Nick Hakim – Small Things (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 27:07 minutes | 532 MB | Genre: Soul, Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © NYXO Records – tmwrk records
Nick Hakim and Roy Nathanson announce their collaborative album Small Things. Executive-produced by Isaiah Barr of Onyx Collective, the album sees two artists who are staples in the Onyx Collective universe join forces. The creative process behind the record was an organic one: Hakim read some of Nathanson’s poetry which in turn inspired several chords that became the foundation of Small Things. Nathanson puts it best: “it seems we were lucky. Looks like we got ourselves on the moon the old fashioned way.” The album will be out on April 16th and will be the debut release on Onyx’s new label, NYXO.
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Nick Hakim – Green Twins (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 46:20 minutes | 478 MB | Genre: Downtempo, Neo Soul
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © ATO Records
First of all, that voice. Anything but refined, Nick Hakim’s singing is cloaked in a kind of otherness. A distant song, as if from another galaxy: the American who grew up in Washington before casting anchor in Brooklyn unfurls around her a diaphanous soul. And it certainly is soul that lies at the heart of her magnificent first album Green Twins. It is as if Nick Hakim had resuscitated Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield, but taking care to make them over a little, with a dash of folk here, or a blush of pop there. Through the melody there runs here an unexpected rhythm or there a surprising instrument: her musical imagination is vast enough to take in South American music she heard at home (her mother is Chilean and her father is Peruvian), or hip-hop from her teenage years… On Roller Skates, a deliberately rickety drum-machine backs up a piercing guitar, itself sickly-sounding, while Nicky Hakim’s voice, in a halo of reverb, transforms the song into a waking dream. Every melody on Green Twins is bathed in a softness (never blandness) that reinforces the music’s dreamlike quality. Because even if Hakim’s voice could thrill fans of Curtis Harding, Cody Chesnutt, Roland Gift and Bilal, the music here is all very much her own, so much so that one wonders if she has in fact invented the gospel music of the third millennium. To be sure, this is the most spellbinding Qobuzissime of the year.
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Nick Hakim – COMETA (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 37:12 minutes | 399 MB | Genre: R&B, Neo Soul
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © ATO Records
Cometa is Nick Hakim’s 3rd full-length album. It is a collection of romantic songs written through different lenses, guided by Hakim’s own experience of falling in love in a way that made him feel like he was floating. The dizzying, out-of-body sensation is the theme that anchors this masterful album, which features guest appearances from Helado Negro, Alex G, Arto Lindsay, and DJ Dahl. The album was recorded between studios and domestic spaces throughout Texas, North Carolina, California, and New York.
Cometa is Nick Hakim’s 3rd full-length album. It is a collection of romantic songs written through different lenses, guided by Hakim’s own experience of falling in love in a way that made him feel like he was floating. The dizzying, out-of-body sensation is the theme that anchors this masterful album, which features guest appearances from Helado Negro, Alex G, Arto Lindsay, and DJ Dahl. The album was recorded between studios and domestic spaces throughout Texas, North Carolina, California, and New York.
The album title is the Spanish translation of “kite,” which is a symbol for elevation in Hakim’s personal life. He sees this as a really beautiful way to speak about feeling uplifted and gravitating toward the idea of being in your own orbit while everything else floats around you like comets in space. Hakim points to a specific lyric from “Happen” that fully encapsulates this concept: “A supernova/ Exploded and changed my world.”
COMETA is a collection of romantic songs that explore various iterations of love that are guided by the full scope of Hakim’s own personal experiences from the mutual love he shares with his community to embracing self-love and falling in love with someone in a way that made him feel like he was floating. “The common thread is I’m lucky to have a support system and love not just in a romantic way, but in friendship with the people that I have around me,” he explains. “It’s really about different lenses looking at moments where I felt captivated and then in moments where I was tryin
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