How the post-pandemic era crowned Nicholas Carpenter as an understated king of self-aware, genreless songwriting
2026 marks a half-decade since the world became introspective during COVID-19’s quarantine, sparking the surge of a new generation of bittersweetly thoughtful and genre-free male troubadours.
Zach Bryan, Noah Kahan, Teddy Swims, and Alex Warren head the list.
However, you don’t have to dig too far — sometimes in the same songwriting room — to find the next wave. Among them are currently names like Kashus Culpepper and Patrick Droney. As well, there’s world-renowned singer-songwriter Nicholas Carpenter, aka Medium Build.
Carpenter’s sixth studio album, “King of Having Fun,” arrives on September 4, 2026, from Slowplay / Island Records.
In a world yearning for songs that offer a glass-half-full version of the universe, Carpenter, more than the “King of Having Fun,” is currently the music industry’s understated dean of the “glass-half-empty” school of songwriting.
Say that he’s had the title for at least a decade and few completely realized it, and you’re likely correct.
“King of Having Fun” is a masterful album that revels in the self-aware irony of having a career built on a talent for poking at your own broken heart while its metaphorical stitches are in a perpetual state of healing.
Nashville’s Genreless Legacy: The Rise of Medium Build
Think of Medium Build’s rise as the best example of what Nashville’s broad-swath influence across all facets of music, beyond genre, has yielded.
He’s connected to everyone from Julien Baker, Lewis Capaldi, and Tyler Childers to Dawes, Billie Eilish’s brother, FINNEAS, and the X Ambassadors’ Sam Harris.
"I've been handed life advice..s*** should work out for you mostly,” he sings on his 2025 single “White Male Privilege.”
“My stories aren’t corny because they’re not fake. I was raised by a Midwestern mom who made everything into a mayonnaise-based casserole, and I was raised by a dad who drank instead of talked. And these are just the tales I have,” he said in a 2024 interview about his album “Country.”
Medium Build writes from a “confession-first” mindset that feels like the artistic equivalent of someone making the scientific, logical choice to hit you between the eyes instead of over the head with a ball-peen hammer.
It’s the type of method that metaphorically realizes that the forehead is strong and can withstand heavy force, and the top of the head contains a soft spot that, when born, allows the cranium to pass through the birth canal.
“I wanna starve myself ‘til I’m beautiful / Hey what the f*** is that? / Thought I could fix myself without the dysphoria / Paul heard some philosopher said “hope is fear and fear is hope” / I’m Sisyphus, and you’re the rock I’m pushin’,” he sings on “Armor.”
If he’s hitting us between the eyes, it’s also because, in real time, he’s survived the trauma of the weight of his own success well, hitting him over the head.
The Art of Balance and Becoming: Medium Build’s Recent Journey
His latest album finds him on the back side of both getting sick and being rehabilitated, yet still creating.
The past three years have found him developing into a key collaborative force in the least-anticipated-to-most-wanted surge of Texas-based country rocker Koe Wetzel, becoming a mature representation of the best of what red dirt mayhem sounds like as country radio- and streaming-friendly music.
But he’s also a sensitive storyteller in the vein of Billy Joel and Randy Newman, built from the tender empathy that guided R&B-tinged pop into the comfortable embrace of the adult contemporary lane at the turn of the 1980s.
Nick Carpenter, pka "Medium Build," performs during the 2026 Newport Folk Festival at Fort Adams State Park on July 25, 2026, in Newport, Rhode Island. (Photo by Douglas Mason/Getty Images)
In a 2025 interview with Atwood Magazine, he describes thriving while living between multiple uniquely double-bound realities as less a game of being an indie-to-mainstream success story chasing success like a tortoise eclipsing the hare, and more like, instead, being a sentient pebble in a death match between tire rubber and the open road:
“I caught the car… and then had no clue what to do with it,” he offered.
Imagine being essentially one body being pulled in the equivalent of eight different emotional, mental, physical, and metaphysical directions.
In case you were wondering, in the match between the tire and the pebble, neither matters, and the road actually wins.
On 2024’s “Balance,” Medium Build sings, “Guess I’m tryna find a balance / Between the things I want and the things I need / Between who I was and who I’m tryna be / I guess I’m tryna find a balance / Between the things I kill and the things I grow / Getting way too high, but coming down so low / I guess I’m tryna find a balance in me.”
Stretching Toward Self-Awareness: Medium Build’s Honest Artistry
In 2023, Medium Build told Billboard that his songs and songwriting served a very honest, humane purpose.
“I just have a lot of s*** I’m trying to work out, so I constantly want songs to reflect my own humanity. We can make it hurt more and say something that feels deeper and truer, not just pain for pain’s sake — but pain for freedom, pain for growth, pain like the way that stretching hurts.”
He’s still stretching. That self-work could last forever. On “King of Having Fun,” it’s almost as if he’s achieved a point of evolving around and beyond it.
On “In My Gut,” he sings, “You know, I wonder if I’m the thing we dance around…I might be crucial to the solving.
Being both problematic and problematically self-aware cancels out to simply raw self-awareness.
Poking at your own, still beating, just healed, yet possibly irreparably broken heart is quite the audacious undertaking.
Being willing to believe that the process thrives from a sort of “it’s better me than you” perspective? Yes, for sure: there’s assuredly irony in being the “king” of having that type of fun.