While she was waiting for her last album Pripyat to be released, Catalan composer and producer Marina Herlop was restless. She was concerned about her (by then) uncertain music career, and felt emotionally unmoored. "Some days I used to sit on the balcony of my flat to catch some sun,” she explains, "I would close my eyes and start visualizing myself as a gardener, pulling out purple weeds from the soil, every bad memory or emotion I wanted to expulse being one of the plants." As the days dragged on, the fantasy deepened, and Herlop discovered that parts of the garden was withering; the energy she had been putting into the non-musical side of her life had seeped into her creative pasture and poisoned it. She knew what she needed to do to overcome the blight: plant some seeds and tend to her art to help it blossom and bloom once again.
Nekkuja is a place for Herlop s warmest, sweetest sentiments to rise to the surface and crack through the topsoil. She describes the record as a way for her to seek and affirm inner light, and it is undoubtedly her brightest, poppiest statement to date. The forward-thinking, experimental touches that nourished Pripyat are still present, but blessed with a level of positivity that is rare to find in a scene so entranced by darkness and melancholy. Skittering fragments of ornate acoustic instrumentation provide a serene welcome to Busa, punctuated by precise electronic processes that shuttle the sound towards abstraction and fantasy. Herlop s voice grows over the tangle of sounds from a childish giggle into a layered, matted mantra, sounding passionate, hopeful and full of energy. The vitality spills over into Cosset, where she wraps powerful motifs around ricocheting beats and dramatic piano rolls.