Nicole Faux Naiv will release her debut album, Moon Rally, on April 8 via the UK/Berlin based label Bronze Rat. Born to former Soviet parents in the small town of Olpe in Germany, Nicole grew up speaking both German and Russian and this duality greatly influences the sparkling and hypnotic album. 

Today she shares the LP’s heavenly title track which exemplifies the dream-pop found across the album. Of “Moon Rally” she says, “I started writing this song in early 2020, when I was visiting France for a few days. A lot of the text was written while I was on the trains at night. I remember waiting at a train station one evening looking at the bright crescent moon in the night sky when out of a sudden a lost memory came over my brain — an abstract computer game I played as a child called something with ‘Moon Rally’ … Not sure if this was actually the name of it but I thought this word combination sounds pretty cute.”

Nicole Faux Naiv wrote Moon Rally in her Berlin apartment, yet it grew into something so much more substantial in the studio with Robbie Moore (Florence + The Machine and Little Simz). Working together they added 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. 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. 

“When I created this music, I had all kinds of influences in my head, lots of fragments from different music styles,” she says of the album. “A lot of the songs are about dreams – daydreams and normal dreams and also memories from my childhood. You have these different fragments of memory and some of them are very colourful, and some of them are very strange.”

Photo Courtesy: Greta Markurt