- Nia Archives shows reverence for Black British music's past while blazing a trail for its future.
- The cover art for Nia Archives' new record, Forbidden Feelingz, shows her in front of a wall with pictures of everyone from Angela Davis and Harriet Tubman to Kemistry & Storm and Roni Size. The album's centerpiece, "18 & Over," is a similar sort of collage. The song starts with a smoky break as she sings over a Cocoa Tea snippet, before she slams in a classic hardcore sample and then builds to a halftime breakdown. Like the cover art, the track is a celebration of Black and British music and culture, from the roots reggae of the Windrush Generation to the vanguard of the hardcore continuum. Both the cover art and "18 & Over" are neat distillations of Forbidden Feelingz, a record that not only shows off Archives' knack for candy-sweet hooks, but also her dexterity and range as a club producer.
Like fellow revivalist PinkPantheress, Archives' debut EP was a wispy weed cloud of wide-eyed love and angst, floating over lightning fast percussion. "It's like emotional music," she recently told Mixmag, "but also you're raving, you're dancing, because it's so fast and high tempo."
She tapped into the cultural zeitgeist so easily that it's a surprise that "Sober Feels," with its balance of melancholy, intoxication, and bass, didn't end up in the Euphoria season finale. The second half of Forbidden Feelingz reprises those same ideas:. "Luv Like," for example, hits a similar high to "Sober Feels" with its strummed guitar line, but the breaks are a wee bit tougher this time around. The potential TikTok anthem "Gud Gudbyes" is just as catchy, adding a dubby twist to the archetypal break-up dust-off.
The first half of Forbidden Feelingz, on the other hand, is focused on straight-up club tracks. This part functions like a mission statement about her ability to make tonnes-heavy club music. The bass on her debut had teeth, but that feels tame compared to the way she unleashes the Reese on the first three songs here, from the junglist "Ode 2 Maya Angelou" to the speed garage intensity of the title track. Put simply, these are capital-B bangers—even the wisps of birdsong on "Ode 2 Maya Angelou" can't distract from the tectonic quaking in the low-end. Rather than singing, Archives treats her voice like the samples she draws from, weaving it around Angelou's voice as if the two were performing a duet. It's an eerie effect. The political becomes surprisingly personal and intimate, while the past becomes palpably present. That's a good summary of Archives work as a whole: she makes the fiercest dance tracks sound like radio gold, folding the best parts of her favorite records of yore into something thrillingly new.
Tracklist01. Ode 2 Maya Angelou
02. Forbidden Feelingz
03. 18 & Over
04. Luv Like
05. Part Of Me
06. Gud Gudbyes