“Never give up on your dreams” is the biggest cliché in the book. It’s the rote advice every talk show guest gives to all the young people watching at home; it’s the yearbook quote from the kid who didn’t know what else to put under their picture. What happens when your dream isn’t all it’s cracked up to be? When you’ve shot for the stars, and ended up squarely in the gutter? Do you keep pursuing something that is causing you harm, or do you suck it up and find a new dream to carry you through life?

These were the questions running through Nicole Fermie’s mind as she pressed send on a very important email back in 2022, addressed to Simon Raymonde, the head of Bella Union Records. After finding a modicum of success as the leader of an indie band in the 2010s, she had taken 10 years away from the industry after a period of relentless burnout. She had slowly begun songwriting again, and her new band, LuxJury, which she had just formed with drummer Howey Gill and bassist Nathan Ridley, had just recorded their first EP. Nicole felt like sending it to the label was a final Hail Mary on her career as a musician, one last message in a bottle thrown out to sea. If nothing came of it, she would pack it all up. 

“I didn't send the EP to any other record label other than Bella Union,” explains Nicole. “It was more of a, ‘If this thing goes, then maybe we're onto something,’ kind of thing.  And if not, then maybe I'm going to close this chapter and give up and stop making music—this eternal financial sieve in my life, this mistress that doesn't give back. So, LuxJury was born on the verge of me reconnecting with music but being willing to give it up at the same time.”

Spoiler alert: based on that EP, LuxJury got signed. “It was really wild,” beams Nicole. “Getting signed put shape around something that had always been completely nebulous. I didn't really think beyond the point of sending the email, and to get that excitement back was incredible. Plus, it gave us the momentum to finish the album.” The album’s name? Giving Up.

Once you know the backstory, it’s not surprising that Nicole was seriously considering her life’s trajectory at the time she sent that pivotal message. Since quitting her previous band, she had come out as queer, and her songwriting style had changed—now she was culling from brand new experiences around love, gender and sexuality that she couldn’t have fathomed before. 

“I had lived the life of a musician on the breadline,” she explains emphatically. “I was dating the drummer in the band. We broke up. I realized I was queer, fell in love with a woman, and took a break from music for 10 years because I felt like everything I'd written thus far had been completely disingenuous, because I had this whole other side of my life that I hadn't lived. I came back to music with something to say.”

On the surface, many of the songs on Giving Up are about romantic relationships—their joyful beginnings and rock-bottom heartbreaks. But beyond that, they’re about finding oneself, digging deep to excavate the true meaning of one’s identity. As a queer woman, Nicole discovered aspects of herself through connecting to others, and those truths are the fuel that propel the album forward. These are songs specifically about how queer people love, and how that can be a mirror for the rest of the world—not the other way around.

“The underlying current on this album is definitely what it's like to have relationships with an undertone of social precarity,” says Nicole. “Nothing is scripted. Nothing is written. There's a weird trust system that isn't anything close to what I’d experienced in heterosexual relationships. And furthermore, there’s just something about getting off the conveyor belt, so to speak. Society wants to support you if you make money, have babies and keep propping up the economy, right? So there's that pressure, and once you come out and are okay with letting go of that, you're open to challenging everything. You're open to challenge the way that you have relationships with people in general—friendships, people you sleep with, people you don't sleep with. The biggest undercurrent on this album is that letting go of societal pressure.”

Nothing says “letting go of societal pressure” like diving headfirst into polyamory—which is the subject of Giving Up’s opening track and lead single, “Poly-Amerie”. Set against sweeping strings and forceful, dynamic guitars, the song tells the story of a love triangle, three women who are trying to be romantically open while keeping their jealousy at bay. “The song is about the differences in the ways that men and women navigate relationships,” says Nicole. “In WLW relationships, it can sometimes feel like we never break up—there's this sort of weird, deep bond that women create with each other, where even if they’ve come to hate each other it’s still this long and drawn-out separation.” “Poly-Amerie” is about discovering the long and drawn-out breakups that I'd never had with men, where the cut was pretty clean.” “Poly-Amerie” was one of the first tracks Nicole wrote with LuxJury, her first foray into queer storytelling, and as such perfectly sets the tone of the album. 

The record’s second lead track, “Hot Mess”, is a liltingly groovy slice of yacht-rock-adjacent indie that would sound at home floating from a car stereo cruising down the Pacific Coast Highway. It’s also about a specifically queer romantic experience: the sensation of reliving your passionate teenage years as a result of rediscovering your sexuality as an adult. “You completely compromise on any sort of self-care and are willing to be a complete doormat for the sake of that first queer love you experience later in life,” explains Nicole, “where you're like, ‘I'm going for this with everything I’ve got.’”

Closing out this trifecta is “I Could Love You”, possibly Giving Up’s most introspective offering. Nicole openly admits that she finds the song hard to talk about, the sonic equivalent of a good, hard look in the mirror. “It was the first time that I ever embodied a side of myself that was not very good, that I wasn’t proud of,” she says candidly. “I always talk about how women are caring, but “I Could Love You” is about how women can be cruel—I had fallen out of love and didn't know how to get out of it and was getting really embittered and resentful of the person who was making me feel responsible for them. I discovered that I had that in me, which is something I'd have never experienced and didn’t like, so I wrote about it.” It’s deceptively one of the album’s quieter, more mellow moments, but like everything LuxJury does, there’s an emotionality simmering right below the surface, one note away from overflowing. 

“Honestly, most of this album is me getting over my first queer relationship. There's no lie about it,” Nicole says finally. “I feel like a teenager: it should be an angsty album, but it came out the way it did, hopefully, because I'm a bit older.” There is something fresh and young about it, though, and exciting, and uplifting—it’s like being able to time travel back to your high school years, but with the power to change the story for the better. “Coming out as a queer woman helped me more deeply understand my own female sexual identity, which I felt was more socially constructed than personally informed,” she says. “That informed the themes that I was exploring, which were, ‘How do queer people have relationships? What are the ways that they navigate breakups and falling in love that aren't covered in mainstream media, and that you just have to figure out for yourself by doing?’” When you put it that way, in the end, Giving Up isn’t about letting go of your dreams: it’s about making space for new ones.