Brooklyn’s Nick Hakim has kept us busy these past few months: First, he let us wade through layers of soul on his single, “Bet She Looks Like You;” then, he gave us the beautifully ambiguous video for the track, directed by Terence Nance. Now, with his new project Green Twins just over a month from dropping, he’s released the album’s titular track— a sparse, wistful homage to a life that could have been.
Using a measured dose of reverb and stunning looped vocals, Hakim weaves a web of memories and regrets as he sings, “They will always haunt my dreams/The green twins with your eyes/We could’ve moved to LA/It’s always sunny bright out there/If I had it my way/We would’ve stayed where we started.”
The lyrics may seem direct, but the track had more abstract and inscrutable beginnings. Hakim told Noisey, “I had a dream where we were walking down the road in JP (Jamaica Plain, MA) and two little green babies were running around the sidewalk. There was a crash behind us. As we walk away, we look back and the twins had been run over by a car. The babies were made out of some green Jello texture. This dream happened three times. This song was the starting point for this project. It was written around the same month that a child was to be born.”
The song is the second glimpse we’re getting into Green Twins, and already the album is revealing itself to be more rounded and fuller-sounding than Hakim’s last two EPs Where Will We Go, Pt. I & II. Still, he hasn’t lost the experimental bend—and that masterful touch of distortion—that makes his sound slightly eerie and endlessly singular.
Green Twins is out on May 19, and Hakim, a D.C. native, will play a show to coincide with the release in his hometown on May 20. Check out some other upcoming shows below, and pre-order the album here.
TOUR DATES
Apr 20 Le Pop Up du Label – Paris, FR
Apr 21 Brussels, BE – Chez PIAS
Apr 22 Studio 672 – Cologne, DE
Apr 23 Bitterzoet – Amsterdam, NL
Apr 25 Berghain Kantine – Berlin, DE
May 11 The Drake Hotel – Toronto, ON
May 12 Bar Le Ritz PBD – Montréal, QC
May 13 Brighton Music Hall – Boston, MA
May 14 Iron Horse Music Hall – Northampton, MA
May 17 Bowery Ballroom – New York, NY
May 20 Rock & Roll Hotel – Washington, DC