Los Angeles artist Courtney Nord opens a new chapter in her creative journey with nine-track album wild. She brings together alt-rock grit, emotional vulnerability and cinematic production to put forward a record that feels like a visceral rebirth. Produced in collaboration with longtime partner Adam Avalon, both musicians have pieced together song fragments, demo recordings and previously discarded ideas into a fully-formed record that’s unafraid of embracing imperfection. Ideal for early autumn listeners, those undertones of melancholia underpin wider themes of reckless freedom and surrender. With palpable influences from Mothica to Nirvana, this anthology of songs moves through the phases of love, loss, instability and ultimately renewal; it’s a journey drawn from Nord‘s personal life experience. For On The Record, Courtney Nord unravels how she found beauty in the chaos, discovered power in vulnerability, and put it all into this brilliant new album.
Welcome to Unrecorded! For those who aren’t already familiar with Courtney Nord, can you introduce yourself?
Hello! I’m Courtney, a Los Angeles based music artist! I make music that creates a nostalgic atmosphere and lives within vulnerability and cinematic presence. I pride my music brand on emotional landscapes and conceptual magical imagery.
You’ve just released your new album and the title, wild, could have so many meanings, but what does it mean to you?
This album represents a reclamation of self, a turning back toward uncertainty. Sometimes the tide is so strong that we exhaust ourselves pushing against it, or racing to move faster than others caught in the same currents. wild is about surrender, about letting go, breathing, and trusting the flow.
The imagery for the record is me with my head out the window like a dog. There’s a freedom in that, but first there’s the initial gasp, the rush of air you have to force into your lungs before it becomes release. That’s what this album feels like: chaos that turns into clarity. The big bang that creates an entirety from a void. This state of emotional emergence, where we feel stuck and things get quiet before our own self-discovery volatility spike. Spoken like a trader, but these patters exist in everyday life.
In a literal sense, I was going through so much: transitions, changes, breakthroughs, a breakup. But I’ve always been drawn to challenge. I love change because it opens doorways to things that stagnancy keeps locked away. There’s a Björk lyric I hold close: “the state of emergency is where I want to be.” That inspired me, because wild embodies that same emotional landscape, the beauty of instability, the power of letting life reshape you. The release into the arms of everything to be held by nothing and feel everything in that nothingness. That’s life at its peak creaminess.
The album almost created itself. I didn’t set out to make one; I had no finished songs, just fragments, ideas I thought were discarded. They were like forgotten toys, left in a graveyard of half-finished work, until wild arrived to revive them. The record became a pivot point, breathing life back into what felt lost. The songs all melt together beautifully and almost seemingly intentionally- which just feels magical.
At its core, wild is about revival, surrender, and transformation. It celebrates imperfections, the mundane, and the raw process of becoming.
There’s so much raw emotion throughout the album, so what was the most challenging emotion for you to explore and express on this album?
The rawest emotion in wild is one that is censored in online spaces. Its what holds the glue of everyone together, its what makes life so worth living, we are desensitized to it now. This emotion is related to death, sadness, and suicide. In a world of glossed over plastic perfections we forget to be human. We forget that we are wild. We forget to feel, we numb. It’s at our low points we make key decisions for how our future will look from then on out.
Considering that this record arrived after you are finishing school and a long-term relationship ended, how does it represent transition for you?
Wild is the voice in the back of my head telling me to give grace to the changes. This has looked like pulling away from music for a few months and reassessing how to come back. This has looked like diving into a new journey with my health and my daily wellness routines. Wild, and every other project I have made with the same conviction have served as a marker in my life. I create my music very “method” and live the stories I write in one way or another. I like to have my creativity guide me and let me know how to proceed in various parts of my life.
What was it like working with producer Adam Teller on this project and how did that affect the creative process?
I have worked with Adam for over 3 years on various projects. This one was no different. We didn’t make the songs as one cohesive project wild was an anthology. Each song came in its own way at different times. I also made a few of the songs myself without a co-producer.
Who else, or what other influences, were instrumental in the creation of wild?
My own life experiences help influence some of the songs. Being able to write when I feel depressed helped songs like in memory of… and little miss perfect. Songs like pressure were influenced by people I ran into in my life.
The title-track was inspired by seeing a Led Zeppelin film, so can you describe that moment?
Me and my producer / ex-boyfriend went to go see the Led Zeppelin film on Superbowl Sunday 2025. Both being musicians we felt inspired by the sounds and story of the film then ran off to the studio to create some music. Going to shows and experiencing art tends to inspire me to create.
There’s a personal touch in tracks like ‘little miss perfect’ with a recording of your son’s voice, so is it important to you as a songwriter to stay connected with your day-to-day life?
Keeping my son in the song is a memento. It helps honor the process behind the scenes and immerse the audience into the creation of music as art itself. There is a certain performance art to doing what I did with this album. It has a statement to it and I love that. It says that we need to preserve something as we move forward, something wild.
Elsewhere, you delve into love and infatuation such as in ‘Pressure’. Can you tell us about the story behind that song?
The night I wrote Pressure I was caught up in a crush on someone who had entered my life. In the song, I cast him almost as a godlike figure, someone who seemed to fall from the sky straight into my heart. It speaks to the way we sometimes idealize people and fall in love with the idea of them before truly knowing who they are. Pressure captures that intoxication, filled with small details and impressions of what the connection felt like and who it was inspired by.
It painted the rush of limerence and a wild sense of purity. This person revealed an angle of man I had never seen before. It was both exhilarating and disorienting, like he held my attention by the lungs. I considered several titles, but ultimately chose Pressure because that is what it was, pure tension.
He became a catalyst. Simply knowing that someone like him existed made my own relationship pale in comparison, and that clarity helped solidify my decision to leave.
Following the release of your album, what will be next on the horizon for you?
The horizon is empty and waiting to be filled. I enjoy it that way. For a few years it was project after project and it felt like work. Now I can do what I want and release any commitments and let the art flow naturally. I enjoy this approach. No quota, no rush, no racing to keep up with an algorithm. The people will always be there I just need to find myself again. Find a muse.
You can also listen to title-track ‘wild’ in our Outsiders Club playlist.
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