By the time Noah Hill and I speak, he has already spent a few days slowing down by Lake Como. Now he is back in Milan, a rental car returned, soundcheck approaching, and a gig waiting for him later that evening. “I’m pretty both — relaxed and stressed at the same time,” he says. “Life is just busy. It’s a busy vibe.”
Since he’s in Milan, I thought it would be nice to introduce him to a phrase my very good friend taught me: la vita lenta, the slow life. He likes the sound of it, and after a few days by Lake Como, he has had a brief taste of what it might mean. In a couple of days, he will be in Greece, hoping to settle into it properly.
It feels like an apt place to begin a conversation about Ok ok now, his debut album as a solo artist, due 4 September via Because Music. The record has been two years in the making, with some of its songs reaching back almost a decade. It traces the fragments of a relationship across different periods of Hill’s life, moving between first love, separation, memory and the gradual understanding of why something can matter deeply and still come to an end.
Hill didn’t initially intend to make a record about one person. “I was sort of dancing around it a little bit,” he says, allowing it to be “a heartbreak album about sort of nothing in particular”. The turning point came when he began incorporating old voice recordings of his former partner into the record. He contacted her to ask permission.
“I was like, ‘Hey, am I able to use these voice recordings? I’m making this record about you. Is that fine for you?’” She gave him her blessing. For Hill, the exchange became part of the process of moving through the relationship. “It was nice and beautiful because she was able to give me her blessing for that,” he says. “It was a way for us to both move through it as well.”
That sense of movement is central to Ok ok now. The songs were written at different ages and in different places, including back porches and hotel rooms, and Hill says he found an unexpected continuity between them. “There’s this through line when someone just writes everything themselves and does it all themselves. I think there’s an undefined, ineffable, like, me in it.”
The album’s fragmented structure comes directly from the relationship itself. Hill and his former partner had known each other since they were six, eventually getting together at 20. Distance became part of their story, with Hill living in Berlin and touring while she remained in Australia.
“It was this, like, hazy picture of love and romance,” he says. “When I think about a lot of that time, I get these little glimpses of, like, light and love and, like, beaches and sand and, like, intimacy.”
Those glimpses are how he understands memory, too. “You never, like, see it clearly. You just get these, like, maybe senses and smells and sensations, but you don’t really get the whole thing. So I guess I was trying to recreate that more than anything.”
Hill is conscious of how easily memory can reshape a relationship after it ends. “We either look at them with sort of, like, rose-coloured glasses on, or we look at them as if they were, like, a total disaster and everything was wrong with it,” he says. “When probably neither of those things are true, and it’s always somewhere in the middle.”
His own memories became complicated by loneliness and heartbreak. “I did that a lot — always thinking that the relationship was sort of better than it was,” he says. “You question yourself quite a lot in that.”
That uncertainty eventually led him to reconsider what makes a relationship sustainable. The romance of the relationship had a mythology attached to it: two people who had known each other since childhood, eventually finding their way together. “It seemed like we should be together,” Hill says. “We felt like soulmates in a way.”
The everyday reality was more difficult. “We were very different energetically, wanting quite different things, different capacities. There was a lot of just tension in the day-to-day.”
The experience changed his thinking about chemistry and compatibility. For a long time, Hill considered compatibility almost irrelevant. “I was like, ‘Screw compatibility.’ You’re just deciding whether you love someone or not, and it’s a choice that you make.”
The relationship taught him to reconsider that. “Maybe, yeah, love isn’t enough, and compatibility is an important factor for two humans spending their lives together.”
He is still searching for the balance. “There’s got to be some passion and romance there as well,” he says. “Probably somewhere in the middle of compatibility and chemistry, because if it leans too much into compatibility, be mates. If it’s chemistry, it could be a disaster.”
That uncertainty carries into his songwriting. Hill wanted the lyrics on Ok ok now to be direct, stripping away the metaphors he felt could obscure the feeling underneath. “We can hide behind our words a lot of the time,” he says. “We’ll dress it up, or we’ll put a metaphor, or a simile, and we’ll make it sound poetic in a way to, I think sometimes, hide our true feelings.”
So he decided to say things plainly. “Fuck it, I don’t care, I’m just gonna say it and see if people resonate.”
That approach also shaped the way he made the record. Hill played most of the instruments and mixed the album himself, even leaving in moments where his playing is imperfect. “There’s a naivety and a childlike intimacy that comes through inside of that,” he says. “If I had got some friends of mine who were just amazing musicians to play on it, and I created this perfect album, it would feel further and further away from me.”
Bye Baby, the album’s second single, arrived towards the end of the process. Hill had carried its guitar chords for years, returning to them whenever he picked up a guitar. As the studio sessions approached, he realised something was missing.
“I didn’t quite have the thing that defines the meaning of the record,” he says. “That sort of exasperated resignation feeling of really saying goodbye.”
He wrote and recorded it just days before entering the studio. “It was sort of like the final, final piece of the puzzle.”
The accompanying video, directed by Cai Leplaw, brings that emotional tension into a domestic setting, using dancers to explore the intimacy of everyday life. Making the bed, preparing breakfast, moving through a shared home: the small rituals that can make two people feel connected. Hill describes it as “fighting and loving and fighting and loving” through the same domestic landscape.
Now, with the album finished, Hill is beginning to loosen his grip on it. “I’m actually preparing to enter a new phase of my life,” he says. He is seeing someone new, thinking about a new home and looking forward to writing from somewhere different.
Click here to presave debut album
“I’m ready to give it away, I would say,” he says of the album. “They can make it what they want it to be, and they can resonate with it.”
For someone who has spent two years living inside the memories that became Ok ok now, letting other people have them might be the final stage of the process. Hill is already thinking about what comes after: new songs, a possible solo tour, and a home from which to begin writing again.
“I’m excited about building a new life that is separate to this,” he says. “A place of healing and positivity for the future.”
