Nina Nesbitt Announces New Album 'Älskar'

Nina Nesbitt is set to take her continuing rising star status to the next level with the news that she will release her eagerly anticipated new album Älskar on September 2 via Cooking Vinyl. Nina today releases her new single 'Pressure Makes Diamonds' as well as its official video. Pre-Order/Pre-Save HERE.

Inspired by the introspection, fear and loss during lockdown, Älskar celebrates life in all of its complexities as well as love in every form imaginable. As we've heard from its previous singles 'Dinner Table' and 'When You Lose Someone', 'Älskar' (meaning "to love" in Swedish, a reflection of Nina's half-Swedish heritage) shimmers with both tender, intimate ballads and huge escapist '80s-tinged bangers that beg for the dancefloor.

Speaking about the album, Nina reveals, "Making this album was a completely different experience to anything I've made before, although a lot of the music was created remotely, I feel that I've processed so much and learnt a lot about the relationships in my life during the last few years. I wanted to capture all types of love in their raw forms, whether it be romantic, heartbreak, friendship, coming of age, familial or self-love."

The new single 'Pressure Makes Diamonds' is one of the album's brightest moments, all refined alt-pop sparkle and alluring effervescent melodies which are capped by Nina's quick-flowing freestyle vocal. It's a song of contrasts.

Its sound is immediately catchy and fun, but it expresses a powerful message: the stereotypical expectations that so many young women are expected to conform to as they reach their mid-twenties. Nina wrote the song with its producers Jack & Coke (Charli XCX, Tove Lo) and the Swedish artist SHY Martin. It was then mixed by the award-winning Manon Grandjean (Stormzy, Anne-Marie, RAYE).

Talking about the track, Nina adds, "I wrote 'Pressure Makes Diamonds' about trying to navigate my way through the societal pressures I started to feel as a woman in my mid-twenties."

The 'Pressure Makes Diamonds' video uses a lighter tone to deliver Nina's point. Nina plays a host of stereotypical female characters which are all common in fiction, but which are closer to one-dimensional clichés than they are to real people. By playing such a range of characters, Nina shows that everyone is infinitely more nuanced than such limited tropes suggest. The video is her latest collaboration with director Wolf James and was created with the help of a predominantly female crew.

In addition to the singles, Älskar introduces highlights at every turn. The early landmark moment 'Teenage Chemistry' celebrates Nina's current long-term relationship with beat-driven dreamy elegance and the instantly relatable lyrics. It then journeys through the minimalist ambient pop of 'No Time (For My Life To Suck'), an intimate, acoustic arrangement on 'I Should Be A Bird', and cinematic balladeering with 'Colours of You'. By the time the album closes with the gorgeously glacial title track, it's evident that Nina Nesbitt has created an album that primes her for a much bigger future.

The album emerged in stages. It started in the summer of 2019 when Nina started writing in Sweden during a visit to see her grandmother. Plans for a second trip to Sweden in 2020 were halted by the pandemic, forcing Nina to focus on Zoom sessions from a spare room in her mum's house. It was a tricky but liberating experience that gave Nina the freedom to truly expose her emotions through the cathartic release of music. She wrote or co-wrote every song that features on the album and produced or co-produced many of its tracks.

Fans in North American were recently treated to live renditions of some of the new music while she was on tour with British singer and songwriter, James Arthur this past spring.

Nina can next be seen on stage in the UK when she plays the Isle of Wight Festival later this month, and theTRNSMT Festival in July. Nina is also now confirmed to play two huge stadium shows as guest to Coldplayat Glasgow's Hampden Park on August 23rd and 24th, followed by a just announced UK headline tour kicking off in November.

Nina's new music follows the huge global fanbase she established with her second album 'The Sun Will Come Up, The Seasons Will Change'. The album amassed a staggering half-a-billion streams including for the now classic 'Loyal To Me' which was Top 10 most added at Top 40 radio and propelled her into Spotify's top 500 artists in the world.

Earning acclaim from the likes of Marie Claire who praised the album for its "Joyful, dance-y pop with wrenching indie ballads, displaying a newfound maturity in the...songwriting," and Billboard Magazine who hailed it "an iridescent work of pop mastery, showcasing Nesbitt's proficiency as a songwriter, vocalist and producer," with V Magazine proclaiming, "'The Sun Will Come Up'... captures the precise moment an artist finds herself blossoming into a full-blown pop star."

Nina's growing global reputation was further emphasized when she was named by Taylor Swift during her acceptance speech for the Woman of the Decade Award at Billboard's Women in Music event. Nina would go on to win her own Women in Music Award, this time at the 2021 Scottish Music Awards.

Other highlights of 2021 included hitting #1 on TikTok UK's Hot 50 with 'Summer Fling', collaborating with Seeb on 'Sweet Dreams & Dynamite' (which was also remixed by The Sticksman Project), and headlining the first ever Metaverse Festival alongside deadmau5 and Paris Hilton. Nina was included in an international campaign with Tiffany for their new Rose Gold perfume. It features her modernist take on The Beatles' classic 'All You Need Is Love.'

Her collaborations to date have included countless collaborations, from dance acts Deacon ('Long Run'), NOTD ('Cry Dancing') and R3HAB ('Family Values'), to singer-songwriters Sasha Sloan and Charlotte Lawrence ('Psychopath') and global stars Jonas Blue ('Desperate') and Sigala ('Somebody'). A particular highlight was teaming up with Ranji and WHITENO1SE.

The duo had remixed 'The Moments I'm Missing' and dropped it at Ultra Music Festival, the reaction being so big that Nina subsequently joined them at a show in Mexico City in front of 20,000 people. Nina started 2021 by performing as a special guest at Liam Payne's livestream event 'LP Show Act 4'. In addition to her own set, she also joined him for the duet 'For You'.

Watch the new music video here:

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