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WILL THIS MAKE ME GOOD OUT THIS FRIDAY VIA ATO RECORDS
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photo by: Daniel Regan
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(Toronto, ON – May 12, 2020) – Today, Nick Hakim shares a new song and video from his forthcoming album WILL THIS MAKE ME GOOD out this Friday, May 15th, via ATO Records. “BOUNCING” is a delicate and melancholic track that finds Hakim yearning for companionship and warmth. Hakim had this to say about the track: “BOUNCING” is a sound bath where I wrote about one of the coldest days in New York I remember, while lying in my bed, restless by a radiator. It’s about feeling uneasy.”
The Nelson Nance-directed visual for “BOUNCING” acts as a sequel to the heart of the album, “QADIR,” which was also directed by Nance and named Best New Track by Pitchfork among other critical praise. Nance adds, “The ‘BOUNCING’ video asks the viewer to question our drive to find spectacles and how the pursuit of such can lead to becoming a spectacle. There is nothing inherently wrong with viewing or being a spectacle but I think it’s healthy to question if our energy is being put in the right place when interfacing with what draws our attention.” “BOUNCING” is the third offering from the album following “CRUMPY,” and the aforementioned “QADIR.”
WILL THIS MAKE ME GOOD also follows his NPR Tiny Desk (Home) Concert, his contribution on Lianne La Havas’ forthcoming album, his songs with Anderson .Paak (“Headlow”), Lance Skiiiwalker (“In the World”), frequent collaborators Onyx Collective (“My Funny Valentine”), Sporting Life (“Approach”), and IGBO (“Titas (Beloved Ones)”) and his features on Nappy Nina’s “What You Want” with Ambrose Akinmusire and Slingbaum’s “Strangers” alongside FKA Twigs and Oumou Sangaré.
While WILL THIS MAKE ME GOOD is distinctly Nick Hakim, it does represent a tonal shift from 2017’s Green Twins that reflects the ideas with which he grappled while making the record. To prepare listeners for the experience, Hakim shares the following statement about the record:
“I feel the people simmering, on our way to the boiling point. There’s a lot of madness going on around us and this world can feel so cold. It can get hard to remember what makes it worth it. The people around me and the music I love helps.
For a while, I couldn’t write. I worked on new music but couldn’t find the right words. But that time was just a build-up to the three months of expression that led to this album. I hope this music will raise awareness about where we are right now. About how we are living on this planet. About how we treat our neighbors. About community. About depression. About what can heal us and what can’t. About overmedication, overstimulation and manipulation. About respecting and loving the people around us, because one day they won’t be here-or you won’t. But it’s also true that I’m still trying to figure this record out. People have told me that it’s confusing or that it’s messy-that’s fine. There’s so much pressure on artists to commit to being one thing, or to restrict an album to exploring just one subject or sound. But my life isn’t like that, and so my music can’t be like that either. I’m not thinking about this music as a product to be bought and sold, or how I’ll buy your interest. This is my world; a lot of friends touched this record, and that makes me feel lucky and proud. These songs are glimpses into my community. I’m exploring, but I’m not alone. It’s a journey in progress; it’s an experiment, every day.” Listen to “BOUNCING” above, see album details below, and stay tuned for more from Nick Hakim coming soon.
WILL THIS MAKE ME GOOD cover art
Nick Hakim
WILL THIS MAKE ME GOOD
ATO Records
May 15, 2020
1. ALL THESE CHANGES
2. WTMMG
3. BOUNCING
4. LET IT OUT
5. QADIR
6. ALL THESE INSTRUMENTS
7. DRUM THING
8. VINCENT TYLER
9. CRUMPY
10. GODS DIRTY WORK
11. SEEING DOUBLE
12. WHOO
About Nick Hakim:
Confusion. Repetition. Musical hypnosis and drum patterns. Hope. Cities underwater. Kindness. The texture of a community. Care. For the last couple years this is some of what’s occupied Nick Hakim. The New York-based musician works out of a pleasantly cluttered loft studio in Ridgewood, and like so much of the city, it’s a neighborhood of deep history that’s in flux; if you spend even a little time there you might start to wonder about what the future holds, and what it means to be someone’s neighbor. Hakim’s been wondering about it, and his new album WILL THIS MAKE ME GOOD is something like a response.
