Starting piano lessons at the tender age of nine, the now 27-year-old singer-songwriter known only as Niine (say it “Nina”) has always shown a keen interest in music.
“I started playing in bands when I was about 17,” explains the Melbourne-based musician. “I learned guitar in high school after studying piano for years, and then I started this trashy punk-rock band with two friends of mine. I started seriously composing music when I was 19, which lead to a duo I was in for awhile with this guy.”
Niine points to this stage in her musical discovery where she realised that the solo path was the right one for her. “They were mostly my songs, and I had a very specific vision for the direction I wanted them to go in,” she says. “I wanted to have full control over displaying them the way I thought they should be, because I write cathartically and there was always an uncertainty about how they would turn out with someone else involved.”
With this, the Niine project took off in earnest towards the tail-end of 2016. Niine herself describes the music made under the moniker as “avant-garde” and “heavy pop.” To her, it’s not about following a sound with her music – it’s about following the emotion. “I don’t see myself as being restricted by genre,” she says. “I suppose the vocals are quite poppy, but I like the idea of the avant-garde in my music. It’s not strictly blues, or strictly folk, or strictly anything. I orchestrate the song depending on what kind of song I want to create and what kind of feeling it has.”
It’s this that has led Niine to releasing two new singles so far in 2018, entitled ‘Call Me Your Boo’ and ‘Only He Knows’. The former is described as being thematically tied to emotional conflict in relationships. “It can be very confusing,” Niine says. “You’re torn between falling in love and having your heartbroken all at once. Little things bring you down, but falling in love brings you back up. It’s about falling in love with someone else but still dealing with heartbreak at the same time.”
The latter, meanwhile, was initially inspired by the films of Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki.“Some of the lyrics are envisioning myself in that world,” she says. “I linked it to these thoughts I was having about people not taking responsibility for their own emotions. You can love someone and want to take care of them and still want them to get their shit together. It’s a song that really switches between its moods.”
Both songs have been given music videos, made by video artist Rhys Newling and Goat Records’ Andrew Dobrowolski respectively. Niine notes the disparity between the two video-making experiences, which were direct collaborations with both Newling and Dobrowolski: “‘Call Me Your Boo’ literally only took a couple of hours to shoot,” she explains. “For ‘Only He Knows,’ though, it was shot in sessions over a few months – if you watch the video, you’ll see I went through three different hairstyles in the time it took to make it.
“Thankfully, that ended up working thematically with what we wanted the video to be. It ended up feeling a lot like a short film, which was awesome.”
