There have to be one thing within the water in Copenhagen, the place for the previous few years a cohort of rising artists have been making elegant, hyperreal songs in singer-songwriter mode, however from an digital background. Some members of this scene transmute guitar music by way of MIDI, giving their pastoral landscapes a freaky sheen; others apply classical coaching to homespun electroacoustic R&B. These loosely linked artists meet someplace between the Danish countryside and the uncanny valley, capturing totally different angles of the “actual world” as mirage: shimmering, bending, retreating.
From this pool of expertise emerges the debut album of Nice Glindvad Jensen, who makes music as Nice. The singer and producer studied at Copenhagen’s esteemed (and free) Rhythmic Music Conservatory, whose alumni embrace ML Buch, Erika de Casier, Molina, and Astrid Sonne. She’s spent a decade because the vocalist for the electro-pop group CHINAH, collaborates with Sonne in a aspect mission known as Coined, and co-wrote songs for Okay-pop superstars NewJeans with de Casier final yr. However Rocky High Ballads, her first full-length solo mission, stems from a childhood reminiscence of listening to her bluegrass musician father play his banjo by way of the wall: “You may hear it,” she recalled in an interview this yr, “however you possibly can’t actually hear it.”
The songs on Rocky High Ballads—sample-based productions with natural instrumentation, written and produced by Nice—inform a narrative of a love affair that’s laborious to grasp. “You kiss me like a stranger,” she sighs on “Coasting,” downtempo dream pop for the spa or chillout lounge. Then she delivers to her lover a cryptic prophecy: “You’ll meet me in a bath/Upon a mountain.” These enigmatic characters transfer by way of a quiet, intense world that appears suffused with which means that’s simply past our grasp: the evening sky turns unusual colours, fires burn within the rain, and folks typically get misplaced, purposely or in any other case. The lovers maintain leaving, or wishing they hadn’t, or begging the opposite to remain, although it’s laborious to inform which one is which, or why they must go. “There’s one thing/I’m leaving/Every single day/One thing I’ve to provide you…” Nice sings softly on the twangy “Shedding Tennessee,” however she doesn’t ever say what it may be.
