Meet Indie-Folk's Next Star: Hazlett on His New Album, Opening for Noah Kahan at Hyde Park and More

A quick scroll through Hazlett's socials will tell you that he's somewhat of a coffee connoisseur.

Interspersed with announcements of his 2025 world tour and clips of his new album, last night you said you missed me, you'll see cosy shots of the folk maverick passing the time in coffee shops, occasionally accompanied by a tempting slice of cake.

In a strange way, Hazlett's beloved flat white captures the spirit that underpins his forthcoming record, which arrives on September 12th. When that first sip touches your lips, there's something comforting, soothing and also fondly familiar about the taste. Yet also bubbling underneath is a faint, caffeinated buzz of anxiety, and you start to wonder if it is even possible to have one without the other.

This tension between despair and hopefulness is one of the many fascinating dualities that permeate last night you said you miss me. Where there is heartbreak, there are glimmers of hope that a brighter day is around the corner, and where there is bold certainty and assuredness, crippling self-doubt lurks closely behind.

It serves as the indie-folk singer-songwriter's keenly awaited sophomore album, following the acclaimed Bloom Mountain in 2023 and a smattering of successful EPs.

The atmospheric, layered textures of ‘mountains of a memory’ and ‘fast like you’ bring to mind early Bon Iver, while the visceral vulnerability of ‘tell me something’ and ‘i don't want your garden’ draw more from the space occupied by Noah Kahan.

While in London opening for Kahan at BST Hyde Park, Hazlett sits down with Holler to delve into his journey so far, his creative process and his eagerly anticipated new album.

Remarkably, despite formerly calling London home, he had never been inside Hyde Park until this day, “It was crazy. I briefly lived in London for a little bit, and I never stepped foot in Hyde Park. So my very first time stepping into Hyde Park was today, to play for 65,000 people. It's not lost on me how big it is. I'm not much of a ‘stop and smell the roses’ kind of person, but I think today I'll make an exception and have a glass of wine and pat myself on the back. It's not my ‘I made it’ moment, but it's a little milestone in my life that I won't forget anytime soon”.

Through Hazlett's stellar, captivating Hyde Park set, which features a blend of new material from last night you said you missed me and earlier fan-favourites, such as ‘Blame the Moon’ and ‘Old Salt’, he cements his status as indie-folk's next-big-thing.

While some of the genre's prominent figures are often accused of wallowing and indulging in their despondence, Hazlett makes a concerted effort throughout his discography to offer listeners chinks of light - even if he cannot see them himself.

“I'm naturally like that quote, ‘I'd much rather help someone out sort their own problems than sort out my own problems’”, Hazlett muses, “It's self-sabotage sometimes, but...that's the way I'm wired, which is the way that I then communicate when writing songs. You'll see a line that's very niche, and you're like, ‘What? What on earth does that mean?’ But then I like trying to open that line up to also be a mirror to hold up in front of someone, so they can see themselves in it”.

He expands, “I like trying to find threads between my own niche problems and what someone else might feel around this situation...I think maybe it's the helper in me that wants to help people. I write about my life, and then see how it might relate to others”.

There's a striking metaphor in ‘doing my best’, the lead single from the album and the cornerstone of the project, where Hazlett uses another hot drink to convey his growth.

The ‘Old Salt’ crooner reflects, “There's a line [in ‘doing my best’], “Cold cup, warm stay / Growing up and learn to make tea”. It seems like a random lyric, but it's also about how I moved overseas when I was very young, and have been finding my way and living by myself a lot overseas. I never liked tea until I started trying to take better care of myself. I was like, ‘I'm going to learn how to make tea one day’. It's actually a very literal line, and not as metaphoric as it may look on the outside”.

Throughout the record, Hazlett persistently zooms in and out, providing listeners with granular specificity, before dialling back and giving vaguer, more enigmatic vignettes. It's an album of contrasts - between the personal and the universal, between light and shade, between ease and agitation, between regret and nostalgia.

Not only does this radiate through the sonic architecture of last night you said you missed me, which flits from hazy and ambient to intensely lucid, but also through the narratives.

