Brutal and incisive, sensitive and poetic. There is a visceral intensity in Nikola that can be found both in his lyrics and in his performance. His first album MNE (three-letter country code for Montenegro) is a record of tumultuous introspection, traversed by the quest for his roots and his identity, between France and Montenegro. "I dreamed of Paris and now I dream of Montenegro, of Podgorica, of the peaceful village where my family lives between the fields and the mountains that plunge into the Adriatic Sea. Today, the land of my ancestors, which I know little about because 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 questions transmission, or non-transmission, within a genealogy marked by displacement and a history full of gaps. From magmatic boils to the tradition of French chanson, from urban breakthroughs to modern Balkan sonic incursions, from enveloping sweetness to outbursts of anger, from a spoken voice to one passed through the filter of the machine. So last summer, Nikola traveled through the Balkans in a van. A way to see with his own eyes what he had projected into this record. And to realize that definitively, he has come a long way.
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