It’s the event of the return to music in France, perhaps even of the year, and so much the worse for its detractors: today appears DNKAya Nakamura’s fourth album, the greatest pop star of the Francophonie, which we will see for the first time on a Montreal stage on August 4, on the bill of the Osheaga festival. Six years after appearing on the charts, five years after the dazzling success of her song Djadja — 900 million views on YouTube! —, the Malian singer-songwriter consolidates her success with a sensual, assured album, with an astutely careful musical technique.
Last Friday, the daily The world launched its edition of Magazine M with Nakamura on the front page — with two different covers, please. Misunderstood and mocked at her beginnings, in particular because of her vocabulary, this mixture of African and Parisian expressions, her verve inherited from the Seine-Saint-Denis commune where she grew up, Aya Nakamura has today become a must. strength of the French music scene… and the source of countless press stories peoplewho is enjoying the trial these days opposing him to his former boyfriend (and director).
In this regard, the one who calls herself La Nakamurance had hinted that DNK would be the album of unveiled intimacy — the title refers to his real family name, Danioko. In the background, perhaps, but in depth, not really, his texts remaining on the surface of things of love, although felt. It’s the general atmosphere of the album that reveals her best: flowing, mature, assertive, and respectful of the popular music of Africa with which she grew up.
Mixing the zouk rhythm (reminiscent of house, but slower, and even more here on DNK) with R&B and pop influences, Nakamura makes his bed on the first third of the album. Sparsely paced on corazon opening, spicier on the heady Baby (“He wants hugs everywhere / Wants dear-all [toucher] everywhere everywhere / Affection and everything and everything”, a pure nakamurance chorus), typically zouk on the cadence Daddyduet with the rapper with Congolese roots SDM, which we will see at Club Soda on March 25th.
All this first third, collaboration with the Puerto Rican Myke Towers included (the song You are scared), flows from the same calm water, the grooves like little rocking waves, her voice a little too soaked inauto tune, to stay in the aquatic theme. It works, it listens to itself. Consensual ? Completely. As if the success of the Afropop refrain Never again of 2020 with the British Stormzy, from the previous album AYA (a much more sulphurous album), had guided the musical direction of DNK.
The intention is however clear: to make popular West African rhythms the new French-speaking variety for the general public. In recent years, the Nigerian music scene has imposed on the pop planet its new afrobeat formula, strongly inspired by Jamaican dancehall; by opting for simple, accessible musical productions. But, dependent on her region of origin, Aya Nakamura (born in Bamako) offers her own interpretation, her own flavor, of African pop. A little watered down, certainly, adapted to Western radios, but infectious.
In the middle of the album, Nakamura raises the temperature with Belleck, on a rhythm vaguely influenced by the trap, its prosody becoming more punchy. Follow the eye-catching Giftcollaboration with the young rapper and singer Tiakola, before the stripped-down ballad I am in pain, his voice being accompanied simply by guitar chords. We will discover two new bombs in the last portion of the album: Taste and its impeccable chorus, and the slow groove pop zouk Eachin duet with singer Kim.
DNK looks like the album of an artist who no longer has anything to prove. If she is reproached for a lack of audacity (the same audacity that annoyed her so much in her early days!), it will be necessary to recognize in the same breath the effectiveness of its formula and the renewed image of the musician, her calm assurance, her sense of the formula and his impressive artistic maturity, reached at only 27 years old.