On ‘Buzz’, NIKI goes from burnout to balance: “I feel awake for the first time”

The song’s about to start (Can you hear it?) / The door’s about to open (Can you feel it?)” Anticipation is palpable on the feathery chorus of ‘Buzz’, and throughout NIKI’s third album of the same name. This excitement about what’s right around the corner was hard-earned, as the record’s buoyant indie pop was born not out of excitement, but fatigue.

• READ MORE: NIKI talks NME through her ‘Firsts’

The singer-songwriter born Nicole Zefanya had been running on empty. “To be honest, I was feeling really overwhelmed with this artist’s life of constantly being uprooted,” the 25-year-old tells NME of the experience touring her last album, 2022’s ‘Nicole’. “I was also trying to wrestle with a completely new identity and sound, and I had to keep it all together onstage for the audience and fans.”

To pull herself out of that tough spot, she wrote a song that she’d later title ‘Strong Girl’ –  a reminder that she would “have to display a lot more strength than you’d initially thought”. NIKI sings urgently: “I’m a pendulum…I just know that I can swing it, I’ll always swing it…Who am I if I can’t be everybody’s strong girl? / Aren’t I?”

Zefanya offers an answer to that rhetorical question: “Growing up in an Asian household, there were a lot of expectations. I’m also the oldest child. So there’s sort of this ingrained sense of perfectionism in me. ‘Strong Girl’ is the synthesis of those things, feeling like you can’t afford to break down, because if you do, then everything and everyone else does too, even though that’s not true. It just feels like it in your mind.”

Still, NIKI always forges ahead. Since she left the Indonesian capital of Jakarta for the United States at 18 – first going to Nashville for university, then dropping out two semesters in to sign with 88rising to pursue music full-time in Los Angeles. Starting out covering songs in her bedroom with an acoustic guitar, she’s since developed a genre-adventurous catalogue, exploring ’90s-influenced R&B (2018 EP ‘Zephyr’), gleaming, conceptual pop (‘Moonchild’, NME’s best Asian album of 2020) and returning to her folk-pop roots only in the last two years with ‘Nicole’, an album that featured songs she had first written as a teen.

“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. “T​​hat’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.”

NIKI’s ‘Buzz’ is out August 9 via 88rising. NIKI will kickstart the record’s world tour in September.

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