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When MagNorth caught up with NoSo recently to talk about their latest album 'When are you leaving?' - and upcoming European tour, they were at home in Los Angeles - speaking over Zoom with the kind of openness and thoughtfulness that mirrors their music. Despite the physical distance, our conversation was honest: reflective, unhurried, and grounded in questions of identity, process, and connection.
NoSo is a Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter whose music sits somewhere between indie-pop, alternative folk, and something harder to define - emotionally rich songs that favour nuance over neat conclusions. Over the past few years, their work has built a devoted following on both sides of the Atlantic, with listeners drawn to its honesty, intimacy, and quiet intensity. With a new album in progress and a European tour underway, NoSo arrives in Manchester at a moment of key creative momentum.
There’s something quietly radical about refusing to choose a side.
For NoSo, that refusal begins with a name - one born from a childhood spent fielding casual but loaded questions. Growing up Korean in a predominantly white town in the United States, they were often asked where they were “from”. More specifically: North or South?
Rather than continuing to answer it, NoSo - encouraged by their dad - dissolved the binary altogether. NoSo. An acronym, yes. But also a statement: an insistence on existing between categories, borders, and easy resolutions.
It’s a fitting name for an artist whose music thrives in emotional grey areas. NoSo’s songs are intimate without being confessional, restless without being chaotic, and deeply personal without oversharing. They don’t rush toward closure; they sit inside uncertainty, allowing ambiguity to do its work.
That sensibility runs through everything - their songwriting, their live performances, even the way they talk about creativity itself.
Listening to NoSo’s music can feel like witnessing discovery in real time. Songs unfold rather than announce themselves; emotions surface gradually, sometimes seeming to contradict one another as they go.
Sometimes, NoSo begins writing with a clear emotional weight - something unresolved and pressing. Other times, the feeling only reveals itself as the sound takes shape.
“I think it feels restless in a lot of ways because I’m trying to discover something at the same time while writing it.”
That restlessness isn’t a flaw - it’s the point. It allows songs to remain open, alive, and changeable, both for the artist and for the audience.
Take Sugar, a song that is dark in subject matter but euphoric in motion. On record, it feels unsettling; on stage, it becomes a moment of collective release. It’s now a show-closer, greeted with dancing, excitement, and a strange sense of joy - something that has reshaped NoSo’s own relationship with the song.
Watching audiences respond so viscerally has added new dimensions to its meaning. For NoSo, that tension - between content and feeling, darkness and delight - is where music becomes most interesting.
Touring occupies a similarly paradoxical space. It’s physically demanding, emotionally intense, and relentless in its pace - and yet, it’s where NoSo feels most renewed.
“I still enjoy every show… I think it will always rejuvenate me.”
Live performance offers something that the writing room can’t: shared experience. The emotional arc of a gig - from soundcheck to the moment the crowd disperses - mirrors the journey of an album itself. Intimacy builds, tension rises, and release arrives not as neat resolution, but as something collective.
The quieter moments, in particular, hold a special weight. When it’s just NoSo on stage, without the band, the atmosphere shifts. Those songs feel exposed and deeply personal - not performances at an audience, but moments held with them.
This emphasis on shared emotional space is one reason Manchester feels like a natural stop on NoSo’s European tour.
Returning to the city - and to Band on the Wall, a venue steeped in musical history - carries weight. Manchester has long been a place where music, identity, politics, and class collide; where sound has served as both expression and resistance.
For MagNorth, Band on the Wall is a venue that matters. Last year, we visited the space to spend time with the team, learning more about the organisation’s community work, its commitment to accessibility, and its role in nurturing artists at every stage of their journey. It’s not just a room with a stage - it’s a cultural institution rooted in care, independence, and connection.
That ethos aligns closely with NoSo’s own approach.
They’re conscious of Manchester’s musical legacy, but also of the city’s spirit.
Speaking of their previous visit: “The culture was really interesting. The people were really cool.”
Band on the Wall feels like the right setting for an artist whose work values intimacy over spectacle - a venue where emotional nuance matters, and where songs that live in uncertainty are allowed to breathe.
It might just be me...but there’s something quietly poetic here, too. A publication shaped by its own relationship to place and identity, covering an artist whose very name emerged from resisting the pull of North-versus-South thinking - meeting in a city long defined by its own productive tensions.
Despite the emotional openness of the music, NoSo’s creative process is carefully structured.
Albums grow organically in terms of subject matter, but the daily work is regimented: learning new instruments, setting timers, switching tools when inspiration stalls. Discipline, they’ve learned, doesn’t stifle creativity - it creates the conditions for it.
At the same time, balance is essential. Creativity can be isolating, and knowing when to step away - to go outside, see someone, live a little - is part of sustaining the work.
That philosophy extends beyond music. Asked what advice they’d give to young people struggling to process difficult emotions without a creative outlet, NoSo’s response is grounded and generous: find any way to channel it. Write badly. Move your body. Get it out.
It doesn’t have to be beautiful. It just has to be honest.
As NoSo works on their next album, reading has become a quiet companion - particularly short story collections, whose structures subtly inform their songwriting. There’s no grand concept yet, no declared influence. Just curiosity, routine, and attentiveness.
Perhaps that’s the point.
Five years ago, NoSo was playing to near-empty rooms, wondering if anyone would listen. Today, they’re crossing borders, building communities, and finding connection far from where the question North or South? was first asked.
What remains constant is the refusal to simplify - to flatten identity, emotion, or experience into something easily explained.
NoSo exists in the in-between. And in a world that so often demands certainty and sides, that may be the most honest place to stand.
At MagNorth, we’re interested in stories that allow space - for complexity, for uncertainty, and for the quieter emotional truths that don’t always fit neatly into headlines.
We don’t believe you need to already know an artist, a writer, or a place for a story to matter. What matters is whether it offers recognition, reflection, or a sense of shared experience. Pieces like this aren’t about keeping up; they’re about slowing down.
NoSo’s music - and their way of speaking about identity, creativity, and community - resonated deeply with us for that reason. It lives in the grey areas, resists easy answers, and trusts the listener to sit with what’s unresolved.
That’s the kind of work we want to make space for here.
NoSo is at Band on the Wall on Thursday Februray 19 2026. For tickets CLICK HERE
For Tour Info CLICK HERE
Header Image: NoSo - Nara. Image: Driely Carter
