Daily Discovery is a daily feature that will highlight a new or recently discovered artist that we’re excited about. See the rest of our Daily Discoveries here.
With all of the music that gets lumped under the header “R&B,” it would be forgivable to forget that the full genre title is “rhythm and blues,” and that the “blues” portion once served as a cornerstone—in a time long before Trey Songz and Justin Bieber’s discovery of the R. Kelly catalog. Though the genre has mutated greatly since its early days, some of R&B’s greatest modern practitioners (D’Angelo, Erykah Badu, and, more recently, Miguel, for example) carry on a certain spirit of the blues, the ability to tap into daily pain, even life (and especially love) at its worst, and to persevere, to create music for a brighter day.
Brooklyn resident Nick Hakim’s music is an intimate conversation, vulnerable and bewitching–R&B born of the blues’ sensibility for soul-bearing. His single “Cold” is a gorgeous exploration of love’s power and the pain of losing that love. Its chorus, a simple, repeated—”Oh, she’s never coming back/Oh, she’s never coming back/To me”—sounding simultaneously forlorn and aware that life goes on, even a bit hopeful. It’s an affair described through the adult eyes of bluesy zen.
Listen to Nick’s first two singles, “Cold” and the equally pretty, lilting “The Light,” below.
