(Self-released, CD, digital)
“Give me one reason to stay here / And I’ll turn back around,” pop singer-songwriter/producer NanaUpsideDown sings on her track “Give Me One Reason,” its title and lyrics a likely nod to Tracy Chapman’s song of the same name. But that’s where the comparison stops between the bluesy 1995 hit and NanaUpsideDown’s electronic banger.
The hypnotic phrase drips out under heavy processing and reverb, the last syllable stuttering like a skipping CD-R as squelching beats crackle to life. Like Janelle Monáe before her, the 19-year-old Colchester artist has big android energy, coming off like a cybernetic maven of heartbreak and anxiety on her self-produced debut full-length album, DIMENSIONS.
That one lyric reveals a lot about the record and its creator, real name Nadja Zipporah-Helene Douoning. DIMENSIONS is all about looking back at the past to properly process it — but not in a way that’s beholden to solving anything. The “mess that a young girl has to go through” isn’t worth turning back for. By the end of “Give Me One Reason,” a surging storm of teen angst, Douoning arrives at a different kind of resolution. Without fanfare, she casually changes the subject: “I really like this beat / And I like how it sounds.”
Capping four years of autodidactic musical discovery, the Berklee College of Music-bound artist debuted DIMENSIONS on her 18th birthday in May 2024 at Burlington’s recurring Black Artist Showcase. Douoning is a budding beatsmith, eclectic producer and clever lyricist with a knack for making fun music that centers on decidedly un-fun themes.
Her genre-agnostic flourishes include springy new-wave guitar riffs à la INXS (“Idea (Something New)”), Dresden Dolls piano-stomp theatrics (“Running”) and ice-cold Erika de Casier R&B (“Wishing”). “Sad Goodbye” pairs down-home, twiddling guitar with synth bells and scuffling beats on one of the album’s most effective — and futuristic — assemblages of sound.
Douoning has a lot of typical Gen Z issues on her mind. On “Wishing,” personal expression is inextricably linked to the digital space: “I keep my feelings inside / Afraid to let ’em out / Afraid of people judging me on my account.” She implies a gamification of life on “I Can’t Hear You” when she sings, “I think my head’s gonna explode / I can’t do this on hard mode.” And as a member of a generation that came of age when one wrongly worded online post can and will spiral into a full-blown crisis, she understandably wants to conceal a “Problematic mind no one should see or discover,” as she confesses on the brooding “Misplaced Feelings.”
Douoning’s lyrical knots are fun to untangle. Earlier on “Misplaced Feelings,” she sings, “If I die I think I’ll go insane” and, later, “Don’t wanna die but I wanna die,” a Möbius strip of self-flagellation.
The artist recently unveiled “Slow Down,” an unreleased track, during a multidisciplinary Juneteenth presentation with her mother, Dr. Jolivette Anderson, Edmundite scholar in residence at Saint Michael’s College. A jazzy, more organic tune about mindfulness, it shows her capacity for new directions. Given that she’s on the cusp of the explosive growth typical of college students, it’s anyone’s guess where she’ll go next.
DIMENSIONS is available at nana504.bandcamp.com and on major streaming services.
This article appears in Jun 25 – Jul 1, 2025.
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