FEATURE: Spotlight: NIKI — Music Musings & Such

FEATURE:

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Justin J Wee for The New York Times

NIKI

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MAYBE she would…

not want me to start off looking back a couple of years. Perhaps not as enamoured of this past music as her current work. In any case, it is important to look back and see where NIKI has come from. I wanted to start out with an NME interview from 2022. How the Indonesian-born, American-based Nicole Zefanya became NIKI. I wanted to spotlight NIKI as her new album, Buzz, was released this month. It follows on from 2022’s Nicole:

“When NIKI wrote ‘Every Summertime’, she didn’t expect it to go onto be the lead single from the soundtrack of Marvel epic Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings. Nor did she expect it to become a viral sensation and her biggest song to date. “It was just one of those last-minute songs that we created at the tail end of the process [of making the soundtrack],” she reflects on a Zoom call from LA. “It’s interesting that it was kind of the throwaway back burner song and now it’s taking off.”

And take off it has. The sunkissed, smooth slice of classic R&B has taken over TikTok and racked up more than 90 million streams on Spotify alone – and counting. While the life it’s taken on might be surprising to its creator, the song’s success won’t feel completely out of the blue to anyone who’s been following the Indonesian singer-songwriter’s journey so far. On it, she’s proven herself to be an imaginative and essential artist whose tracks lift you off into new worlds with each listen.

For the latest in NME’s In Conversation series, we caught up with NIKI to talk about ‘Every Summertime’, Shang-Chi, new music, what to expect from her upcoming Coachella performance and more.

‘Every Summertime’ was inspired by an unlikely artist

It isn’t often these days that Barry White is cited as an influence on a track that’s soaring in popularity; but that’s just who NIKI and her producer Jacob Ray looked to when they were writing her sleeper hit ‘Every Summertime’. Specifically, the balmy jam was inspired by White’s habit of talking in his songs.

“Nobody really talks in their songs anymore,” NIKI explains. “I feel like that trend died in the ‘90s – where it’d be music and just really low voices. We were listening to them just bewildered as to how people made music back then.” What started out as fun listening sessions quickly began to feed into the “magical” moment of writing the Shang-Chi soundtrack single, helping NIKI make a “total car jam” all of her own.

Moving to America has changed her relationship with her hometown of Jakarta

Late last year, NIKI blessed us with another beautiful single in ‘Split’, in which she detailed her feelings on having to adapt and assimilate between her hometown of Jakarta and her adopted home of LA. “Kinda wish I knew what I meant when I say I miss home,” she sings over a timeless, soulful foundation. “Guess I’m forever caught between two worlds / Right foot rock, left foot hard place, head and heart at war.”

“It’s really weird cos, coming to America, I experienced culture shock and now I live in America and I come back home to Indo and then I experience reverse culture shock,” she laughs. That takes the form of “very micro things” like the heat that hits when you first step out of the airport on arrival. “It’s been so long since I’ve adapted to that or been acclimated to that kind of weather, so I noticed it. There are all these things that I took for granted or didn’t notice because you acclimate to your environment, and then you step away and come back.”

Splitting her time between the US and Indonesia has changed the way she thinks about her hometown, the singer-songwriter explaining that the cliché “absence makes the heart grow fonder” has a lot of truth to it. “I view Jakarta in this new way where my love for it has grown,” she says. “My appreciation has deepened and changed. As a kid growing up in one place forever, you’re just like, ‘Yeah it’s home, whatever’ and then having that taken away from you and stepping out of your comfort zone tends to create an appreciation for where you’re from.”

NIKI’s new music goes back to her YouTube roots

Before she moved to the US and before she joined up with the 88Rising crew, NIKI got her start on YouTube, sharing acoustic covers and original songs in the indie-folk vein. Still a teenager at the time, she gained small success with that material, scoring tens of thousands of subscribers and, after winning a competition, opened for Taylor Swift when The Red Tour came through Jakarta in 2014.

While NIKI’s debut album ‘Moonchild’ and recent singles might have skewed towards more electronically produced R&B and pop, what’s coming next will see her picking up the six-string once again. “I’ve been working more guitar-based [songs],” she shares of what she’s been working on lately. “I’ve felt this beckoning call back towards my singer-songwriter roots, so I’ve been exploring and experimenting with that a lot.”

