Laura Kerry
The cover of Nick Hakim’s debut LP sports a surrealist, green-hued landscape with a detached eyeball gazing at itself in the mirror. Like an updated Salvador Dali painting, it seems to comment on the way the mind perceives itself. The eyeball is bare and exposed, suggesting vulnerability in introspection.
On Green Twins, Hakim continually makes himself vulnerable. The follow-up to his dual EP, Where Will We Go, which he made while attending the renowned Berklee College of Music in Boston, the album perfects the artist’s unique breed of tender soul music. Sometimes delicate and soft, sometimes strong and guttural, Hakim’s voice betrays yearning, joy, love, and ache, all with seeming ease in his singing and lyric-writing. “If there's a god /...I bet she looks like you,” he proclaims commandingly on “Bet She Looks Like You”; “Let me inside of your mind / I’ll live inside of you / To find what you're looking for,” he sings in a near-whisper over mellow keys on “Needy Bees”; and in “The Want,” his voice is delicate enough to break for a quick, barely perceptible moment as he sings, “I wanted her.”
Green Twins is so soulful and intimate that it partially disguises the quirkier elements that add texture and color to the music. Like its cover, the album contains a psychedelic strain visible in spacey accents of synth and other effects, playful dynamics, and dreamy reverb. Hakim assimilates these—along with other traces of an eclectic range of genres—effortlessly. In “Cuffed,” a song about embracing one’s “vices without shame,” his sensual delivery sounds at times like D’Angelo and his hip-hop phrasing sounds at others like Frank Ocean. In “Roller Skates,” a song with deep heartbeat percussion, his processed voice is funky before it is joined by an ascending line of harmonies that recall Motown. In “TYAF,” sparse and shimmering verses give way to dense psych-rock choruses with muffled but energetic drums.
The more you listen to Hakim’s album, the more these kinds of unexpected details emerge. What at first appears straightforward—or at least relatively so—reveals itself to be complex, strange, and multi-dimensional. He has created an entire world in the space of an album, meticulously constructed from a mind that has been trained in harmony and composition and an ear that has spent a lifetime immersed in a diverse pool of music. Through it all, though, Hakim’s gaze remains focused and introspective, like the eye in the cover art. Warm and intriguing, Green Twins draws on the thoughts and feelings of its creator, spinning them into a beautiful debut.