Nina Nesbitt has released her highly anticipated new album Älskar today via Cooking Vinyl. Building upon the huge success of her 2019 release, The Sun Will Come Up, The Seasons Will Change, the new album finds Nina Nesbitt embracing herself more than ever and finding love along the way.
Speaking about the new album, Nina reveals, “‘Älskar’ is about love in all its raw forms, whether that be my relationship, family, friends, or learning to love myself. I really like the dynamics of the album. It has that Swedish feel to it, as I got to work with a lot of my idols from the pop scene there. But it also has a Scottish element too – the storytelling and the folk – which influenced the other half of it.”
As we’ve heard from singles such as ‘When You Lose Someone’ and ‘Pressure Makes Diamonds’, ‘Älskar’ switches confidently between confessional, emotionally-charged songwriting, and instantly addictive modernist pop bangers. The record’s new focus track ‘I Should Be A Bird’ comes from its introspective side, its acoustic guitar melody providing the backdrop for a lyric which tackles the complicated emotions of being an empath and trying to set boundaries when those close to you are struggling. As Nina explains, “My first reaction is to help them through it but sometimes you can make it worse by being there too much.” The song is accompanied by a Wolf James-directed official music video, which was filmed with the beautiful natural scenery of the Brecon Beacons mountain range in South Wales.
The project commenced when Nina visited her family in Sweden. It was a trip which also provided an opportunity to work with a range of talent from the nation’s music scene, including Elvira Anderfjärd (best known for her Taylor Swift remixes), Jack & Coke (Tove Lo, Carly Rae Jepsen). The two roots of Nina’s family heritage bookend the album. The tone-setting ‘Gaol’ (Scottish-Gaelic for ‘love’) is a collage of voice-notes from fans, each saying “I love you” in languages ranging from Estonian to Korean, while the gorgeously cinematic title track nods to Sigur Rós.
There are numerous other new highlights set to be discovered by fans, including the beat-driven, hedonistic romance of ‘Teenage Chemistry’ and the stuttering, playful pop that bounces within ‘Limited Edition’. But it never shies away from confronting issues head on. ‘Older Guys’, for example, is a song about the changing perceptions of love. What may have felt exciting and rebellious when you were younger, now just feels different with more life experience under the belt.
Nina wrote or co-wrote all twelve songs that feature on ‘Älskar’ and has production credits on half of the record. Her other collaborators include top tier songwriter Dan Wilson (Adele’s ‘Someone Like You’) and Grammy-winning mixer Manon Grandjean (Stormzy, Dave).
Nina’s new music follows the huge global fanbase she established with her second album ‘The Sun Will Come Up, The Seasons Will Change’. The album amassed a staggering half-a-billion streams including for the now classic ‘Loyal To Me’ which was Top 10 most added at Top 40 radio and propelled her into Spotify’s top 500 artists in the world. The track, which Nina performed on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert (her US late night TV debut), earned acclaim from the likes of Marie Claire who praised the album for its “Joyful, dance-y pop with wrenching indie ballads, displaying a newfound maturity in the…songwriting,” and Billboard Magazine who hailed it “an iridescent work of pop mastery, showcasing Nesbitt’s proficiency as a songwriter, vocalist and producer,” with V Magazine proclaiming, “’The Sun Will Come Up’… captures the precise moment an artist finds herself blossoming into a full-blown pop star.”
This Fall, Nina will embark on a UK and European tour with plans to return to the US in 2023. Stay tuned for news and updates. All dates can be found HERE.