The Affirmations of Fast Money Music
- 1 day ago
- 7 min read
Words by Angelika May
Scantily clad, and idiosyncratically layered, multi-hyphenate creatives spill into the belly of lost — the experimental clubnight that’s been steadily gaining traction since launching last year. Tonight’s bill: Fast Money Music. Amid the labyrinthine layout, smoky dance floors, hidden bars, and cinema rooms looping films of French women with perky breasts, a certain Nick Hinman, aka Fast Money Music, lurks in the shadows, patiently waiting for his midnight slot in the club’s “music room.”
Fast Money Music’s performance is gigantic. The cavernous venue, large enough to house an orchestra and definitely big enough to swing a cat in, gives Hinman the space to fully command the stage and revel in its expanse. The set is wild, energetic, and it’s clear that big, bold, brash stages suit the San Franciscan perfectly.
The rest of the band are tight, polished, and visibly feeding off the late-night revelry of the crowd. There’s a certain hedonism that comes with putting a live band inside a nightclub, and it naturally pushes the performance into something more raucous and unrestrained.
Which is essentially what lost is all about: creating an antithetical approach to London nightlife, demanding more spaces for culture and connection while pushing back against the soulless parties born from the steady erosion of decent nightlife.
I spoke to Nick early one morning over coffee at his local spot beneath his quaint East London studio. We talked about his debut album Fast Money Music, which for Hinman is “life on life’s terms”, Polish divination cards, and dentistry.
The track “Nevermind” came together from an improvised idea. Do you find that your most instinctive songs tend to be the most honest, or do you feel the need to refine them later?
Nick - When I’m writing, a lot of it is a stream of consciousness. Either the music inspires the lyrics, or the lyrics inspire the music and I just follow whichever has momentum. If I don’t follow the momentum of an improvised idea, I can get stuck. “Nevermind”, for instance, was super collaborative between me and Oliver (Marson). In those moments you’re so present, passing instruments back and forth, screaming lyric ideas at each other, trying to figure out what something means in real time. It’s like throwing paint at a canvas and later realising…
It’s a Pollock!
N - It’s a masterpiece! I usually like to let things breathe first, then refine them later. Sometimes lyrics I used as scratch vocals end up staying because, down the line, I suddenly understand where they came from. They do need to be refined eventually, but I try not to overthink it, I like writing a song in a day and letting it be, but I’m also very compatible with overworking things.
Can a day make or break a song?
N - Hopefully it all balances out into just a version of you.
How do you balance humour with vulnerability without undercutting the other?
N - Life is funny, even when it’s sad or intensely emotional. There’s always some humour in it, and I think it’s important to see that. If something gets too dark, you have to find the lighter side to balance it out. When humour feels too contrived or like it’s trying too hard to be funny, it feels less authentic. But there is humour in vulnerability.
When you have those moments, are you half crying, half celebrating — like, “God this is good stuff”?
N - Yeah, or why am I being so dramatic? Why am I so emo?
Is there an emo song coming soon?
N - I don’t think so, but a lot of my sonic influences are bands like New Order. They were emotional in their own way, dancey but still carrying a lot of feeling. Not pop-punk emo, but definitely emotional. That kind of stuff is cyclical.
Since this album was written over a decade, do you think your perspective on older songs changed when revisiting them?
N - Yeah, I put out EPs pretty much back to back, one in 2023 and the other in 2024 and I had this cache of songs I’d been working through for years. There were songs I wanted on the album that I had made in 2017. So, when I say the album was written across a decade, I mean some songs were written ten years ago, while others like, “Nevermind”, were written three months before finishing it. It really spans a huge period of my life.
But when I go back to those older songs, they still feel really relevant. Even if the circumstances or specifics of what I was writing about have changed, the emotions still connect. I try to keep my lyrics open-ended enough that they can evolve and be interpreted differently over time.
How do you feel you’ve changed in the past ten years?
N - A decade is a long time. I quit drinking about four years ago, and that was a major turning point in my life. Not that my writing before and after sobriety feels completely different, but there was definitely more party energy in the earlier stuff. Now I think it’s a bit more introspective. But I still try to keep that sense of humour in there too.
You’ve mentioned previously that “timing is everything”, how has timing shaped your artistic journey and this album.
