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May 18, 2017 Nick Hakim By Charles Steinberg

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After speaking with Nick Hakim about the background of his debut album, Green Twins, you come away with the impression that he’d just as soon let the music do the talking. Hakim also doesn’t put too much thought into being labeled a neo soul artist, or for that matter, any specific classification of his sound.

“I think neo soul is seen as a genre but around the time it was coined—like when Erykah Badu and D’Angelo and Jill Scott or Bilal were coming up—they were just making music, ya know?” he says. “The label is more for the media. The people who really fuck with [my music] know that it’s a lot of different things.”

That it is. Through the immersive listen of Green Twins, the 26-year-old’s broad scope of musical exposure is evident. Growing up in Washington, D.C., Hakim absorbed everything from the Latin American folk music of his Chilean/Peruvian roots to the grunge and punk rock his brother introduced him to, and the go-go and hip-hop that flowed through his circle of friends. A kaleidoscopic swirl of ‘80s/‘90s hip-hop drums, contemporary R&B, and textural allusions to alternative rock all pass through the foggy soul emulsion of Green Twins. “It represents where all the people involved were coming from,” says Hakim. “There’s just a wide variety of things that we listen to and they all have an influence.”

It all funnels into a relaxed musical body language that continues through the album. At times songs seem let free to explore the environment created for them, one that’s spacious and reverberating and rather distinct from that of his first two Where Will We Go EPs.

“I recorded with a live band on the EPs and every song was a one take recording of however many we did. On the album, it was me learning to record and engineer by myself and really take things into my own hands. Obviously I still collaborated with the same guys but I’m playing most of the instruments on every song.”

Though Hakim starts his songs in the solitude of his bedroom in most cases, his collaborators help bring them to life. Having played and recorded with the same guys from his days at Berklee College of Music in Boston, and on through his move to Brooklyn three years ago, a second nature has set in.

Hakim has found especially fluent rapport with Green Twins producer and bass contributor Andrew Sarlo, who has become a reliably different “other ear.” When recording, they never deviate too much from the original inspiration. For Hakim, the demo is way more than a rough sketch.

“We would literally build off of my demos. There’s a lot of things I do originally that are hard to recreate sometimes, it’s like there’s one spirit [of the song]. In some cases it was more intentional but mostly we would build a song [from its bottom].”

Ultimately the philosophy of sticking with songs, and the people you play them with, has proven fortuitous for Nick Hakim, and made way for his brilliant debut.

“I’m so proud of the record. It feels really good to finish something, to actually finish a piece of work. It was also a lot of fun. Some of those songs were so fuckin’ fun to record, man. Sometimes I would just be jumping around the room in my boxers with my girl in the bed, listening to them.”

[Note: This article originally appeared in Under the Radar’s Spring 2017 Issue (April/May/June 2017), which is out now. This is its debut online.]

www.nickhakim.com

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