Medium Build

Medium Build is the project of Nick Carpenter, a songwriter who has spent the better part of a decade turning self-examination into something you can sing along to. The name came up around ten years ago, when Carpenter was just 22 and slipping out of Nashville, looking for a place to hide. Releasing songs under his own name never quite fit, so he borrowed an old joke he'd had with an ex and built a whole identity around it. That instinct, to take something private and slightly uncomfortable and make it warm and shared, still defines everything he does.

His story runs between two poles. Carpenter has Southern roots and a connection to Georgia, but Alaska is where Medium Build truly came to life. After his brother moved to Anchorage and Carpenter spent a winter there at 18, the place got into his blood, and he kept coming back until it became his spiritual home base. He grew into a beloved fixture of the Anchorage scene before splitting his time with Nashville, and that dual citizenship, half far-north outsider and half Music City craftsman, gives his work its particular flavor: intimate and unguarded, but built with real songwriting discipline.

The music itself is a genuine hybrid. Carpenter folds the vocal texture of R&B singers into the emotional bigness of emo and the clean construction of country songwriting, and the result lands somewhere all its own. He is open about who he is as a queer artist, and that honesty runs straight through the songs. On the album takeaways, that range is on full display. R3verse and the pointed, self-aware White Male Privilege show a writer willing to turn the lens on himself without flinching, while the standalone single Rage channels that same candor into something cathartic and loud. Tracks like Last Time and Crying Over U lean into the ache of his ballad side, the R&B-tinged vulnerability that makes his quieter moments hit so hard.

takeaways works as a kind of living collection, gathering new songs alongside reimagined pieces from earlier chapters of his catalog, so it doubles as both a fresh statement and a tour through where he's been. It arrives in the wake of Country, his deeply vulnerable folk rock record from 2024, a high-water mark of unfiltered writing that helped widen his audience well past Alaska.

That audience has been earned the hard way and the right way: through songs, through the road, through showing up. Carpenter has shared stages with artists like Holly Humberstone, Finneas, and Lewis Capaldi, and it's easy to hear why he fits in that company. He writes the kind of plainspoken, emotionally direct material that translates to a room of strangers. Medium Build is worth hearing because the project never hides behind its cleverness. Underneath the wit and the genre-blurring is a songwriter genuinely trying to figure himself out, and inviting you to come along while he does it.