Arthouse, the debut album from Eurovision 2024 winner and history-maker Nemo, sees the 26-year-old at the centre of a party. It’s the sort of party where attendees are drinking “all kinds of syrups” in their cocktails and “everyone gets to be themselves”.
On “God’s A Raver”, over jubilant, Scissor Sisters-lite piano, Nemo – born Nemo Mettler, in Biel, Switzerland – trills: “If there’s a God, we just met at the gay bar. She is a raver just like me!” Partying is again a holy practice on the whimsical, glam-pop stomper “Ride My Baby”: “The universe is a club, and I’m convinced that you’re God.”
But Nemo’s partying is conscientious partying; inside the arthouse, the news is on. The world is “cruel”, they declare on oddball new wave-inspired rap song “Frog Swamp”, and on the title track, they spit wearily: “I believe this world deserves a f**king better time.” Nemo’s hedonism is peppered with existential dread.
“I’m so glad you pointed that out,” Nemo says, speaking on Zoom from their new home city, Paris. Their hair is a shock of brown curls and their eyes are bright, blue marbles. They pause, jumping out of their seat to answer the door to a delivery driver. “Um… because… I got a matcha!” They bound back into view, all puppyish charisma. “Woo! Yay.”
“That’s exactly the contrast I think that this album lives in,” they continue. “I have my reality and I have my idea of the world and then this is living in the backdrop of the grander world, that is going through a f**king crazy time right now.” A close friend put it best, they say: “This album is hopeful and joyful without being ignorant. I think that’s how I am as a person as well.”
Nemo is acutely aware of the tension between euphoric pop music and the dystopian world at large. In 2024, they won the Eurovision Song Contest for Switzerland, becoming the first non-binary artist to do so. Their entry “The Code”, a soaring, brain-frying blend of opera, rap and drum-and-bass about accepting their gender identity became a top 10 hit in 10 countries, and has amassed more than 100 million streams on Spotify.
Yet the groundbreaking win was bittersweet, with 2024 becoming arguably the most contentious year in Eurovision history. The contest experienced mass boycotts for allowing Israel to compete amid its military action in Gaza. The Israeli delegates faced formal complaints from other delegations over their behaviour. The Netherlands’ act Joost Klein was disqualified. After winning, Nemo revealed they had been banned from bringing a non-binary flag onto the finale stage (they did so anyway). Eurovision 2024 was headline news, often for the wrong reasons.
Nemo has since called for Israel to be excluded from Eurovision, and has condemned the organisers for effectively banning Pride flags from Eurovision events. Today though, they highlight the ample amount they learnt during that frenzied period, such as how much Eurovision “meant to different people” and how it shaped “interconnectivity in Europe”. The contest, with all of its highs, lows, chaos and craziness, also taught them resilience.
“I’ve learned so much about the world and about myself both in the last 18 months. I think this experience has, like, forced me to grow in a lot of ways, you know? I was being thrown into cold water out of nowhere and that’s the best way to learn how to swim. Every situation and every challenge was forcing me to become a bit bigger and to grow,” they say.
It’s incomparable to the global Eurovision stage, but Nemo was accustomed to the glaring spotlight back in Switzerland. They started rapping as a teenager, having already learnt opera, violin and piano as a child, and became well known for participating in rap battles in the 2010s. Their 2017 single “Du” was a top five hit, and that year, they won five Swiss Music Awards.
Gaining notoriety at a young age came with its drawbacks, especially as the musician didn’t yet understand their musical or gender identity. “I had no clue who I was,” they say, but “there was already an image of me.”
“Rap was a bit, like, performative for me in a way, and then people are reacting to that and telling you who you are through [their] reaction. It’s like a feedback loop.”
The experience prepared them a little for the intense public scrutiny they endured during Eurovision and for “what it means to be a public idea,” particularly as a gender non-conforming person. The complexity inspired “Unexplainable”, a sparse soft-rock dirge that swells with a wail into glam-rock histrionics. It stands out starkly among the rest of Arthouse’s eclectic funk and electroclash, and we speak at length about its beginnings and multi-layered meaning.
It was one of the first new songs Nemo wrote for Arthouse back in January this year – before ultimately performing it at the Eurovision 2025 final – but they initially kept it secret. “There’s these songs that you don’t really want to show anyone because you feel like you’re revealing so much about yourself.” They were overhead singing it on piano during a studio session break, and convinced to build it into a complete work.
At its core, “Unexplainable” is about “the contrast between dreams and reality,” Nemo shares. “The subconscious can sometimes reveal way more than we think, and waking up from dreams I’ve had over the course of months and years where I, in my dream, see myself as a woman and I’m not questioning that in any way, because I’m not even conscious that there’s anything to question or analyse.” Waking up from the dreams, the real-life context of them hit hard, “but in the dream, it feels so free”.
In the real world, people want solid answers, definitions, boxes. If they aren’t content with how you explain your identity, they disparage it. “Can a feeling be a lie?” Nemo coos on verse one, quietly responding. “There’s people that don’t accept you for you. There’s people that don’t even acknowledge that you exist in a sense,” they muse. “I think that’s what is making it so hard to feel like you’re explainable to the world.”
It’s been two years since the musician came out publicly; do they feel comfortable enough in themself now to not have to explain their identity? “I don’t really feel that much pressure to be anything [other] than what feels right to me,” they say, but stress it’s not a black and white experience. “I wish that people would understand me more. I wish that I felt more understood by the world. Then in other ways I feel understood by so many people and you can’t be understood by everyone, you know?”
Nemo has gratitude that they are surrounded by people who do understand them. They too spend life trying to understand others’ perspectives and experiences. It bums them out that so often, others don’t do the same. “When people don’t put an effort into understanding anything because they don’t have to, you have the privilege of not having to understand anything, and then you just choose to ignore it or, worst case, even to go against it. That makes me sad definitely. I wish that wasn’t like that.” Nemo has such inherently smiley energy that even notes of sadness are delivered with a toothy half smile.
I was intrigued by the genesis of “Unexplainable”, but all of this chat makes Arthouse sound remarkably serious. It’s not; it’s one of the most spirited albums of the year. The soundscape is varied and interesting, with Panic! At The Disco and Twenty One Pilots verve melding with the lyrical whimsy of Brits Lily Allen and Mika.
“Oh, so Mika’s now British?” Nemo laughs playfully, eyebrow raised, when I voice this. “I think Mika is being claimed by a few countries… That’s funny because he was born in Lebanon and raised in Paris and London, so everyone’s kind of right.”
I don’t need to look it up for confirmation. This is the star who became a superstar on the stage that famously, or infamously, combines music and geopolitics. I think Nemo knows what they’re talking about.
Arthouse is out now.
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