Writing on guitar will likely change the songs she’s writing in ways other than sound, she says, noting that the instrument tends to lead her to write lyrics that are “naturally deeper”: “It just has more substance to it emotionally. When you work with a beat, there’s a lot of things going on and the music guides you and guides what the song must be. But when you’re just with a guitar, it’s easier to dictate what the song could be”.

I want to move on to a few interview from this year. In this, from The New York Times, we learn how a 2010 Taylor Swift documentary, E! True Hollywood Story, set NIKI on a career in music. How it was a revelatory moment for her. Buzz is her third studio album. Moving towards West Cost Folk-Rock. A world away from what she was writing and releasing from the start. Perhaps understandable that she sees now as a fresh chapter and does not look back as fondly as some artists might:

“Zefanya was 15 when she won an online contest to open a Swift concert in Jakarta. In her dressing area before the show, Niki said, “I just see this slender arm poke through the curtain and just peel it back, and she goes, ‘Hi, I’m Taylor, nice to meet you.’ And I just froze, like, oh my gosh, I’m seeing Taylor Swift in the flesh. I remember not being able to say anything to her.” (They took a picture.)

Soon afterward, Zefanya — like countless musical teenagers in the 2010s — started her own YouTube channel, nzee24, singing covers and unveiling her own songs. English was her favorite subject at school, and she delighted in polysyllabic rhymes. Unlike many YouTube bedroom pop creators, she didn’t just strum and sing — she assembled multitrack productions.

Niki continues to produce or co-produce all of her songs. “She’s a great producer,” Ethan Gruska, who co-produced many of the songs on “Buzz,” said in a video interview from his Los Angeles studio. “My job usually, with her, is to take things that are well thought out and sounding really great and scale up. It’s almost like color correcting.”

Zefanya accepted a scholarship to Lipscomb University, a Christian school in Nashville, knowing the city is a music-business hub. During her freshman year, a song that she wrote and uploaded to YouTube at 16, “Little Souls,” caught the ear of the Indonesian rapper Rich Brian.

“I cringe whenever I hear that song,” Niki said. “It was too long. It had no coherent structure. And for some reason people really enjoyed it. I think it was the genuine honesty.”

Brian brought her music to 88rising, an American label and management company that cultivates Asian and Asian American songwriters performing English-language pop. When she signed with the company, she dropped out of college and moved to Los Angeles to record as Niki. She took down her YouTube channel, and her early singles for 88rising positioned her as a pop-R&B songwriter, backed by electronics and eager for romance. One single, “Lowkey,” has racked up more than 468 million plays on Spotify. Her 2020 debut album, “Moonchild,” had more somber ambitions, with moody synthesized tracks and high-flown metaphors.

PHOTO CREDIT: Justin J Wee for The New York Times

In the isolation of the early pandemic, Niki reconsidered her teenage songs and decided — glancing toward Swift remaking her early albums — that some were worth reclaiming. In her bedroom she had sung, plainly but gracefully, about high-school insecurities and heartaches.

“I cringe whenever I hear that song,” Niki said of “Little Souls.” “It was too long. It had no coherent structure. And for some reason people really enjoyed it. I think it was the genuine honesty.”Credit...Justin J Wee for The New York Times

For her 2022 album, “Nicole,” she reworked some of her YouTube songs and wrote new ones in their spirit. The songs resonated worldwide; “Backburner,” “High School in Jakarta,” “Oceans & Engines” and “Take a Chance With Me” have each been streamed more than 100 million times. But Niki’s perspective was changing.

“‘Nicole’ is unapologetically just so saccharine,” she said. “When you’re 18, you think, ‘This breakup is cataclysmic,’ you know? I’m 25 now, and I was 17 then, and my frontal lobe is developing as we speak. I would hope I’m a lot more reasonable nowadays.”

Some songs on “Buzz” deal with a more recent breakup. Niki sings about a relationship that ended after “four full laps around the sun” in the intricately syncopated “Blue Moon.” In a chugging rocker named “Colossal Loss,” she vows to play “the blame game” and adds, “I’m happy to report that petty feels pretty awesome.” Niki reproaches, “Did You Like Her in the Morning?” in a delicate waltz.

“She’s very calm, very levelheaded,” Gruska said. “It’s cool to see that somebody who is so even can access the tempest of emotions in an artistic way.”

The sound of the new album downplays electronics in favor of hand-played instruments — guitars, drums, piano — as Niki looks back to West Coast music from before she was born: Fleetwood Mac, Sheryl Crow, Joni Mitchell. For Niki, Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” is “the best song ever written.” The dualities of that song echo through “Buzz,” as Niki seeks balance.

