“When I finished Can I Miss It For A Minute?, it was so nice to be able to put that to bed,” says Nell Mescal.

“I thought maybe I am going to be writing about this for the rest of my life, and no one is going to want to listen to me anymore, because I’ll have nothing new to say. But I will still have to say it anyway.”

The ‘this’ that Mescal is referring to is a friendship break-up, which anyone who has had the misfortune of being a teenage girl will know all about.

Mescal admits that the friendship break-up at heart of the EP “kind of overtook my life”. “When I finished it,” she says, “I thought, ‘It feels nice to be able to wrap it up in a box and present it to the world.’ Now I can start writing about other things that have been on my mind as well. It was definitely something I used to heal, and in doing so, I just happened to make an EP I’m really proud of.”

It seems odd to think that Mescal, who has performed support slots for Dermot Kennedy, P!nk, and Florence & the Machine – along with appearances on The Late Late Show, Other Voices and Electric Picnic – is only now releasing her debut EP.

Can I Miss it for a Minute?

Of course, studio recording asks different questions of artists than live performance, with ‘Yellow Dresser’ proving one of the challenging tracks to nail.

“It’s been in the set for as long as I’ve been playing live,” notes Mescal. “We really tried to make it as live as possible, as ‘me’ as possible. We finished it at five in the morning and it had just been the craziest few days of working so hard. It’s so liberating when you finally get it. Making this EP was really difficult for a lot of reasons. As much as it was the most fun I’ve had and so creatively cathartic, it was hard.

“I don’t have anything to hide behind. I’m not a band, I didn’t start this artist project with an aesthetic. It was just me doing covers on social media. What you see is what you get, and it’s really hard to make that look cool and open up a world for people to see. A lot of the time, it’s really hard not to overshare. Nobody is meant to read anyone else’s diary, and I feel like a lot of the time with artists, that’s exactly what we are allowing people to do.

“You can’t really be honest without oversharing a little bit. Maybe that’s a good thing or a bad thing.” What does Mescal want to achieve from the deeply personal listening experience?  “I always try to have hope somewhere in my music, because I know I get classed as sad girl music,” she replies.

That’s great and I love that, but also, we can’t wallow forever. Having a bit of hope somewhere in a track, whether it’s in the drums or the guitar, is important.” And what about the possibility of a debut album? “I am definitely writing a lot,” says Nell. “There’s a file on my notes app called ‘Nell’s LP’. I am silently working away.”

• Can I Miss It For A Minute? is out now. 

Check out Nell Mescal's interview in the latest edition of Hot Press: