Nicole Faux Naiv is excited to announce the April 8 release of her debut album Moon Rally via the UK/Berlin based label Bronze Rat. She has now dropped a new single, “Imaginary Boy” a bouncy, and sharp three-minutes that melds an icy exterior with a more sorrowful heart.  Nicole notes the track tells the story of “being obsessed with a strange, unrealistic projection of a person, instead of with the person itself.” Along with the single she shares a video directed by Aljona Olifirenko.

Born to former Soviet parents in the small town of Olpe in Germany, Nicole Faux Naiv grew up speaking both German and Russian and this duality greatly influences the sparkling and hypnotic Moon Rally. Across the album’s 10 tracks, she sings in both English and Russian and drew influence from both her German background and Soviet roots, watching old Russian cartoons to draw inspiration from and feeding that into her songs. “I grew up with this culture a lot, it was present all the time,” Nicole says of that process. “So I was really interested in watching old movies and listening to more Russian music. I’ve got more interested in the whole culture.”

Though the album was mostly written by herself in her Berlin apartment, it grew into something so much more substantial in the studio with Robbie Moore (Florence + The Machine and Little Simz). Nicole and Robbie worked on the songs, adding new guitar lines as well as real drums, violin, piano and cello to the songs, which brought about added depth to the music that wasn’t previously possible. “It was very cool using lots of organic instruments in the recording process,” Nicole says of that process. “It suddenly felt like something serious and not just a hobby.  I was looking forward every morning to going to the studio and working on the music, seeing how the songs were starting to sound so much bigger and brighter.”

The result is a record that gleams with both the rush of possibility and the multitude of influences that are entangled within it. Shaped by Nicole’s love for Russian post-punk of the 1990s, French synth-pop, and old soviet movie soundtracks, she somehow shapes all of these different trails into something beautifully cohesive. She sees it as a diary, a musical collage of moods – some fleeting, others far more meaningful.