6.7

GENRE: Pop
YEAR OF RELEASE: 2022

Nicole Zefanya, a.k.a. NIKI, is a twenty-three-year-old singer whose career went from posting videos on Youtube to sharing the stage with Taylor Swift during Swift’s Red Tour stop in Indonesia. Now living in Los Angeles and signed to record label 88rising, Zefanya is undoubtedly an inspiration for young Asian women pursuing a career in music, especially in the competitive American market. Undeniably, the singer has broken a lot of barriers. Her sophomore album, Nicole, which was featured on Billboard ahead of its release, it’s billed as a denuded version of the singer. At times, the record flies above the surface with straightforward ballads and less complicated storylines. But Nicole gets lost in a voluptuous amount of influences, entangled in its purpose of sounding like a not-so-commercial indie pop project. Zefanya’s euphonious voice is held hostage on an LP plagued by convoluted songwriting, with tracks that draw too much inspiration from songs like “All Too Well” to stand on their own feet. The moments of unshakable deja vu mixed with her rich, agreeable timbre make the record a bittersweet but nonetheless worthwhile listening.

As a self-portrait, Nicole succeeds. The album is a collection of run-on sentences that recount Zefanya’s juicy life as a teenager. But as a pop record targeted at a younger audience, though relatable, the album provides no space for engagement. The first track, “Before,” which is also the first single off Nicole, has a nice crescendo with its guitars, bass, and soft drums, but the bewildering long lines don’t make any justice to the song’s ambitious construction. In “High School in Jakarta,” Zefanya’s witty recallings of her time as a high schooler don’t quite fit the structure of the song: filling up lyrics with “yadda yadda” just to rhyme doesn’t fly with me; having backing vocals repeat your words in a screaming manner to fill up the beat marks two strikes in one song. Surprisingly, the philosophical free will and predestination innuendos on “Backburner” show Zefanya at her most normal and less pretentious yet: her songwriting is edited here, shedding a light on her intelligence in a strikingly beautiful way. “The Goo Goo Dolls are dead to me/The way you should bе, too/But you bring them up/Along with how much I fucking miss you,” she sings like a pop titan.

When trying to make an indie record, it might be cool to use obscure references if they come from a place of natural inspiration, but at times, it looks like Zefanya is doing it just for the sake of sounding smart: the “enneatype four Aquarius” line on “Keeping Tabs” is so pretentious that it sounds like a crop of a bored Google search. In the moments she quits being so ostentatious, the artists comes across as more sincere. Slow burners “The Apartment We Won’t Share,” “Facebook Friends,” and the flowery “Anaheim” all find beauty in simplicity. On “Autumn,” Zefanya’s novel-like lyrics pick up the pace with the help of amicable drums and ethereal sound effects. If there’s any question left, “Oceans & Engines” settles it: Zefanya’s voice was made for ballads, and that’s why the latter part of Nicole exceeds the former in quality. In fact, the second half of the album would make a far better EP, had it not been included on an album with the first tracks.

At length, Nicole is a collage of muddy ideas and fussy lyrics misplaced on clean melodies like stained plates laid on a white table cloth. It might not be Zefanya’s fault: her sin is being too smart for her own good. Her canorous tunes and the productions of the songs are pleasurable, and Zefanya’s instrumentation choices hint at an artist that, with time, will grow confident enough to know when it’s time to say less, or even say more but in a concise and more relatable way. Who knows, there might be a time when we see NIKI, the artist, disrupting established concepts of pop music—the brains, the talent, the voice, and the sentiment are all there. She just needs to push harder if pushing boundaries is what she wants to do. For now, all we can do is give her a chance while we find our own shortcuts to identification with her music.

Listen to Nicole: