LOS ANGELES, CA- There is something almost surprising about calling Nocturne Wasia Project’s debut album. Olivia Hardy and Will Gao have already spent the past several years developing the kind of musical identity that many artists are still searching for several albums into their careers. With 2024’s Isotope EP in particular, the London-based siblings demonstrated an unusually mature command of composition, arrangement and atmosphere, building a devoted audience around music informed by their classical training while comfortably pulling from jazz and contemporary pop. Their growing profile subsequently carried them through sold-out headline shows in the U.K. and U.S., including two nights at Los Angeles’ Fonda Theatre and New York’s Irving Plaza. [Wasia Project press release, Sept. 18, 2026]
Perhaps that is why “Bleeding Gold,” one of the standout tracks, IMHO, from Nocturne, feels so significant.
For artists this young, Wasia Project make remarkably structured and polished music. There is very little about their work that feels accidental. Melodies resolve when they need to and resist resolution when they shouldn’t. And through it all, Hardy and Gao have developed an aesthetic strong enough that you can recognize Wasia Project even as the musical vocabulary around them continues to change.
“Bleeding Gold” may be one of the clearest examples yet of that evolution.
The classical and jazz vocabulary that helped distinguish Wasia Project’s earlier work remains part of their musical DNA, but it no longer seems interested in dictating the boundaries of what they can create. Where some of the duo’s earlier material invited understandable comparisons to artists such as Laufey, particularly through its combination of traditional instrumentation, jazz-inflected harmony and contemporary songwriting, “Bleeding Gold” takes a firmer step outside that framework. The musicianship is still there. It has simply become less concerned with announcing itself.
Instead, Hardy and Gao increasingly use those musical instincts in service of atmosphere, movement and emotional tension.
That evolution is evident in the song’s writing as well. “Bleeding Gold” begins with an almost mundane lyrical scene: someone alone on a bus, crying, cold and trying unsuccessfully to reach someone while everything seems to be going wrong. The journey eventually turns toward home, but home doesn’t provide the uncomplicated resolution we might expect. Relief arrives, followed almost immediately by the realization that whatever the narrator was trying to escape has followed them there.
It is a deceptively mature idea about growing up. Sometimes returning to the places that once made us feel safe cannot return us to the people we were when we lived there.
Hardy and Gao reinforce that emotional contradiction throughout the song. Everything can somehow feel like nothing. Leaving can feel necessary even when returning feels inevitable. And the repeated lyrics “back again” turns into an inevitable endless cycle. The narrator is constantly going somewhere, yet emotionally keeps finding themselves back at the beginning.
That sense of contradiction fits neatly within the larger concept behind Nocturne. Hardy and Gao describe their debut as a collection of songs moving through the night, exploring the extremes that can exist between the connection of a nightclub and the isolation of being awake alone. It is an idea broad enough to allow the record to move through markedly different musical spaces without losing its center.
And after even one or two listens through Nocturne, it becomes apparent that “Bleeding Gold” is not some stylistic outlier.
Across the album’s 12 tracks, Hardy and Gao repeatedly stretch beyond the vocabulary that characterized much of their earlier work, experimenting with different textures, moods and approaches while retaining the aesthetic coherence that makes the music unmistakably theirs. That may ultimately be the most interesting development on Nocturne. The evolution isn’t simply that Wasia Project are experimenting with more genres. It is that they seem increasingly unconcerned with genre as a boundary at all.
There is considerable confidence required to do that, particularly when the sound you already have is working.
Isotope helped establish Wasia Project as something distinctive. Its combination of classical sensibility, jazz influence and contemporary songwriting offered an immediately recognizable point of entry into Hardy and Gao’s musical world. The safer decision would have been to continue refining that formula. Instead, Nocturne sounds like two musicians asking what else they can build with the tools they already possess.
“Bleeding Gold” provides a particularly compelling answer.
Rather than abandoning the sophistication of their earlier material, Hardy and Gao have begun integrating it more deeply into the construction of their songs. Their classical training does not disappear simply because a track sounds less traditionally composed. Their understanding of dynamics does not disappear because the production becomes more atmospheric. If anything, those foundations give them greater freedom to experiment because the structure underneath the experimentation remains so strong.
That may also explain why their music feels unusually polished for artists at this stage of their career. Gao and Hardy formed Wasia Project in 2019, drawing upon both their Chinese-British heritage and classical musical training, and they have spent the years since developing their sound through releases including 2024’s Isotope and 2025’s “Letters From The Day.” By the time they arrive at their first full-length album, they do not sound like musicians introducing themselves. They sound like musicians challenging an identity they have already successfully established.
There is an important difference between those two things.
Plenty of young artists experiment because they have not yet figured out what they want to sound like. Nocturne suggests Wasia Project are experimenting precisely because they have.
For a debut album, Nocturne therefore feels less like an introduction than the beginning of Wasia Project’s second chapter.
If Isotope demonstrated just how compelling Hardy and Gao could be working within the intersection of classical, jazz and contemporary songwriting traditions, “Bleeding Gold” and Nocturne suggest something potentially much more exciting: just how little interest they may have in staying there.
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