Mouse on TikTok, music promotion and his new single.
Nic, better known as Mouse, is a 20-year-old punk artist based in Edinburgh. Mouse dropped his first single ‘School Will Kill The Artist.’ a year ago and he’s been on an upwards trajectory since.
On a cold Monday afternoon, I made my way through to Edinburgh to chat to Mouse: “I was originally into acting, but I went to college to study it and realised it wasn’t for me. I found music quite late on, I’d done musical theatre since I was three and there were vocal lessons within that, and my mum always tried to get me into it. I went to college and s**t myself because I’d wanted to do it since I was three and realised I had nowhere to go. I started playing my guitar going ‘what do I do?’ and I thought ‘I’ll do this’. I got a laptop, audio interface and everything I needed to record music and I sat for about a year working on my writing rather than just going headfirst into releasing stuff”.
He added: “I got myself into Riverside Music College which helped me out a lot the first year, but through that time my dad passed, and I had to take a bit of time out dealing with that and trying to build my portfolio and my college portfolio. I got through it and got an A, then attended the second year and I wasn’t learning anything, it was the same stuff but just longer essays and I felt it was holding me back. I’d learned what I went to college for, so I dropped out and put all my efforts into promoting myself and my music”.
Self-written and self-produced, Mouse has complete creative control over his music. “I don’t even know how I write” Mouse laughed. “I just sit down and write a goofy song, because it’s good to just write. In terms of the songs I’ve released, it needs to have a story behind it. Personally, I don’t like music that’s just pop music saying something for the sake of saying it”.
On recording he said: “In college we were taught the basics of how to record, but it wasn’t in depth. To actually learn how to mix and master I had to work on it myself, which was fun for me. It’s hard to find the flow right away, but once you get into it, it’s fun.”
Mouse gained some traction on TikTok last year when he began promoting his single ‘Hostage’, his video went viral and his fanbase has continued to grow since then. Mouse explained: “It was a video from an English punk artist called Louis saying that the Scottish accent doesn’t compliment the genre, my stitch got him to follow me, and I got my first show in Birmingham supporting him. Without posting that video I wouldn’t have had that opportunity.”
A keen advocate of the platform, the young artist believes that TikTok is a key tool in modern music promotion: “I’ve come across a lot of bands and artists who s**t on TikTok, they look at people like JXDN who started out as one of those TikTok dancing boys in the Hype House and they see it like there’s a musician and there’s a TikTok musician.” He adds: “But TikTok isn’t social media anymore; it’s a promotional tool and it’s all about building creators, whether that’s people who just stitch videos or use trending sounds or artists that are promoting. You can get in front of everyone and anyone.”
The secret to success on TikTok? Prolific content creation and putting your own unique spin on it. Larger-than-life content catches the viewers’ attention and keeps them engaged, and the platform is shaking up the way people discover music by facilitating new ways for creators to build communities around their music. Mouse said: “Bring your personality if you get into TikTok because that’s what people are looking for, people and not robots. Live music and real people are going to be key in the next generation of music and I think TikTok is the future.” He smiled: “It’s about quantity over quality, create, create, create.”
This month Mouse unleashed his brand-new track ‘Dead 2 Me (Ghost).’, a pop-punk banger that sounds like the lovechild of The Lafontaines and Greenday. Mouse said of the new track: “There are sort of two choruses in the song I can’t lie, one is about self-sabotage and how my old habits were killing my progress and that’s dead to me. I’ve beefed it out to make it more relatable to people that don’t necessarily have a curtain call. The dead to me part came out of losing my dad as a brutal truth, there’s a lot of inspiration that comes from different places.”
What’s next for Mouse? He revealed: “This year my focus is more on bringing people to what I’ve got already and bringing out a few new songs. One thing I want to do a lot more of this year is live shows; I want to build on getting used to them because once you’re used to the deep end, the shallow end is easier.”