Romero collaboration “Like Home.”
“When you’re in the studio, you really experiment with your voice,” explains Mim. “For us, tone is a really big thing, so we do work hard when we cut vocals.” Liv adds that, while working on “Hold On” last October, she and Mim were inspired by “indie vocals” like those of Imogen Heap and Portishead. “Because we don’t have big diva voices—which we would love. But, let’s face it, we don’t. We work with what we’ve got.”
In this case, what they have is that rare song that works in headphones and in DJ sets alike. “It’s been received really well in our sets,” says Mim. The track has enough dance-floor drive to command a crowd, while its melody continues to resonate long after it ends.
Given their recent streak of big singles and headlining DJ sets, asking about the “a-word” is all but inevitable. Yes, there will “hopefully” be a NERVO album by the end of the year, says Mim. “We’ve already fleshed out a lot of the ideas, which are great.” Liv adds that they “don’t want every song to be a four-on-the-floor, 128 [BPM] banger with an electro drop. We want to show some different layers to us as artists and writers.”
