ALBUM OF THE DAY
Nick Hakim, “COMETA”
By John Morrison · October 17, 2022 Merch for this release:
Vinyl LP

The latest album from D.C.-born and New York-based singer-songwriter Nick Hakim takes love as its unifying theme, exploring its many layers and dimensions and resulting in an album that’s as upfront and earnest as it is bittersweet.

The album opens with “Ani,” a groovy, breezy love song where Hakim presents love as an ongoing dialogue of shared passion and discovery. “Ani wanna feel love, glad I found her/ She opened up her heart and showed me what’s inside her.” With its crunchy drums, waves of delay, and a vicious, Alan Licht-style burst of guitar noise that enters toward the end, “Ani” is also a sonically odd delight. “Happen” begins with a flourish of dreamy psychedelic organs before settling into a slow, strummed-guitar groove. Hakim delivers the song’s lyrics in a near whisper: “The sweetest angel fell into my world/ She gives me reason/…Was lost for a damn long time.”

The dreamy “Vertigo” is built around a gentle guitar riff and a half-time electronic beat. Hakim’s voice is particularly dextrous here—it gets slowed down, pitched up, and layered to produce lovely stacked vocal harmonies. Like many of the songs on COMETA, “Vertigo” occupies a sonic space between rough-hewn lo-fi rock and inventively produced soul. “Feeling Myself” combines plucky synths and a pitched-down drumbeat. The music has a chill retro-futurist feel, while the lyrics are impassioned and direct: “You got my tongue out of my mouth/ I’m addicted to loving you.”

COMETA’s hyper-focus on love doesn’t limit the music—it’s full of interesting stylistic fusions and soundcraft. By diving so deeply into the specifics of romantic love, Hakim imbues the songs with the degree of intimacy and detail that one of the most profound human experiences deserves.

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