If you were ever to go looking for NIKI, you’d probably find her in the garden. A beautiful oasis in her backyard in Los Angeles, it’s one of the places she loves most. She grows an impressive range of fruits, vegetables and herbs here, from strawberries to bok choy to just about every salad ingredient you can think of. “Lately I’ve been harvesting passionfruit and blackberries”, she tells The Forty-Five from her home. “Passionfruit actually grows very well in California weather.”
The singer-songwriter, born Nicole Zefanya, has been an avid gardener for years, picking up the practice after moving to LA from her native Indonesia. “With what I do and being on tour all the time, my life is constantly being uprooted”, she shares. “Gardening has been a beautiful way to feel grounded. You’re putting your hands in the soil, literally getting your hands dirty, and watching things grow very slowly in their own time.”
It was here that inspiration first blossomed for Zefanya’s forthcoming third album, ‘Buzz’. “Every spring I would notice, kind of like clockwork, the bumblebees start to appear in the garden. It became a signal that spring was just around the corner and the promise of harvest was soon to come.”
“I thought that was such a beautiful metaphor”, she continues. “When you hear the buzzing of amps on stage, it means the song’s about to start. The buzz of a doorbell means someone’s at the door. It’s this physical manifestation of being on the precipice, a feeling that you’re on the cusp of something great.”
Indeed, the album – Zefanya’s third after 2022’s ‘Nicole’ and 2018’s ‘Moonchild’ – feels imbued with potential energy. Stirring songs like ‘Magnets’ and title track ‘Buzz’ brim with a palpable feeling of renewal, whilst the undulating, funk-infused ‘Too Much of a Good Thing’ radiates the propulsive drive of strutting down the street. Foraying confidently into funk, rock and folk styles, the album is another sonic evolution for NIKI, whose already genre-defiant artistry has footing across pop, indie and R&B.
“A buzz always seems to signal this flurry of excitement. That really captures how I’ve felt in my career, my songwriting, my artistry and just my general growth as a person on this earth”, Zefanya shares. “This is my third album, but it really feels for the first time like I’m finally awake. I’ve stepped into myself, my power and my art with new conviction.”
“This is my third album, but it really feels for the first time like I’m finally awake. I’ve stepped into myself, my power and my art with new conviction.”
Niki Zefanya
The making of ‘Buzz’ spanned two years, a period marked by transformative events in Zefanya’s life. One was embarking on her first-ever headline tour for ‘Nicole’, which took her across Europe, North America, Australia and Asia for more than a year. With her early experiences of the tour marred by isolation and burnout, Zefanya shifted her focus towards balance and finding joy in the travel and community, soon finding herself “injected with energy and optimism about the world and having this newfound sense of appreciation for all of it – the good, the bad and everything in between.”
The road became the place where much of ‘Buzz’ was written, inspiration finding Zefanya amidst the travel and transience. Tracks like ‘Buzz’ and ‘Tsunami’ were written between airports and beaches, the latter even recorded in a bathroom backstage.
Holed up in a Holiday Inn somewhere on a particularly “long and gruelling” leg of tour, Zefanya started to write the first song for the album – the tender and introspective ‘Strong Girl’. It was intended just for herself, a personal plea for strength as Zefanya struggled with the weight of life, unsure if she could keep it all together. “Who am I if I can’t be everybody’s strong girl?”, goes the gentle refrain. “It’s essentially me saying: ‘I have to be strong all the time, and no one gets it, and I’m tired’.”
“It’s very Capricorn-coded, and one for the eldest daughters to relate to”, Zefanya adds with a knowing grin. The lyric “Soft like wax, sharp as an axe / Both can’t be true in my world” is the “foundation for this song, and this whole project, really”, she highlights. “I have this tension between feeling really connected to my softness as well as my strength, thinking I can’t be both at the same time. How can I be this ‘boss bitch’ on stage but also be crying in my hotel room because I’m going through my own shit? It’s taken me a while – and lots of therapy – to understand what sounds so simple: that yes, those two things can both be true.”
Much as the album celebrates the buzz of new beginnings in love – from the amped-up sucker-punch of falling for someone on ‘Tsunami’, to the sensual pull between new lovers on Magnets’ – it also lingers on the beautiful sadness in endings, with songs like ‘Take Care’ and ‘Blue Moon’ capturing the end of Zefanya’s long-term relationship. ‘Take Care’ in particular (written and produced entirely by Zefanya) paints intricate scenes of splitting up a shared life – dividing up neighbourhoods, deciding who takes the dog, reassuring the person that they made you better – in tender, lived-in detail.
Unlike the break-up songs on Zefanya’s last album ‘Nicole’ which, looking back, she describes as “sad in a very saccharine, kind of schmaltzy way (which, don’t get me wrong, I do think is still quite charming in its own way)” now take on an “older and wiser” tenor, one of “acceptance and still wishing the best for someone, even they’re not in your life anymore”. “I’m 25 now, and my brain is different”, she continues. “Breaking up feels different now than when you’re 17. There are no faults, no ‘good guy’ and ‘bad guy’. It just didn’t work out. All you want is for the other person to take care, you know?”
“Breaking up feels different now than when you’re 17. There are no faults, no ‘good guy’ and ‘bad guy’. It just didn’t work out.”
Niki Zefanya
Beyond ‘Take Care’, NIKI is a producer and instrumentalist on all 13 tracks on ‘Buzz’. Inspired by the likes of Madison Cunningham, Phoebe Bridgers and Liz Phair, she sought out the breezy, instrument-forward sound of rock and folk traditions, enlisting producers like Tyler Chester and Ethan Gruska – collaborators of those very acts – to help create the sound of the record. “Touring my last album and playing live awakened this excitement in me for live instrumentation and musicianship. I wanted that to be the huge central vein”, Zefanya explains.
She found her music-making abilities stretched in the best ways, encouraged by her new collaborators to record the final album tracks as live band sessions, capturing exactly how things sounded in the room. “It was so nerve-wracking for someone like me who’s always been quite insular”, Zefanya comments. “I’m so used to doing things on my own on my laptop, building each part of the song one at a time. But you realise that, wow, this is how people made records back in the day. They just played the music all together and recorded it right there. I’ve really enjoyed putting the emphasis on musicianship with this album.”
It’s this consciousness about playing these songs in big rooms full of people to which NIKI attributes a sense of ease and “looseness” about the record. “My previous albums were a lot more manicured and polished – which I love and have nothing against – but I just wanted ‘Buzz’ to feel more honest. I’ve never valued that more in my life than now”, she says.
As our time together draws to a close, a sense of calm and presence emanates from NIKI even through our video call screen, a feeling of true rootedness and self-possession in exactly where she is right now. “Much of the album feels like it’s suspended in suggestion”, she notes, “and that’s intentional. I made it a point to avoid ending the songs in resolution. Because isn’t life just so irresolute? It’s such a constant wrestle between chaos and order.”
“We can feel completely helpless to it, or we can try to embrace it”, she continues. “Why don’t we welcome it with open arms, and empower ourselves to go with it?” For now, all she knows is that right after this she’ll be back in the garden. Hands in the dirt, sowing seeds, growing where she’s planted.
Buzz will be released on August 9, via 88rising.
