MNE

Description

Raw and incisive, sensitive and poetic. There is a visceral intensity in Nikola that can be found in both his lyrics and his performance. His first album, MNE (the three-letter country code for Montenegro), is a tumultuous, introspective record, driven by the search for his roots and identity, between France and Montenegro. "I used to dream of Paris and now I dream of Montenegro, of Podgorica, of the peaceful village where my family lives between the fields and mountains that plunge into the Adriatic Sea. Today, the country of my ancestors, which I know relatively little, as I haven't lived there long enough, seems to be calling me." The 23-year-old singer, songwriter, composer, and producer, discovered at the Inouïs du Printemps de Bourges, blends oral poetry, questions, and observations to open wide his intimate pages to collective history. He explores the transmission, or non-transmission, within a genealogy marked by displacement and a history full of gaps. From magmatic surges to the tradition of French chanson, from urban breakthroughs to modern Balkan sound incursions, from enveloping softness to bursts of anger, from a chanted voice to one passed through the filter of a machine. So last summer, Nikola traveled the Balkans in a van. A way to see with his own eyes what he projected into this album. And to realize that, definitively, he has come a long way. Nikola will be opening for Grand Corps Malade's Zénith shows from January to March 2024.