Release Date: Feb 17, 2014
Genre(s): Pop/Rock
Record label: Island
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Nina Nesbitt's full-length debut album, 2014's Peroxide, features the Scottish singer/songwriter's melodic, folk-inflected pop music. Produced by Nesbitt along with Jake Gosling (Ed Sheeran, One Direction) and Iain Archer (Jake Bugg, Snow Patrol), Peroxide showcases Nesbitt's sweet voice and personal yet universally relatable lyrics, which she frames in bright, often acoustic piano and guitar-driven arrangements. The album combines material from Nesbitt's previous EPs with a handful of brand-new songs.
You've got to love a songwriter whose "fandom" call themselves Nesbians, but that's just the start of Nina Nesbitt's appeal. An Edinburgh-born 19-year-old, she has an acute eye for the minutiae of teenage life, and the wit to send up its self-absorption. Though it was only a matter of time before someone wrote a song called Selfies, Nesbitt's track of that name takes a refreshingly jaundiced view of girls who lash out at ex-boyfriends by posting pictures "in black and white, with that depressing quote on my life".
The lead single off this debut by 19-year-old Edinburgh native Nina Nesbitt is called ‘Selfies’, so I think I can be forgiven for not heading into it expecting Highway 61 Revisited. Not, of course, that there’s actually anything wrong with that. The Oxford English Dictionary didn’t just recognise ‘selfie’ as a legitimate term last year; it actually declared it to be ‘word of the year’.
Nineteen-year-old Scot Nina Nesbitt has skipped insouciantly down the contemporary route to fame. Posting cover versions on YouTube at 16, she received early endorsements from Ed Sheeran and Example, and won the iTunes new singer-songwriter of the year in 2012. Peroxide is the most pre-ordered debut album in Island history; those fans are known as Nesbians.
The debut album from half-Scottish, half-Swedish songwriter Nina Nesbitt is pop so sugary it’ll rot your teeth. Cutesy keyboards, AOR acoustic guitars and syrupy lyrics about “going crazy but I don’t give a fuss!” (‘He’s The One I’m Bringing Back’) make ‘Peroxide’ pretty much everything you’d expect from a singer-songwriter discovered by Ed Sheeran and whose big break came when she Disneyfied a Fleetwood Mac song for a John Lewis advert. ‘Two Worlds Away’ aims for the heart-fluttering pop of Taylor Swift but lacks the Tennessee charmer’s wit, while the bouncy ‘Selfies’ sees Nesbitt try to win back an estranged lover by finding the perfect Instragram filter.
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