On ‘blue jean’, Hazlett requests, “Go, but don't leave me / Take problems over easy / Hard times feel like home / Hug the lightning”, while on ‘doing my best’, he delivers another piece of juxtaposition, “I know what you liked / But don't know what you like”.

“When I start writing for a project”, he muses, “I do this thing called ‘checking in with my creativity’. In-between albums, or when something hasn't been written, I'll pick up my guitar every now and then and have a bit of a play. I might feel like nothing's really coming to me. Then some days, I might pick it up, and a song falls out”.

He goes on to cite ‘doing my best’ as the key that ultimately unlocked last night you said you missed me, “Then, when putting an album together, I always look for what I call ‘the Sun Song’ that the solar system revolves around. So I write until I find a song that feels like that. I think the album then takes shape around that. I like to pull a lot of guitar sounds and pad sounds from that one Sun Song and put it into the other songs, and make everything feel cohesive. Like they're all part of the same solar system. It's the same with lyrics and themes. For my first album, ‘Please Don't Be’ was the Sun Song that everything fell around. On my last album, it was ‘Blame the Moon’. For this album, it was ‘doing my best’. You hit that song, and it's like, ‘Okay, now I know what everything needs to orbit around’”.

It was from this point that Hazlett developed the overarching style that would colour last night you said you missed me, which would be at least partly driven by his determination to balance his more melancholic hues with brighter splashes of paint.

“I don't think I've ever written a song that's completely sad”, he outlines, “I get the ‘Sad Boy Music’ label and comparisons with Noah Kahan. But for any song I've written, usually I've gone through something and got to the end of it. So I'm it's looking back, writing about it and seeing what the silver lining was. I think there's a lot of nostalgia and weight to these songs, and nostalgia sometimes has that icky feeling of sadness for some people. But I think nostalgia is not necessarily a sad feeling. For me, it's all lingering, and putting as many silver linings in songs as possible. Like, ‘Here's a path out’ or ‘Here's light at the end of the tunnel’”.

Even so, there were some songs on the album - such as the yearning ‘tell me something’ - that made him question whether there were some unresolved feelings and issues that needed to be addressed, “For a lot of this album, I went in with a feeling, and I wrote on autopilot. It wasn't until listening back to a lot of the songs that I realised the weight of some of them”. He reflects, “I went through a breakup last year, and it was a very long-term relationship that ended. So ‘tell me something’ was the release of something ending, and you try and hold on for as long as possible - which is what the line, ‘Tell me something, something I won't believe’ comes from. You want to tell each other it's going to be alright, but maybe it isn't, at the end of the day, and that's okay. You've just got to keep moving forward. So, yeah, ‘tell me something’ was a heavy song, but I didn't realise it was that heavy until I heard a mix back from it. I was like, ‘Oh, I might have been going through something that I hadn't quite processed just yet’”.

This level of self-awareness is what makes last night you said you missed me so enchanting, with Hazlett acknowledging his flaws, insecurities and worries, while clinging onto the belief that it will get better. He's “kinda upset”, but hey, he's doing his best.

“I think it comes with the silver lining thing and also the nostalgia thing”, he concludes, “I know you have to see bad stuff, but I want to see good stuff. Life can't be all butterflies and rainbows. I like looking at two sides of the coin constantly, because I think it's the only way you get perspective. Otherwise you're living in a echo chamber with a bunch of people that think the same as you, and you're always going to hear the same thing back. If you're looking at two sides, you're going to get to a more rational or reasonable explanation as to why things happen”.

On this album, there are times when you feel like you're sat across from Hazlett in one of his snug, cushioned coffee shops as he calmly confesses some of his concerns and fears, and there are others where you are suddenly transported to a cliff's edge, with the protagonist baring his soul as he bellows mournfully into the abyss.

But no matter how hairy it gets as he takes you on this emotional voyage, he'll always bring you back to the solace of that coffee shop, and by the time you reach the final drop of that flat white, you feel a little lighter - and perhaps even a little healed.

Hazlett's new song, ‘i don't want your garden’, arrives on Friday, August 8th. His sophomore album, last night you said you missed me, is out on September 12th, 2025.

For more on Hazlett, see below: