On populism, AI, and what remains when the songwriters who once stood on pedestals are gone

Transmission 382: Interview with Nick Carlisle

Nick Carlisle has spent the better part of two decades moving between projects on the UK DIY music scene, from Peepholes on Upset The Rhythm through Bamboo, Katy and Nick, and Lean Logic, before turning to solo work in 2022 with Häxan: A Soundtrack. His fourth solo album, The Mad Decades, released 29 May 2026 on The Colour Inverted Records, follows Sailors On The Roiling Sea (interviewed here).

Title: The Mad Decades
Artist: Nick Carlisle
Release Date: 2026-05-29
Genres: Art Rock, Post-punk, Progressive Rock, Psychedelic Rock
Label: The Colour Inverted Records
Description: Nick Carlisle interview on The Mad Decades, out 29 May 2026 on The Colour Inverted Records: Asimov, AI, populism, real instruments.

The title comes from Trends, a 1939 short story by Isaac Asimov in which scientific progress outpaces the population, who respond by reverting to superstition and anti-intellectualism. Eight songs recorded at Church Road Recording Company in East Sussex, The Mad Decades moves through populism, cognitive offloading to AI, and unrequited love, with Carlisle joined by Julian Tardo and Joe Davin of Insides, Marcus Hamblett of Bears Den and Rozi Plain, and Aubrey Simpson of Pale Blue Eyes on fretless bass.

Featured image: © Aubrey Simpson

How did The Mad Decades come together as a project. Where did it start?

I probably started around January of 2025 and the process as always basically involved three things: reading and watching film/TV for inspiration, noting lyrical ideas down in my iPhone, and improvising on the piano with Logic running on the computer. That way it’s quite easy and quick to get an album project started, and I normally try and get 8 or 9 song sketches on the go, even thinking of track order and titles etc at that early stage. So the album then already exists, and like a jigsaw all that remains is the longer task of filling in the jigsaw pieces. Part of this jigsaw process as time goes on is replacing the demo plugin pianos, organs, Mellotrons with their real counterparts, and the drums, bass, guitar etc. with real performances from the other contributors to the album. Quite an exciting process for me, to hear it all come together. I happened also to be watching the original generation of Star Trek at the time so at least a couple of titles came from that, Fire Without Heat and Retreat To Barbarism alongside I guess this 20th Century nostalgia that hangs over the album. But yeah, reading Trends by Asimov really got everything going as that gave me the title The Mad Decades, and the lyrical idea for the title track. I think the loose sci-fi element is pertinent today obviously but the contrast is that with 20th Century sci-fi there was most always a sense of hope, optimism and progression, whereas today you could be forgiven for thinking it has curdled into some kind of psycho dystopia.

Asimov wrote Trends in 1939, yet it reads as a diagnosis of the present. Do you think he was describing something cyclical about human nature, or a specific failure of our era?

I’d say a bit of both! I think it’s cyclical to the degree that there have always been and always will be innovations and sea changes in civilisation that inevitably leave people behind or that exploit the majority. And historically there are several moments where humanity has metaphorically (and of course once literally!) burned down the library at Alexandria and hastened in another Dark Age, turning their back on science and knowledge, and turning to superstition instead. What’s tragic about the current era is that a lot of the innovation seems to go hand in hand with an attitudinal reaction against the progress made in the latter half of the last century, so against civil rights, trans rights, women rights etc. So these great advances in technology we are seeing seem linked to a regression otherwise, bit of a paradox really. And all the while the climate crisis time bomb is ticking away.

The theme of madness runs across the album in several forms — political, emotional, technological. Was that a conscious decision from the start or something you recognised once the songs were assembled?

It was really afterwards when I already had all the lyrics and the album title. Sometimes you only see the bigger picture when you can step back from the project and look at the whole thing with a little distance — “aah, THAT’S what I was doing”. I had the album title early on so I guess that was guiding and pointing me in a certain direction for all the lyrical ideas. It wasn’t the greatest period for me personally either writing the album, so that plus everything that’s going on in the world that I was writing about, there was a fairly dark energy to the songs and this theme of humans and their propensity to be utterly bonkers in their thinking came to the fore a bit!

Fire Without Heat imagines an underground detention city where state enemies are stripped of identity. What triggered that specific vision?

Oh it was watching US news coverage of ICE with a little bit of the tech bro world thrown in I guess. Utterly depressing to see the human propensity for cruelty play out over and over again. There’s that aforementioned nostalgia for the 20th Century on this album so that dystopian near-future depicted in Fire Without Heat is very ’50s-’60s somehow, kind of paperback sci-fi. My old Stylophone that comes in at the climax of the track helps give it that feel.

Three Studies of a Half Human was sparked by a 1960s Bacon documentary. What was it about that footage specifically that lodged itself in you?

On the one hand, it comes back to this nostalgia for the 20th Century — or perhaps more specifically nostalgia for progress. It’s a very strange feeling to get to my age and think there’s a very objective argument for saying we are really regressing at the moment. All those big questions that everyone knows about, the climate crisis, AI, populism etc. Obviously the 20th Century gave us two world wars and many others besides, but the feeling in the latter half was always of moving away from the horrors of World War II, “Never again!”, whereas now it feels like we’re drunkenly stumbling back towards it again crying out “Again!”. But yeah, more specifically with the Francis Bacon documentary it was just great seeing an artist totally — and literally — immersed in his art. His art studio in his flat was absolutely rammed with stacks of newspapers and magazines like a hoarders cave, inspiration all around him, paint all over the walls. And then out of this chaos coming his amazing creations on canvas. I guess I was struck by the contrast between that, and the idea of using AI to make art today, where the artist doesn’t get their hands dirty and after a few prompts is removed from the process altogether.

You described Hilversum as aiming for ABBA’s euphoria alongside NEU! and Harmonia’s drive. How do you hold those two emotional worlds together?

Well, coming from the UK I guess there’s a certain European air to NEU! & ABBA (and a lot of capital letters!) that is noticeable from where I’m standing. And there’s a similar euphoric drive to both, also coloured by that mid ’70s piano/synthesizer production. So there are very loose similarities there! The piano was really the common factor that I used in Hilversum. It’s multitracked and stacked up like how I believe ABBA used to record, and it has those big chords that seem almost celebratory in contrast with the more melancholic lyrics. There’s a song by NEU! (read our interview with Michael Rother) which I’m very fond of called Isi which is very piano-driven too, and I think Hilversum somehow seems to evoke something which contains all of the above. Hilversum is a bit of a travel song, I imagine it being set on a train after some rendezvous which results in the person in the song questioning their own worth, and so that almost motorik beat of NEU! and Harmonia (read our interview with Roedelius) propels the song along, carrying the protagonist away from the situation and back into their comfort zone, for better or worse.

Aubrey Simpson directed the “Jester Quantised” video and also played fretless bass on the track. How does it change things when a collaborator moves between those two roles on the same project?

Actually strictly speaking I directed the Jester Quantised video, but very much guided by Aubrey Simpson‘s expertise as a filmmaker and photographer. I’ve worked with Aubrey since the days of my collaboration with Rose Keeler-Schäffeler, Lean Logic: Aubrey shot the photos for The Last Mirage album cover. He is so great to work with as he has endless enthusiasm for whatever it is the project entails, and yeah, it turns out he’s a great bass player too! In terms of how it changes things when he moves between the two roles, I’m not sure it does other than his positive outlook and energy is there propelling both aspects and bringing something else to the work that wouldn’t be there if it were just me. He’s played on all three of my song albums, shot the Bloody Saturnalia & The Mad Decades covers, and his presence is even there on Häxan — A Soundtrack as the cover is an outtake from the Lean Logic photo shoot. A great person to work with! He’s quite a bit younger than me so it’s interesting to see he’s really into some of the jazzier bass of that 1970’s fusion era, his fretless bass playing is great. Throw that into the almost medieval sound of the Mellotron and organ laced Jester Quantised, and you get something else entirely. But yeah, we had so much fun shooting that video in the South Downs. It was nice to reconnect with my old friend Heidi Heelz too who I collaborated with before many years ago, they brought a hell of a lot to that video, making all our costumes and generally being a very convincing evil medieval assailant!

What did Anna River’s backing vocals add that you hadn’t anticipated?

Anna River is a good friend and an amazing artist whose songs you should check out. If anything I under-used her, she’s just doing that crowd-chant in Jester Quantised along with me where we shout “held by the ankle held by the wrist”. Multitrack her a few times doing this though and the crowd very quickly sounds completely feral and unhinged, so her contribution was perfect for the song. She was learning to play sax when I was recording this album and actually I wanted her to play on Retreat To Barbarism. That never happened in the end but maybe in the future!

Sailors on the Roiling Sea came out eighteen months before this album. What carried over between the two records, and what did you consciously leave behind?

There were a couple of songs on that album that I was less keen on, and I think I wanted to strive a little harder for a completely satisfying album from start to finish this time around. I normally try and give myself a hard deadline with a one-album-per-year output, and in the past this has literally meant rushing songs just to make the deadline. But this time around I took another six months and it was good to have that — I stepped away from the project for a month or so and came back with fresh eyes and ears, and actually whittled it down to eight songs, chucking one that was well on the way along the recording process to the cutting room floor. So it’s a concise album this time around, with hopefully no filler! In terms of what carried over, I am still on my quest to record real instruments and use real recording studios where possible (and where I can afford it!). I’m still really in love with the sound of a real piano or drumkit or Hammond organ, I’m a little tired of the digital world right now. But that might change, I might dive back in at one point.

Does writing about the dehumanising tendencies of contemporary politics offer any relief, or does articulating them just sharpen the anxiety?

It’s a good question, I think maybe actually it tends towards relief for me. It’s a little similar to the theory behind art therapy where if I make something out of all my feelings, I kind of can see it all more clearly there in front of me, and perhaps make sense of it and live with it all a little easier. I don’t know though, that’s just a personal thing, obviously my songs will not stop the bad stuff from happening! But yeah, relief is something I guess it does provide. It can be very cathartic to write a song, music can be your companion in those moments.

The Mad Decades ends as a historical reckoning. Would you want the next record to continue that confrontation, or write toward something else entirely?

I’m talking musically here but once I’d finished Sailors On The Roiling Sea I told myself I’d do something completely different next but I think as I got stuck into writing The Mad Decades I found myself writing in the certain ways that seem to come naturally to me currently, and so that radical change in direction never happened. Also this idea of using real instruments in real studios, you end up with a certain kind of playing I think and therefore a certain style of song. I feel similarly now, that I want the next album to be quite different; but whether it will be or not I have no idea. Things just seem to fall into place for better or worse. In a way I miss the noise and chaos and experimentation of my old band Peepholes, where I’d just use one synth and Kat would be bashing away on the drums and singing through an echo pedal, I’m sort of torn really! There were a couple of tracks on Sailors… that I wasn’t so keen on, so realistically I think there’s a process of wanting to avoid the same mistakes too in this “songwriter” phase that I’m in. In terms of subject matter to write about, it’s probably inevitable that the confrontation aspect you mention will continue, as I want to write songs that reflect the times either personally or on a wider scale. If the world changes then my lyrics will change haha.

Photos courtesy of © Nick Carlisle

Matteo Damiani

Matteo Damiani is an Italian photographer and author. Curator of the sites Retrofuturista.com; weirditaly.com; china-underground.com and others