Many of the songs on “Buzz” are about turning endings into new beginnings. The album opens with its title track, a catalog of hopeful moments: “It’s the anticipation when the amps turn on/Just cables and crackle,” Niki sings. A prerelease single, “Too Much of a Good Thing,” sets a casual flirtation to a strutting bass line: “I get the feeling that this feeling isn’t one meant to last anyway/So what do you say?” And in “Tsunami,” Niki sings about an overwhelming, elemental infatuation.

If American pop is a musical language that has conquered the world, Niki still finds her Indonesian roots within it, and has delighted in playing to audiences of Asians and Asian Americans who have thanked her for representing them. “Take Care” is one of the songs on “Buzz” that she produced and played entirely on her own. It’s about a couple going separate ways; Niki sings, “You take someone’s clothes off/And someone takes me home.”

She came up with a bass line on her guitar, topped by chords that she played by strumming a paintbrush across an acoustic guitar, the essence of subtlety. After finishing the song, she realized that her vocal melody uses a scale from Indonesian gamelan music: pelog, a set of seven notes usually played on gongs.

“As I was writing it, I didn’t even think twice about it. It was just like, ‘This feels like the melody that I want in there,’” Niki said. “It just flows out of me”.

There are great interviews like this that I would recommend people read. I am going to end with a couple of NME feature. Well, an interview and a review. In this NME interview, it is said how Nicole Zefanya loosened up and took the reins for her third studio album following exhaustion from touring and career pressure. It was a very strained time. Out of the other side came this real musical revelation and evolution. You can feel it through Buzz:

“When I’m artistically stuck, I like looking to the past as a palate cleanser,” she says. “I had a lot of reservations about updating the songs but I wanted to stay true to the spirit of it. I feel like that schmaltz and saccharine drama was also kind of the charm and superpower of [‘Nicole’]. It’s very difficult, as a 25-year-old, to lean into that kind of honesty you have when you’re 17.”

‘Nicole’’s pivot to the personal was, as it turns out, necessary for NIKI. ‘Every Summertime’, her blithe, joyous love song released for the soundtrack of Marvel’s Shang-Chi, blew up far beyond the intended audience of the superhero film, trending on TikTok and racking up nearly 400million Spotify plays. It’s one of NIKI’s top streamed singles, but she admits that there was a “level of detachment” in writing it, as it was meant for “a larger project that was bigger than me and what I had to say”.

“‘Nicole’ was my attempt at sort of saying, ‘Hey, thank you for listening to that. But also, this is the more personal and diaristic side of me that essentially feels more like me in music form,’” NIKI says. “‘Nicole’ was a necessary stepping stone towards the kind of artist I want to be and the kind of music that really does feel satiating and fulfilling to my soul – I feel like I needed to put out ‘Nicole’ in order to put out ‘Buzz’,” she concludes.

Like ‘Strong Girl’, NIKI wrote the rest of the song on ‘Buzz’ while she toured ‘Nicole’, informing her decision to cut wordy verses and tweak chord progressions to maximise the songs’ live potential. One song that was tricky to perform prior was ‘High School In Jakarta’ – “I would genuinely be out of breath the first few shows, and it was no one else’s fault but my own,” NIKI laughs.

“[I dug] deep into the musicality of my songwriting, which I feel sometimes can be masked by a very pop formula”

In contrast, ‘Buzz’ is much more sparse, relaxed, and loose. “The goal was to just invite more chillness onstage.” NIKI took her songs to producers who worked with artists she carries torches for: ‘Nicole’ collaborator Ethan Gruska (who also worked on Phoebe Bridgers’ ‘Punisher’) and Tyler Chester (who recently worked on Madison Cunningham’s ‘Revealer’).

Studio sessions with them were sometimes “nerve-wracking” for NIKI. Some songs were either recorded live, in one take, or without a metronome, in an environment that was “more organic, loose, and musical, which is what I’ve always kind of craved and dreamed of in terms of playing things live”.

The process was a double-edged sword: It “shone a light on: ‘how good a musician am I?’” but also allowed NIKI to “dig deep into the musicality of my songwriting, which I feel sometimes can be masked by a very pop formula of four-chord progressions and syllabic lyrical choices.”

