After a ”write-off” 2025, NOAHFINNCE is finally back with a new single, MR OVERWHELM. Ahead of his gig with Twenty One Pilots, we caught up to find out about the strains of the past year, getting back in the game, and the meaning behind the new tune. ”Everybody's looking for escape, but to what extent is that healthy?”
The irony isn’t lost on NOAHFINNCE that he’s releasing a song about overwhelm in the middle of one of the worst heatwaves the UK has ever seen. Everyone’s melting, schools are shutting, and the panic’s risen as high as the humidity. The weather’s been a bigger topic of conversation than the Prime Minister resigning, and it’s just another episode of the world’s absurd freefall. It means that, on his forthcoming second album, Noah has a lot to unpack.
“The world, and the news, and day-to-day life has kind of been a sick, prolonged joke that everybody's in on at this point,” he says, sweating in his living room in a sweltering Reading. “So much of the album is about political turmoil, and now Keir Starmer is finally leaving. That’s the irony of writing about the world being an absolute mess!”
To add to this, Noah filmed the video for his new single MR OVERWHELM on the hottest May day on record. Inevitably, it’ll be a mirror for anyone feeling trapped in a prison of horror as the cost of living crisis soars, wars rage and the planet boils. While Noah can separate himself from Mr Overwhelm now, but for a while, they were one and the same, particularly as 2025 proved an immensely difficult year.
“MR OVERWHELM is essentially me when I'm in my most dysregulated, anxious, scared, fearful sense,” he says. “I feel like anybody that isn't scared at the world right now is either lying or just like a little bit delusional. For me, it was just an easy way to write about my experiences and what I was going through, but compartmentalise it into this one character. He doesn't leave the house, but to be fair, it is hot, and I'm still not leaving the house because it's too hot!”
You’ve been away for a while working on new music – whereabouts in the process did MR OVERWHELM come to life?
“2025 was a write-off. I was trying to write stuff, but I was very depressed and not really coming out with my best work. I had an actual rest over Christmas, which I haven't really done for fucking years, and I was like, ‘If I had to encapsulate 2025 in one word, it would just be ‘overwhelmed’. Everything was just way too fucking much, I was constantly vibrating with stress. I looked through my voice memos, and there was one that went ‘It’s time go to bed, Mr Overwhelm.’
“I had a meeting last year with my manager, and he was like, ‘The album has a lot about how much you hate yourself, and maybe we could gear that more towards about the specifics of how you're feeling. Try an American Idiot-style song inspired by how fucked the world is right now.’ After those conversations, I had to figure out why the fuck I was feeling the way I felt.”
On that note, how are you coping with the feeling of dystopia right now?
“Because of how online I've been, and because there were people watching me during my developmental years, I've been living in this weird dystopia for longer than a lot of people have. I’ve never had a normal world. I feel like I'm going insane every single day, and the only thing that makes me feel not as insane is talking to other people about it and creating this little compartmentalised world that doesn't exist, but does exist, and I can control it in whatever way I want.”
“A lot of creative people do that because they want to escape something that's happening in their real world, which is exactly what this whole album is about. I feel like everybody's looking for escape, but that's another thing that the album grapples with - to what extent is it healthy to escape in that way? A lot of what made last year difficult was that all I was doing was trying to escape the world, my head, my responsibilities, and isolating myself. To a certain extent, it was good for me. It allowed my brain to rest, but in another way, but there's only so much escaping you can do before you go crazy for a different reason.”
Sonically, MR OVERWHELM does feel very NOAHFINNCE but is still a bit different too. What motivated that particular direction?
“With the last album, we'd go in for a session, and be like, ‘Okay, we need a song from this, because we need to have the album finished,’ so I would go in and just hope that we came out with something that I liked. With this one, we had loads of time to explore and fuck around. We brought in writers like Emily Phillips, who's like a pop writer who does loads of Rizzle Kicks stuff, and then right, and also [LostAlone’s] Steve Bateille and the guys in As It Is.
“The dreaminess of the piano and the calmness of it lends itself to that dream world that we're trying to create. Obviously, the chorus is fat as fuck and going from the cute piano stuff straight to that is exactly what being overwhelmed feels like for me. The way I write, I want it to sound how it feels in my head, the quietness and loudness is the ADHD and the autism beating each other the fuck up!”
You’ve been very open about the struggles of the rising costs of touring and you recently got some funding from the UK Artist Touring Fund to jkeep you on the road. Why was that so important for you to talk about?
“I feel like I will combust if I don't just say exactly how I feel. A lot of people seem to think that artists are greedy rather than the fact that everything is getting insanely more expensive. I've always been incredibly lucky that I've been able to afford to tour, because I've had YouTube and the social media stuff as well. But I just think it's a lot harder to struggle with that kind of thing when you're not really speaking about it and the only people that you can really speak to about it are other artists. I think the idea of bottling that up would probably make me a little bit resentful when anybody makes a slightly ignorant comment like, ‘He's getting so much money from doing VIP.’ It's really important that people understand that a lot of the reasons that their favourite artists will be doing VIPs because if they don't do that they won't be able to afford to tour, so I think it doesn't do anybody a disservice whatsoever to just be open and honest about what's going on with the industry.”
How much has that been compounded by the fact you’re now unable to tour the U.S. right now due to Trump’s anti-trans visa policies ?
“Being able to tour the U.S. was always the highlight of my year, both in terms of numbers and connection and career growth. Trump doubled the prices of visas as soon as he came in and made it increasingly hard for anybody that said anything anti-Trump to actually get a visa, but I think the hardest bit for me was the reason that I can't go over there is literally just because I'm trans. I've never had a problem getting a visa like any other time. It really fucked my head for a while and it made everything so much harder. It’s taken away half of my job, and my job is doing something that I love, so it’s just taken things completely out of my control.”
It’s been just over a year since you last played live and it’ll have been 15 months by the time you come back to play as part of Twenty One Pilots’ day at All Points East. What’s it been like to not have live shows in your life for such a long time?
“It’s weird that it’s been so long and an insane amount of stuff has changed, but I'm really looking forward to playing the new songs, because I feel like they'll be really, really good live. Since I last played a show, I've broken my ankle, I've kicked my toenail off, I broke my toe, I’m kind of dreading the idea of having to run around only because I haven't done it in so long, but I am so fucking excited to play All Points East.
“The last year has been so fucking weird, and because I've been working so much, I haven't been posting as much, so there hasn't been that connection as well. But literally, just since I've started like promoting the new stuff, I've realised there are real people that are actually excited for this, which makes me more excited.”
MR OVERWHELM is out now. NOAHFINNCE plays All Points East with Twenty One Pilots on August 30.
