The Bad Arts 048: Who Is Nirosta Steel, the 69-Year-Old Behind The Album of The Summer?

A brief primer on an album featuring 40-years worth of music that could have never seen the light of day.

Have you been inundated during your daily doom scrolls with the sepia-tinged image of a man with a unibrow that rivals both Sam Eagle's and Bert’s of The Muppets? Are you wondering what the deal is with this Nirosta Steel album, MY SKYSCRAPER, that all the music sites are going crazy for?

Giving the album a score of 9 and Best New Album, Pitchfork noted, “For an album that feels like a major artistic statement, almost none of the songs have a single definitive version.” The history of this artist and the life and legacy these songs could have had (the irresistible opening track, ‘English Party’, was initially written with Madonna in the early 1980s) are as much part of the album as the music.

I, too, was intrigued, so I listened to MY SKYSCRAPER, an album comprised of songs, some recorded 40 years ago, that had been gathering dust until Chanel Beads’ Shane Lavers showed the duo behind Indiana-based label, ULYSSA Records, Steel’s 2014 LP, Cool Fire.

So, who is Nirosta Steel?

Born Steven Hall in Scotland in 1957, in a modest town outside of Glasgow. As a youngster, he sang in church choirs— developing a foundational grounding in vocal harmonies— and received a sophisticated and dexterous musical education at school, where there was a full orchestra, in his church, and through playing folk music in his local youth group. Exposed to different styles of music across his formative years, as well as orchestral training, gave Hall the confidence and curiosity to pick up practically any instrument successfully, except drums. (He’d meet someone later, however, who would fill that void when he started recording his own music.) Under his formal classical training, Hall was skilled in French Horn, his primary instrument in the school band, and played bagpipes and guitar. That early musical education would stand to him, however, as he grew older and music became Hall’s professional pursuit, a lot of the conventional structures went by the wayside.

By the time Hall turned 15, he left Scotland behind with his widowed mother for life in New York City. He attended a liberal high school that regularly invited poets from the City to speak to the kids; this introduced Hall to Larry Fagin, who took the teen to the Poet’s Building in the East Village, a creative-domestic hub where Allen Ginsberg, Richard Hell, and another recent New York convert, Arthur Russell, lived. It was during that period, in his late teens, studying at Columbia, and learning poetry under Allen Ginsberg, that Hall became a fully fledged member of this underground arts scene, with Ginsberg inevitably introducing him to Arthur Russell. Russell’s integration into New York life seemed effortless; he worked as the musical director in The Kitchen and often played cello accompaniment at Ginsberg’s readings, all the while developing his idiosyncratic musical style, blending folk with dance music that spawned art-pop.

Hall was perhaps more serious about writing and poetry in his university days, editing some arts magazines and interviewing people he encountered in the Poet’s Building. Music, after a childhood immersed in classical training and performance, was merely something he did for fun. He started playing dulcimer because Joni Mitchell did (she also influenced his guitar playing) and was increasingly intrigued by John Martyn’s approach of experimenting with pedals. Eventually,

[Steven Hall, aka Nirosta Steel, performing with Arthur Russell]

Soon after his introduction to Russell, the pair forged an incredibly strong musical collaboration that extended until the groundbreaking cellist’s premature death in 1992, aged 40. Hall, now performing under the moniker Nirosta Steel, joined Russell for countless shows in legendary New York venues like Max’s Kansas City and The Mudd Club, recorded on several Russell tracks, even singing the lead vocals for ‘Tell You Today’ (1983) and ‘Is It All Over My Face?’ (1980), which Russell developed as Loose Joints. They frequently bounced ideas off one another, and Russell was immeasurably influential on Hall’s writing and approach in his Nirosta Steel recordings. He even completed a song that the Scot was ready to give up on called ‘Lost In Thought’, with their only other co-write ‘Go For The Night’ finally finding a home on MY SKYSCRAPER.

After Russell’s death, Steel and several other collaborators and friends came together to keep the Iowa composer’s work alive in Arthur’s Landing, a tribute act that continues to play, although Hall is no longer involved. It’s to be expected, then, that on MY SKYSCRAPER, Hall’s close friendship and musical collaborations with Russell bled into the DNA of a significant portion of its 17-song-long tracklist. There’s the spacious, lo-fi production on the likes of ‘Triangularize’ or ‘Fresh Feeling’, the former with its rudimentary acoustic guitar-drum sample summoning Russell’s spirit in its minimal infectiouness.

