A heart tattoo, a vintage Jag, a nighttime Golden Gate drive. The fog, the heels, the tension. The video for Lover Boy, the latest from Fast Money Music – the solo project of US-born, London-based musician Nick Hinman – cuts fast and raw, perfectly echoing the track’s gritty, no-wave pulse; cited influences swing from ESG to Jonathan Richman.

Marking the first taste of Fast Money Music’s upcoming debut LP, Lover Boy was recorded between Hackney Road Studios and Hinman’s Dalston space, and features Jamie Reynolds (Klaxons) on bass, John Waugh (The 1975) on sax, and Steffan Halperin (Klaxons) on drums. “It’s about you,” Hinman says below, speaking about the track in conversation with designer and Poster Girl co-founder Natasha Somerville – his co-star in the Lover Boy visuals, and fiancée in reality – “about when we first started hanging out… I knew there was something special.”

Natasha Somerville: OK, Lover Boy. What’s this one actually about?
Nick Hinman: You know what it’s about.

NS: I do, but tell me again – for everyone else. What’s Lover Boy about?
NH: It’s about you, about when we first started hanging out. Or pretty close to then. It was a strange time in my life. I had just gotten sober, I was in the middle of some huge personal changes, and suddenly you were there. I knew there was something special immediately, but I also knew I had things I needed to sort out before I could really pursue anything properly. I wanted a fresh slate. The lyric is “I could be your lover baby,” not “I will be,” because it was written in that moment of uncertainty.

NS: And what were some of the musical influences shaping Lover Boy?
NH: The whole song started with the bassline. I was listening to a lot of ESG at the time, that tight, minimalist, rhythmic pulse they’re known for. There’s also a bit of Daniel Ash from Love and Rockets in there. I’ve always loved his sort of sultry, detached delivery. And then Jonathan Richman, especially the song Girlfriend on the first Modern Lovers record, where he spells the word out letter by letter. I used that idea as the basis for the “L-O-V-E-R B-O-Y” chant in the chorus.

NS: That’s my favourite part of the song. There’s a real mix of confidence and vulnerability in the track. How do you move between the two?
NH: I think it lives in the uncertainty of the moment I wrote it. I knew I wanted to pursue this connection, but I also knew there were loose ends in my life that I needed to wrap up first. So there’s the confidence of feeling like this could work, but also the vulnerability of not being fully ready yet.

NS: Let’s talk about the video. We filmed in San Francisco first: the Golden Gate Bridge, the car, the fog – it was freezing that night, you were wearing my fur coat! And I was wearing those stripper heels I found at a thrift store in Reno. But how did it all come together as an idea?
NH: We were in SF for my mom’s birthday, and I knew the album was coming. I wanted each song to have either a vignette or a proper video. Lover Boy has this urgent, driving rhythm, and I had this image of you as a sort of modern femme fatale. We had access to the same car from the Hot Melt Glue music video, and San Francisco means a lot to me since I grew up there, so putting you in the middle of that landscape felt right. At first there wasn’t a strict narrative. It was more about mood and movement. Then right when we got back in London, I was standing next to my friend Jamie when we were at Wide Awake Festival and realised that he had a tattoo that said “Loverboy” on his neck. It caught me so off guard, but I was able to get a quick clip of him in the studio. That shot ended up being the irregular heartbeat of the video.

We sat on that footage for a while, and then a couple of weeks ago I realised I wanted a performance layer too. So we filmed in our bathroom, very DIY, and I used blend modes to overlay different performances, including you wearing the same sunglasses from the original shoot. It created this effect where sometimes you’re there, sometimes you’re a ghost, sometimes there are multiples of you. In a way, the video made itself, similar to the way songs can write themselves. And sometimes they don’t need a strict narrative, just a feeling.

NS: It fits our DIY spirit. I shot you in Tokyo for the Space Opera music video, and you narrated the Poster Girl Love Factory campaign. It feels special to collaborate on each other’s art.
NH: Totally. It’s partly practical because I don’t have a huge video budget, but it’s also intentional. This album is me getting back to something that feels authentically mine. Doing everything in this stripped-back way takes more work, but it ends up feeling more honest.

NS: And I did all the single cover illustrations. All those surrealist Polish divination cards were so fun to reinterpret, especially being part Polish myself. Does Lover Boy connect to the rest of the album in a bigger way?
NH: Yes, definitely. When I finished the demo, it immediately felt like the anchor of the whole album. At one point I even considered using the Lover Boy card as the album cover. It’s one of my favourite tracks on the record.

NS: It’s definitely my favourite… but I’m biased.

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