Nekkuja / Marina Herlop

"Nekkuja" (2023) by Marina Herlop.

Catalan composer and producer Marina Herlop was restless while waiting for the release of her last album, Pripyat, feeling anxious and emotionally unstable due to the (then) uncertainty surrounding her musical career.

"Some days I would sit on the balcony of my apartment trying to soak up the sun."

"I closed my eyes and imagined myself as a gardener, pulling purple weeds out of the soil, each one representing a bad memory or emotion I wanted to get rid of."

As the days passed, her reverie deepened, and Harlop noticed that parts of her garden were withering. The energy she had wasted on her non-musical life had seeped into her creative sphere, poisoning it. She realized what she needed to do to overcome this devastation: sow the seeds and tend to them so that her art could blossom again.

Marina Herlop describes the album as "a way to search for and affirm the light within," and it's her brightest and most poppy work to date. The cutting-edge experimental elements that underpinned Pripyat are still present in this album, but this time it's filled with a positivity that's rare in a music scene steeped in darkness and melancholy.