By and large, ‘Buzz’ is filled with colourful flourishes on great loves chased and lost. NIKI astutely chronicles the prospect of a soulmate (‘Magnets’), a hookup (‘Too Much Of A Good Thing’) and that one crippling crush (‘Tsunami’). There’s room for grieving amicable partings (‘Take Care’), just as there is space to lash out at exes. On ‘Colossal Loss’, NIKI howls: “Is this what kids call petty? / I’m happy to report that petty feels pretty awesome….’cause you and I, we don’t talk / to my benefit and your colossal loss”.

The album closes quietly with the strangely hopeful standout ‘Nothing Can’, which is about being comfortable with the idea of saving yourself from pain and suffering because “no one and nothing can”. In keeping with the spirit of ‘Buzz’, she draws attention to what comes next: “But you still smile at a stranger / And you still make your weekend plans…But you’ll still write another song / And you’ll still get breakfast with the band.”

“There are still so many little moments of joy, hope, and freedom in between [that] sort of redeem suffering, which is just general human experience,” NIKI says. “That’s how ‘Buzz’ started. It was me learning to fall in love with touring and making music that resonated with me, not just this overwhelming sense of, I must be this thing that I guess everyone wants me to be early in my career.”

And who does NIKI want to be now as ‘Buzz’ season approaches? “I think the best way of describing it is I feel awake for the first time – ‘Buzz’ has really felt like me stepping into myself, my authenticity, and my own power, the first odyssey where I have been completely steering the ship on my own. I feel a lot more confident about who I am as an artist”.

I want to end with a review of Buzz from NME. Such a remarkable album, you do not need to know about NIKI’s musical past to appreciate Buzz. It ranks alongside the best albums of this year. Someone who I hope gets a lot more attention here in the U.K. If you have not heard NIKI or know much about her, I would suggest you follow her on social media. Listen back to her previous music but also really explore Buzz and what she is putting into the world now:

“Since the Jakarta-born, Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter signed with 88rising in 2017, she’s explored different expressions of her artistry. She tied up her stories in noirish R&B on her 2020 debut album ‘Moonchild’, and two years later, revisited some songs she’d written in her teen years via the saccharine pop of ‘Nicole’. At the beginning of 2024, she shared the standalone single ‘24’, reflecting on the first quarter-century of her life in a Joni Mitchell-indebted piece of hushed folk-pop.

Mitchell’s influence can be felt on ‘Buzz’ too – as well as that of Sheryl Crow, Liz Phair and Fleetwood Mac. Here, NIKI deals in hook-filled alt-rock, ‘Too Much Of A Good Thing’ strutting on a ’60s pop bassline that means business, shuffling drums and a swooning guitar line weaving around it like they’re in a flirtatious dance. The riff of ‘Colossal Loss’ offers a buzzsaw accompaniment to her devilish descent into petty games, while ‘Magnets’ strips things back to create a mesmerising glacial drift.

‘Buzz’ is the most advanced its creator has ever sounded musically and lyrically – even when NIKI keeps things simple, writing like she’s cornered you in the bathroom on a night out or is recapping dating tales with the girls over brunch. “No guys, I swear he’s not emotionally unavailable / He’s just traumatised,” she protests on ‘Focus’, her defensive tone suggesting she knows her friends are right.

The hum of romantic possibility might characterise much of NIKI’s third album, but it’s awash with heartbreak too. Between the coquetry and cool are wrenching vignettes from a wrecked relationship. ‘Take Care’ depicts the dividing up of a couple and their city, and ‘Blue Moon’ realising what’s been lost. ‘Paths’ is most devastating of all, though, NIKI torn between accepting her fate and holding onto hope for a future reunion: “My youth is in your past / You’ll always have that / And though it didn’t last / I hope our paths cross again.”

Whatever the future holds for NIKI and wherever her musical explorations take her next, ‘Buzz’ solidifies her place as one of music’s most incisive songwriters right now. It’s an album full of heady thrills and emotional lows that confirms, if you’ve been sleeping on NIKI so far, you can no longer do so without truly missing out”.

I am new to NIKI’s work. I think that she is a phenomenal artist that has a long future ahead of her. Her story is fascinating. I feel we will be hearing and seeing a lot more from her very soon. I only had to hear a couple of tracks from Buzz to really bond with the album and appreciate NIKI’s music. An artist who has taken big steps. It will be fascinating seeing where she goes from here. I am excited. There is no doubt that this Indonesian artist is someone who should be…