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 releases her new single ‘Pressure Makes Diamonds’ as well as its official video.
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.
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).
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.
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