Indie Artist Nep on Fanfiction, Florida Girl Identity, and Her Debut Album “Noelle”

For Nep, fanfiction wasn’t an escape—it was rehearsal for a life in music, one that finally takes shape on Noelle.

Photo courtesy of the artist

“Daytona sucks, now // didn’t you notice? // That nobody’s happy? // That I’m not home.”

Indie artist Nep sits somewhere between Floridian anthropologist and prolific fanfic author. Her debut album Noelle, which she describes as her most cohesive, most personal project to date, is a complex portrait of the sticky heat of mid-Florida adolescence informed by the digital world. 

Just a year ago, Nep remembers writing frenetically to complete all 12 tracks in Noelle. She graduated from the University of Miami, deleted social media for a few months, and packed up her boxes and moved across the country for the dry heat of Southern California. Now, she’s gearing up for the second leg of her tour across the US. 

It began with the title: Noelle, a name that Nep frequently used in her stories as a child.

“I mean, anybody that wrote fanfiction when you were younger knows if you were writing a main character it was, like, another name, but it was you as the character,” she explains. 

As a child of the internet and voracious Wattpad reader, fanfiction played an essential role in Nep’s development as a musician. Some of her stories featured the band Five Seconds of Summer, but the form soon became a place for Nep to daydream and write music. 

She’d imagined herself (or Noelle) at industry parties, something that felt inconceivable as a teenager. 

Her first project, an EP called Nep’s Storybook, was an evolution of her teenage writing. Many of the songs were fictional. The final track, “Milktown/Mr. Carter” is a bouncy work of imagination lightly inspired by the movie The Graduate as well as a Frankie Cosmos music video. 

Now, though, Nep is ready to blur the line between fact and fiction. She confronts the stagnation of home, the fear of leaving and the fear of staying. 

“Beaches are fucked, Daytona Sucks,” she repeats as “Bikertoberfest” fades. 

Perhaps she’s more equipped to unpack the claustrophobia of growing up in Daytona now that she’s escaped it. 

“Florida’s heavy,” she says, “I grew up in a town where people move back home and have kids and grow up next to their parents, which is not a bad thing at all. It's just not something that I ever wanted. People die here, I don't want to die here.” 

In the last few months, LA has felt like a dream. She describes it as “full of whimsy”, reminiscing on the 200 fans she met at a meet and greet (a great way to get to know people in a new city) and chasing the color pink down sun-soaked boulevards on a color walk with her roommate. 

“I kind of miss all of that creative power I had when I was a kid,” she says, “I used to take out this toy piano, and it would entertain me all day.”

These days, Nep finds herself practising scales, a habit that took 22 years to form, but even her technical skills are in service of her imagination. 

Living in LA has put Nep in a tricky limbo. Her breakout single, “Florida Girl,” is an anthem for the boisterous, “too much” girls who don’t fit in. At the time of writing, Nep thought about her Floridian peers who made her feel like an outsider. In a world of Angelenos, however, being from Daytona had its negative connotations. West Coasters still have their stereotypes about the middle of nowhere, Florida. 

“As I'm getting older, I’m letting go of this really idealised version of myself,” she says. “It’s fun to escape to that for a second, but also, like, I am a Florida girl, I am messy.”

Despite it all, Nep still misses the Daytona humidity.