N - It’s all in the expression, timing is everything. Things happen when they’re supposed to happen, and this album came out when it was meant to. Even though I wrote some of these songs ten years ago, I just wasn’t ready to release them until now. It’s kind of inexplicable.
What Changed for you that made it the right time? Why couldn’t the songs have come out earlier?
N - For a long time, I was trying really hard to control my artistic output. I was afraid to release things. I wasn’t always sure what was truly me and what wasn’t. Then, before I released the first EP, I hit a point where I thought…I’m not waiting around for labels or for people to say yes or no anymore, I just want to put my art out.
Once I started doing that, it became easier to keep going. If I’d kept holding onto all this material so tightly, I probably would’ve gotten in my own way and never released anything. Letting go became really important. I just wasn’t ready to do that back then. Now it feels like I’ve unlocked a mentality where I can finally let things out into the world instead of clinging to them. You have to let go to make space for new things to come in.
Is that your business card on your lock screen?
N - No, it’s actually the barcode for Better UK gyms from when I was going swimming.
I thought it was a barcode to your EP!
N - No, it scans me into the pool, which is somehow even nerdier.
Collaborating with other artists such as John Waugh and Oliver Marson seems central to this record, what did those collaborations unlock in your sound?
N - It goes back to me trying to relinquish as much control as possible and just allowing things to happen. Fast Money Music is a solo project at the end of the day, but at the same time, it takes a village. Writing music is vulnerable, but it’s also something that’s meant to be shared and my intention with this record was to let more people influence it. I really like it, I like being open to other people’s ideas, seeing where their brains go with something or what they naturally bring into it.
When you bring in a live collaborator, they’re going to play things in their own way, which alters and morphs the music into something more human and amoebic, rather than me just saying, do it exactly like this. You don’t want to shut down someone else’s intuition. It should always feel like a dialogue. Even writing with other people and seeing their process, you always end up learning something about yourself too.
How do you decide what each song’s “world” looks like beyond just the music?
N - It’s really intuitive, it’s about how I visually see the song. A lot of the time it comes from the imagery in the lyrics. With “Unfortunately”, for example, I wrote it while I was in La, and there was all this seaside imagery in my head, so I knew I wanted it to exist on a beach visually.
For the wider visual world of the album, I became obsessed with the idea that every song could have its own collectible “card” or story attached to it. I found scans of this really obscure 1982 Polish divination deck that had been distributed during communist-era Poland. It had this strange surreal art style created by a young art student, and it became a huge inspiration. My partner Natasha and I used elements of that imagery to build unique cards for each song. That became the whole visual identity of the album and the single artwork.
“Round and Round” was much more introspective. I found a bunch of old home videos in my mom’s garage and digitised them. Watching footage of myself as a kid, birthday parties, and grandparents who’ve passed away felt like this huge blast from the past, and using those videos in the visual made the song feel even more personal.
Did it make you think about how your younger self would see your life now?
N - Yeah, definitely. I hadn’t seen those tapes in years because we didn’t have a player for them anymore, so it was surreal revisiting all of that.
You’re banned from making music, what career do you end up in?
N - When I got my visa here, they specifically told me I also couldn’t be a dentist.
Why?
N - I have no idea. It’s apparently part of the visa rules. So I guess I’d become a dentist out of spite.
Would you be a cosmetic dentist or an NHS dentist?
N - Definitely an NHS dentist.
So you’re sticking it to the man while also becoming the backbone of the country? Actually, NHS dentists still charge, so maybe that’s not really being the backbone of the country.
N - I’d open an NHS dentist office that didn’t charge anyone.
So how are you making money?
N - I’m not. But I’m not really making money in music either, so it doesn’t matter.
So the name “Fast Money Music”, is that an affirmation to try to make money fast?
N - That was kind of the irony of it. When I started the project, I was finally ready to release songs and was trying to come up with a band name. One of my favourite bands is Suicide, and on their second record, there’s a song called “Fast Money Music.” I always loved the duality of making really introspective, heartfelt music while calling it Fast Money Music.
I also liked the joke that it probably wasn’t going to make me any money anyway. So that was basically the genesis of the name — a little homage to the gang.
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