NIKI

Since breaking through with her 2018 EP Zephyr, NIKI has made a powerful imprint on the pop scene, amassing a devoted global fanbase with over 1.8 billion streams to date and making history as the first Indonesian artist ever to perform at Coachella. But after delivering her critically acclaimed debut album MOONCHILD, the Los Angeles-based singer/songwriter felt compelled to completely reexamine her artistic process—a move that found her revisiting the vast catalog of unfiltered and indie-folk-leaning songs she’d created in high school. As she returned to the stream-of-consciousness approach to songwriting that defined her earliest material, the 24-year-old musician soon arrived at her sophomore album Nicole: a boldly self-possessed body of work written entirely by NIKI, spotlighting her finespun storytelling and warmly expressive vocals more fully than ever before. With the album’s first half comprised of new or never-before-heard songs and its latter half featuring her favorite tracks from her widely beloved YouTube channel, NIKI imbues her songs with the kind of lived-in specificity that immediately reconnects the listener with the rush and devastation of their own first love. Nicole is out now via 88rising.