We Speak Music
senna JMB Shares Debut Album ‘Purity’
senna JMB, an artist based in Brussels, creates a very personal, vibrant, and surreal world incorporating elements of cloud rap, postpunk, IDM-influenced electronics, and experimental pop. He returns with his debut album, Purity.
Purity, deliberately concentrated on ‘songs’ as such, at times evoking the pop-meets-post-punk aesthetic of Yves Tumour or the pop-rap of Yung Lean. Together with Kiche (Ismaël Iken), the beats were closely co-produced, and while they are unmistakably punky and club-oriented, they also carry a strong sense of nostalgia and urban unrest.
The breaky beats, colorful synths, and fluffy autotune all have a contemporary digital atmosphere to them, even though Purity’s sound isn’t entirely modern. The unrelenting interplay between the frenzied and unapologetic guitars results in a sound that is reminiscent of discordant guitar tones from the ‘80s and ‘90s yet in step with today’s hybrid internet culture. senna JMB has one foot in the past, but both eyes are focused on the future.
With those guitar aspects, the eight-track album’s intention becomes even more personal because, at the age of 14, senna JMB began learning the guitar on his own. He then performed live at Pukkelpop, Best Kept Secret, and Ancienne Belgique, among other venues, as a guitarist, lyricist, and co-vocalist with the band Fornet.
Purity, has lively and upbeat productions with dreaming, ethereal, and punky moments combined with melancholia and bleakness. The genre blend of cloud-rap, post-punk, hyper-pop, pop, and electronica mashes the entire album creatively together in a nice manner.
senna JMB takes listeners on a self-referential journey through his punky, image-heavy rap singles ‘Weekend’, ‘Bossa Nova’, and ‘Lotus’. He blends memories from his childhood with views of and escapes from the present, leading him to a hubris-induced crash into a fantasized, collapsing future. The songs feature a strong bassline, ethereal synths, and guitars, lively and breaky drums, and existential lyrics in swaying rap flows.
‘North Sea’ is a darker track that features lyrics full of escape and drift, a danceable trap beat, and IDM-inspired keys. While ‘Genesis’ captures the rawness and bewildering attractions of the city, ‘Slap Back’ harmonizes a Brazilian baile funk rhythm with carefree and sunny atmospheres.
senna JMB displays a gloomy side on the songs ‘Chains’ and ‘Retro Green.’ His expressiveness is captivating and gives Purity’s unique sound new depth through enigmatic, introspective themes.
On the album, senna JMB comments, “Purity, counts eight uninhibited tracks that surf on a dreamy energy and create a rule-free world that makes it impossible for senna JMB to be pigeonholed. Its title refers to rebirth through music, to staying true to intuition, the freedom of inconsistency and change.”
‘What’s Next?’, the sophomore album from Danish artist NP York, is a dreamy indie-rock record that reflects on lost youth and the places, people, and versions of ourselves that we leave behind as we grow older.
Written in the aftermath of a severe period of depression and as somewhat an outsider of Copenhagen’s music scenes, ‘What’s Next?’ is an album about the strange distance that develops between who we were and who we’re becoming. Across the record’s 10 tracks, NP York turns that distance into melancholic, guitar-driven songs about aging, memory, friendship, ambition, and the quiet realization that youth is something you can never quite return to.
Rather than treating growing older as a simple loss, ‘What’s Next?’ lives in the tension between grief and acceptance as it moves between existential reflections and epic moments of blissful uplift. There’s the paradox of leaping headfirst into new love when you know the cost of failed romance in ‘As Bold As A Heart’, there’s revisiting late teenage night drives and old friendships in ‘One More Day’ and there’s the effervescent gem ‘Trier’, which deals with holding on, waiting for answers and persevering.
Musically, ‘What’s Next?’ draws from the emotional immediacy of indie rock, balancing chiming guitars and restless rhythms with expansive poignancy. NP York’s rich baritone vocals anchor down lyrics that combine a poet’s ear for emotion with a humourist’s wit as he ironically muses on childhood dreams and expectations from the reality of becoming a man in his mid-30s and the absurdities and chaos of the world around him.
The result is a record that feels nostalgic without becoming sentimental, a collection of songs less interested in preserving the past than in understanding why we miss it. As the wild and exuberant yearning for youth in tracks like ‘LIE!’ and ‘As Bold As A Heart’ turn to maturity in more mellow tracks like ‘Let’s Talk’ and ‘Better Place’, ‘What’s Next?’ becomes about a past that has shaped us and the moment we realize we have outgrown it. It asks what happens when places that once felt like home become a memory, when old friends begin living different lives, and when the future starts to feel less like an open road and more like something that requires choosing.
‘What’s Next?’ follows NP York’s 2024 debut album ‘Music for Fools’, which was a sumptuous intimate singer-songwriter affair of personal catharsis featuring graceful string arrangements by Who Killed Bambi, alongside subdued pianos and raw guitars. Backed again by his band of musician friends ‘The Fools’ and recorded live with producers Kaspar Kaae and Asger Techau (David Bowie, Lou Reed and Tony Visconti) at the helm, there seems to be more letting go, nerve and release in ‘What’s Next?’, as the apathy of feeling lost in the world, makes way for the optimism of new love, a revived sense of creativity and the constant urge to explore and the question: WHAT’S NEXT?.
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