Salt Spring Island singer-songwriter Nicky MacKenzie shares Morals, a deeply introspective and emotionally layered EP that traces the tension between distraction and self-awareness, chaos, and growth. Blending sleek pop production with confessional singer-songwriter honesty, the project captures the internal conversations people rarely say out loud; the dark thoughts, quiet revelations and uncomfortable truths that shape personal evolution.

Developed over several years, many of the songs on Morals first began as fragments written when Nicky was in her early twenties. Voice memo ideas and unfinished thoughts eventually resurfaced years later, allowing her to revisit them through the lens of lived experience and emotional maturity. “It’s kind of a cool marriage between my younger self and my present self,” she explains. “Taking old experiences and sprinkling them with the learned lessons and flavours of my current life.”

Morals is helmed by its reflective and soulful lead single, “Lost and Found,” a raw pop ballad that captures the emotional comedown after distraction fades away.

“‘Lost and Found’ is about the feeling after the party, when all the lights and noise have died down, and all you have is yourself and your loud thoughts,” Nicky shares. “It’s the lonely feeling of realizing you’ve been acting willingly delusional, and you’re aware of the fact that you still want a distraction from yourself.”

That emotional honesty sits at the centre of both the song and the wider EP. Rather than focusing on romance, Nicky’s writing turns inward, exploring self-awareness, emotional avoidance, and the difficult process of confronting what lives beneath the surface. “The theme in most of my music is more about self awareness and growth,” she says. “The curiosity about what’s really going on beneath the mask, and the internal dialogue you have with yourself that you don’t share with anyone else.”

Written on her grandfather’s old classical acoustic guitar, “Lost and Found” carries an atmosphere shaped by imperfection. The instrument refused to stay in tune, but that flawed texture became essential to the song’s emotional identity. “It was kind of the perfect flawed sound I needed to inspire the feeling of this song,” Nicky explains. That raw foundation is contrasted by atmospheric production choices, including a thick, angelic vocoder hook designed to feel suspended above the track like a drifting thought.

Across Morals, Nicky embraces an instinctive songwriting process untethered from rigid structure. “Every feeling has a different colour palette, a different flavour and a different sound,” she says. “I find having a step by step writing system puts my creativity in a box personally.” The result is a project that feels emotionally fluid and deeply human, balancing melancholy, and reflection with moments of clarity and release.