“This Is Called Living” is Nuala’s declaration that presence is a practice, not a destination. Released under STNS, the Leicester-born singer-songwriter takes what could be a motivational cliché and strips it to something with grip, a voice that earned its place in rooms from Glastonbury to sold-out London nights carrying the full weight of the claim.
The center of the song is a refusal to separate the difficult from the alive. Whatever the lyrical architecture, the vocal does the structural work: dynamic without performance, wholesome and combative in the same breath. That double register is where Nuala is most precise. The fiery and the warm don’t cancel each other out here, they are the argument.
Her work as Nu-La in dance contexts, 20 million streams on Toolroom, live runs with tech-house and drum and bass acts, confirms a range that most singer-songwriters keep fenced off. “This Is Called Living” sits on the singer-songwriter side of that range, but its confidence is fed by everything on the other side of the fence.