Aside from the likeness in texture and production style, another prominent commonality between Steel's and Russell’s musical sensibilities was a disdain towards vocal vibrato. It’s in no way distracting to the songs, nor does this lessen the quality of the vocal performances across the songs —esspecially on the emotive performance on ‘First Love (Ruffian Mix)’, or the gentle harmonies on ‘Grey Boy' (A Capella Mix)’— which can make Hall’s vocals, most obviously on ‘Super Boy’, sound eerily like Chet Baker and his approach to having his cadence align with the trumpet. Practical application of things like that, paired with Russell’s songwriting philosophy that a song can always evolve and change its direction, is apparent in Hall’s treatment and curation of the songs featured on MY SKYSCRAPER.

Packing 40 years' worth of demos into 83 minutes —and having them cohesively and harmoniously co-exist— is no small feat. The album, on its Bandcamp page, is described as representing “works-forever-in-progress” from Hall’s catalogue of Nirosta Steel tunes. From his New York avant-garde days, songs inspired by his travels back and forth to Hong Kong, and his Arthur Russell recordings (‘Special Weakness’ and ‘Fresh Feeling’), it’s an unpredictable yet not entirely overwhelming, intimidating or exhausting body of work.

It’s a fascinating listen, and you can completely understand how people and music publications and podcasts have been swept away by the sheer accomplishment of these songs finally existing for an audience instead of gathering dust. Everyone from Aquarium Drunkard, Paste Magazine, Brooklyn Vegan, Indiecast and, as I mentioned earlier, Pitchfork, have devoted a lot of time to this release and are unified in their glowing praise for the album. Much to Hall’s surprise, there’s no denying that MY SKYSCRAPER accidentally claimed the title of the Sound of the Summer, 2026.

A significant portion of the goodwill and immediate curiosity, not to be a total cynic, is due to Hall’s long-standing association with Arthur Russell. Even though Russell’s estate regularly put out posthumous compilations of the avant-garde composer’s unreleased demos, the prospect of having more “new” songs from him, as well as tracks closely inspired by his singular style, will always be a welcome treat. My engagement with MY SKYSCRAPER was very much informed by that aspect of its story, and it was those extremely Russell-centric compositions that I felt worked the best.

However, what struck me most while listening to MY SKYSCRAPER was the unexpected places my mind went with some of the tonal and melodic likenesses, beyond the domineering ghost of Arthur Russell.

Take for example, the buoyant and bright textures in ‘New Boy’ which could easily sit alongside ‘Rip It Up’ on fellow Scottish new-wavers’ 1982 LP of the same name; the atmospherically mellow ‘Super Boy’, the recording subtly decorated with the crackle of tape, conjures both Portishead and Massive Attack in their more serene modes; the breeziness of ‘Go For The Night’ sounds like, and please believe me when I say this, it’s as though Cass McCombs, with some dynamic stretching and layering applied to his vocals, is either covering a Sade song, or attempting to make something akin to her smooth output for a special Mexican Summer EP. Just listen to it, come back to me and let me know if you hear it.

Another bizarre turn was ‘Lost In Music’, where a slightly rockier feel emanates from the snare effect and fuzzed bass riff, which is nicely sliced through by a bright guitar motif and does not feel a million miles away from something that ‘90s-era U2 would have been pleased with. Lyrically, too, I could all too easily picture Bono delivering the lines, “We’ve got Marvin Gaye on the CD player,” and later, “It’s a big country, and we’re lost in music.” There was a moment on one of my initial listens to MY SKYSCRAPER when I was out walking and listening on headphones. I got a bit of a jump scare as the glaringly cheesy, fancy cocktail bar at an exclusive Ibiza resort-esque arrangement of ‘Boss Trix’, complete with razor-sharp synthesised strings and Nile Rodgers-like licks, just felt extremely artificial and jarring within the context of the album. Fortunately, those moments don’t entirely deter me from going back, as there’s a wealth of tracks here to willingly return to.

The timing for MY SKYSCRAPER’s release is perfect. Aside from the sunny evenings providing the ultimate setting for these sometimes seductive and mischievous songs to blast in your ears while making your way to meet friends in the park or the pub zip, there’s an evergreen attraction to music that has an off-kilter feel to it, that’s been produced by a figure who went almost their entire life without garnering widespread acclaim and attention.

I certainly feel that the desire for “nostalgic” sounding music has only grown stronger and stronger since Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee. Given that Nirosta Steel’s music is actually from another time, capturing and celebrating the debauchery of its time, instead of creating something indebted to a bygone era in an attempt to escape the hellscape of today, adds to MY SKYSCRAPER’s appeal. It feels like stepping into a literal time capsule, suddenly surrounded by snapshots of Nirosta Steel’s treasured memories, instead of dressing your music up in a costume to give off that image. That’s not to say that I think one is better than the other; personally, I much prefer Diamond Jubilee to MY SKYSCRAPER, but they’re also very different albums.

And there you have it, some backstory to the 69-year-old artist, who’d been living a simple and quiet life with his husband in Chicago, until becoming this year’s beloved left-of-centre album that’s been on everyone's lips and in people’s ears over the last fortnight.

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