In 2017, Hakim’s debut album, the critically acclaimed Green Twins, announced the singer-songwriter as an idiosyncratic talent, making music that resists genre classification. You could work a song of his into an HBO original series, as Insecure did; you could smoke to it and wonder about your ego; you could slow dance with the person you love-it’s not versatility, so much as a lack of boundaries and a strong sense of intuition. It drew on the music Hakim listened to growing up in Washington D.C. with his older brother and parents, who emigrated to the States from Peru: American soul music and political folk from South America; Go-go and hardcore.
The time since Green Twins has been complicated; you can hear it in the swirling sprawl of his sophomore release WILL THIS MAKE ME GOOD. Hakim lost a notebook of new songs during a trip overseas not long after Green Twins came out. He tried to recall from memory those drafts and the fight to do so resulted in writer’s block. Musical ideas still came and he worked with his peers, some including Onyx Collective, Anderson .Paak, Jesse and Forever, Lianne La Havas, and Slingbaum-but when it came time to write his own songs, lyrics eluded him. Then a childhood friend passed away.
“He was a little younger than me, but we had a similar path,” Hakim says. “We both had trouble in school and switched schools a lot. He was the youngest in his family and his older sisters asked me to watch out for him.” Affected deeply by his passing, Hakim struggled to articulate his feelings in the wake of the tragedy.
He recalls advice from a close collaborator, Andrew Sarlo, who told him during this difficult period, “Pretend there’s no audience. Don’t think about an outside perspective.” By turning inward, Hakim found a way to express himself and the first song that emerged addressed his departed friend. “QADIR” is the longest song in Hakim’s catalogue; it’s the heart of WILL THIS MAKE ME GOOD, originally an 11-minute epic that builds to a shattering vocal performance accompanied by a ten-person chorus. “If I really sink into a recording, I don’t want it to end,” Hakim says. “It’s repetitive and hypnotizing, like a trance-that’s intentional. The song is my ode to him. It’s my attempt to relate to how he must have been feeling.”
He sings about how “there’s a complexity to being kind”-to yourself, to your space, to your community. “That’s a direct reflection of the neighborhoods that I’ve experienced across the East Coast, from Washington D.C. to Baltimore to Philadelphia to New York to Boston-all places I have ties to,” he explains. Accepting everyone around you is a daily task; it’s also a reminder to keep close the people you love, because nothing is promised. “When I heard of Qadir’s passing I hadn’t checked in on him in a while,” Hakim admits. “I say ‘we’ in the first verse of ‘QADIR’ but I really feel like I’m talking to myself.”
WILL THIS MAKE ME GOOD is a question Hakim has asked himself since he was young and struggling in school, when he was prescribed medication in an attempt to correct his wayward attention. It’s a question he still wonders about, and if the album sounds messy, it’s because there are no easy answers to its query. “I’m still trying to figure out what the record is about,” he says. One thing’s for certain though-it is a reflection of what’s happening in his head as he sorts through his life and the tumult around the globe that can’t help but seep in. WILL THIS MAKE ME GOOD articulates a sense of confusion alongside a desire for hope and clarity. Another bravura epic, “Bouncing” describes sleepless nights spent looking for some calm. “It’s such a dark climate these days,” Hakim says, “with what’s going on politically and how immigrants are being treated here in the US. The travel ban, the camps.”
“Sinking down these thoughts at night,” he sings on “BOUNCING” over heavy drums and distortion, his voice a pinched whisper. Across the album, Hakim treats his voice like an instrument to be played in various ways. “All These Instruments,” which was written with his brother, Danny, is a moment where his vocals rings clear. Hakim sings over delicate acoustic guitar about the “strange powers” musical instruments have. “It’s been so damn hard to find some peace/In a world that’s so damn cold and mean,” he sings.
If there’s any possibility of reprieve from that coldness and meanness, it’s in fingers on guitar strings, in the voice of someone you love, close to your ear. That’s something that could make any of us good, if only for a spell.
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