Hatik reveals himself with his second album “Niyya”

Hatik is a rapper and actor. He likes to multiply experiences and it is also through his musical project Folding chair, released in 2018, that the public discovered it. His tube Angela definitely hit the nail on the head with over 130 million views on YouTube. And then there was, in 2020, the series Valid by Franck Gastambide in which he plays the main role, that of Clément dit Apash, who scanned the world of the music and rap industry. There have also been sold-out tours with an undeniable stage presence. This Friday, May 12, 2023, Hatik is releasing a new album, Niyya.

franceinfo: Niyya contains 17 songs. It is a total immersion in your intimacy. You tell yourself frankly. You wanted to deliver an album without filter, without concession?

Hatick: The idea was to get to the bottom of things. That’s why it’s an album that took a long time to see the light of day. I put it all in like it was the last. That way, at least, if I ever decided to stop afterwards, I wouldn’t have any regrets.

Your first single is about love. With this album, did you manage to allow yourself to experience this great love?

For once, I arrived at a stage of maturity where once you fell in love once, twice, three times, you begin to understand the circuit a little bit. There, that’s it, I have everything I need in my life and I think I can make very beautiful love songs. And above all, beyond making beautiful love songs, just living the real love life every day, that’s the most important thing.

What’s crazy, I want to tell you how I felt listening to this album, is that we have the feeling that you sing as if it were the last time, as if your life depended on it.

I was convinced that ‘Niyya’ would be my last project, that I was going to stop because I no longer wanted to.

I was fed up with it all and needed to do something else, live the real life or just be done with it. It’s sad to come to this for problems that are not the most serious in the world, but inevitably, I wrote this album without filter and I wanted to bring this degree of interpretation into my music. That’s why I looked very far for certain things, which aren’t necessarily easy to get out. Either way, I’m glad I got them out. It’s a therapy, it did me good. I’m relieved and now I’ve even moved on. I can think of continuing to make music without telling myself I’m going to stop.

You also address a subject, often taboo in the rap world, with the title: If only you knew. The perception of celebrity in the surroundings, in the neighborhood. Is it something that touched you?

You have to realize something, it’s that when you’re a young rapper and you arrive, you often come from a neighborhood. We have a bunch of friends we grew up with. For once, they are friends from childhood or adolescence. We have very healthy relationships because it’s a neighborhood, we’re all together, we’re friends, it’s a group of friends. Everybody says they want to push the thing and that “we are very happy for you, etc.“

And then the day when it really starts to take a little bit, then it starts to get a little more complicated. There are desires, shenanigans to achieve their ends, to try to scrape a little bit of money from right to left and recover contracts that are not theirs, etc. So when you lose friends, even if it’s a choice, it’s still a shame because the goal, the dream basically, was to all go up together and have this very family thing that remains. And I’ve always said: it’s not like the others, we’re going to stay together. Turns out it’s like everyone else’s house, so we’re not gonna stay together. But it does not matter !

This album goes from shadow to light. He turns a page to allow a new story to be written. How do you imagine it? Is she positive?

Already, it will be instinctive because there, I thought for two and a half years about an album, intellectualized internal pains and stuff. At some point, it’s good, but it’s hard, it’s painful, it takes a lot of energy to think of an album that is so dense. Yes, it’s the beginning of other things, much more instinctive and luminous in the sense that I won’t go back to what I’ve already mentioned in this album in the next ones.

A word on the stage since this album will have to be born on stage too!

For the scene, I am in a dilemma. Go or not?

Do I defend this album on stage and take the risk of falling back into the old failings I had on the tour before, namely interpreting very sad songs, doing them all the way every night and being in a bad mood ? Or not go on tour to preserve myself, to rest because I’ve been running in a tunnel for five years and I don’t stop and maybe leave a little time and leave later? I think we will go with the second option because it seems to me to be the wisest. I have an audience that asks a lot but also understands very well. This is also my advantage, that is, if I explain to them, they will completely understand. For those who saw me in concert last year, and there were nights when it was hard and even people said to themselves: “Why is he there?“When you can’t finish a song because you burst into tears and you leave the stage, I think that even when you really like the artist, you can still wish him something else. On stage or off , it was not happy so I don’t think anyone wishes me that.

Today, everything is fine?

Everything is fine. As long as I can go to the sport, it’s good!