NICK NICELY – Or A Brockley Afternoon (2026, LP/Digital, Nick Nicely Records) 

RELEASE INFO:

Label: Nick Nicely Records

Format: LP, Album, Limited Edition

Format: Digital / Bandcamp

Release Date: 11 Sep 2026 (Digital) / 29 Sep 2026 (LP)

Some artists spend their whole lives trying to recreate the future they imagined when they were young. Nick Nicely seems to have taken the opposite route: he somehow brought the future back with him from the past. His name has been floating around the deeper waters of British psychedelia for decades, ever since the wonderfully strange “Hilly Fields (1892)” appeared in 1982 and immediately sounded like a lost transmission from some parallel 1967 that had somehow arrived five years too late — or perhaps twenty years too early.

Born Nickolas Laurien in 1959, Nicely has never fitted comfortably inside any particular musical box. Psychedelia, experimental pop, primitive electronics, chamber-like arrangements, lo-fi invention and sci-fi atmospheres all seem to coexist in his world, often within the same song. That peculiar ability to make something familiar feel slightly alien is perhaps what connects his work not only with the great psychedelic tradition, but also with artists such as The Bevis Frond, Robyn Hitchcock, Robert Wyatt and the Dukes of Stratosphear. His pioneering electronic experiments, including his early use of record scratching, only make the story even more curious.

After disappearing from the music business during the 1980s, Nicely eventually resurfaced with music that seemed completely unconcerned with the passing of time. Now, with “Or A Brockley Afternoon”, his sixth album, the ghostly machinery is fully switched on. There is a strong 60s psychedelic pulse here, but it comes wrapped in dream-logic, strange narratives, homemade textures and an unmistakably contemporary DIY spirit. The earlier “Mike Hall Is Calling” already hinted at this direction, before “Fading Away” and “Miniature Man” pushed the door open towards something considerably more acid-soaked.

“Or A Brockley Afternoon” contains 12 tracks. “Mike Hall Is Calling” opens the album with an AMAZING wall of sound, an almost overwhelming amalgam of avant-garde psychedelia and electronic experimentation. Having already written about this track when it appeared as a 7-inch single back in 2024, I can only repeat what struck me then: it is astonishing that Nick Nicely, more than four decades after “Hilly Fields (1892)”, still possesses this ability to create phantasmagoric sounds, experiment without fear and push the psychedelic boundaries until our brains start to melt. This is a superb piece of neo-psych studio alchemy, the kind of track that could easily become a cult object decades from now. “Miniature Man” takes things in a heavier, distinctly futuristic direction, combining psychedelia with trip-hop rhythms, electronic effects, backwards guitars, and dance-oriented beats, creating a wonderfully chaotic neo-psychedelic hodgepodge where nothing quite stays in its expected place. “Wonderful Day”, originally the B-side of the 2024 single, is another glorious collision of experimental sounds, a difficult-to-digest but fascinating piece of heady, noisy psychedelia, like a darker fragment from the more adventurous corners of today’s experimental psych underground. The title track, “Or A Brockley Afternoon”, slows everything down and enters a deeply trippy, hypnotic territory, with layers upon layers of sounds and psychedelic fragments seemingly floating over one another. It immediately makes sense why Nicely has been described as the “godfather of hypnagogic pop”, because the whole thing feels suspended somewhere between memory, dream and half-remembered sound. “Dreaming Alone” follows with a strange, almost ballad-like character, carrying a nostalgic melody that remains deliberately buried beneath a thick electronic veil. There is something distinctly dark and 80s-psych about its atmosphere, as though an old pop song has been discovered inside a malfunctioning synthesizer. “I’ve Gone Jackson Pollock” suddenly injects the record with an amazing futuristic rhythm and attitude, bringing together Psych, Pop and Electro with a surprisingly danceable pulse. In my ears there is something that reaches straight back to Swinging London, especially the spirit of Tomorrow’s “White Bicycle” — not as a copy, but as a distant psychedelic relative travelling through a much more electronic future. Wow! 

“Day That Never Came” returns to the hypnagogic side of the album, moving slowly through a dreamy landscape where an unmistakable sense of isolation gradually emerges. “Tic and Toc” is another AMAZING track, a beautifully distorted piece of Psych-Pop where spacey elements, popsike melodies, and experimental textures are drenched in an unmistakable underground ’80s atmosphere. “Melancholy Morning” is considerably softer, built around a lyrical melancholy and a poppier psychedelic mood, its gentle character providing a nice contrast to some of the more fractured experiments surrounding it. “Facing Awayy” brings another fascinating sonic mutation, with almost industrial, abandoned-sounding drumming, a lysergic pulse and futuristic rhythmic patterns creating what I would happily call Hypnagogic Psych Space. The atmosphere is absolutely captivating, and somewhere inside this strange electronic haze I can imagine Silver Apples meeting Ozric Tentacles for a rather unlikely studio session. “Death Of Desire” slows the journey down again, hypnotic and deeply psychedelic, carrying that lonely, abandoned feeling of something unfinished and left behind. There is a Syd Barrett-esque quality here, almost like discovering a forgotten demo, while the atmosphere occasionally reminds me of “Julia Dream” stripped of its melody and lyrical softness, leaving only the psychedelic ghost behind. Finally, “Day Never Ambient” does exactly what its title promises, dissolving the album into a hazy ambient finale. This is a dark, blurry post-rock/avant-ambient experiment, mysterious and futuristic, with the music seemingly disappearing into the shadows rather than offering a conventional conclusion. 

Listening to Nick Nicely in 2026 is a little like finding an old reel-to-reel tape labelled with an ordinary afternoon, only to discover that the recording contains another dimension. “Or A Brockley Afternoon” feels like another chapter in Nick Nicely’s wonderfully strange journey through the psychedelic unknown. More than forty years after “Hilly Fields”, he still refuses to repeat himself, instead twisting 60s psychedelia through electronics, hypnagogic pop, ambient experimentation and futuristic studio textures. A beautifully odd, deeply personal trip, and perhaps that is the real trick of Nicely’s music: the 60s are clearly somewhere inside it, but they are not preserved behind glass. They are still mutating…Dig! TimeLord Michalis

Tracklist

Links

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