London siblings Wasia Project (Will Gao and Olivia Hardy) use a close creative partnership to shape Nocturne, a darker debut that examines digital-era disconnection, grief, and longing across intimate late-night songs.
Nocturne centers on loneliness and existential questions in a digitally connected but emotionally distant era.
Will Gao and Olivia Hardy’s sibling relationship creates a unique creative trust that guided the album’s more collaborative, darker sound.
Will Gao and Olivia Hardy frame their relationship as the foundation of their songwriting. They have been making music together since their teens and rely on mutual taste and trust. That trust made it easier for them to work more collaboratively on Nocturne than on previous releases. Their process for this album shifted toward collaging ideas and improvising with production, rather than the older approach of writing primarily together in studio sessions.
They describe their methods plainly: each brings ideas—sometimes nearly finished songs, sometimes fragments—and they stitch those pieces together. Will says he writes like a diary when alone, while Olivia's contribution complements his approach. The recently changed process opened more space for vulnerability because they trusted each other to hold difficult material.
Nocturne is explicitly late-night in mood. Lyrically it traces existential dread, heartbreak, and feelings of not being good enough. Olivia highlights the gulf between curated online personas and deep personal conversation: "Everybody's just looking hot to that Steve Lacy song on their story… but when was the last time I talked to someone about death?"
Standout structure: the final three songs
Both members single out the album's closing sequence as especially intense. "Obviously, I'm not healed, but the final three songs are like being shot three f*ing times," one of them says. They call the order "abominable" for how heavy it lands. The trio of closing tracks compresses the record's themes—loss, longing, mortality—into a concentrated emotional experience.
Personal background and public recognition
Nocturne creates space for difficult but common conversations about loneliness and mortality, particularly for people navigating early adulthood and public life. The album's late-night atmosphere and close-knit songwriting aim to prompt listeners to consider real connection beyond surface-level social media interactions.
Nocturne positions Wasia Project as a duo leaning into the darker edges of adult life and public attention, using a long-standing sibling partnership to write direct, late-night songs about how people fail and try to find closeness in a connected world that often feels solitary.
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