Brooklyn-based musician and dancer nasimiYu, aka Nasimiyu Murumba, has announced her first album in seven years, P O T I O N S, due out May 7 via Figureight Records. She made it during COVID lockdown, playing every instrument herself and drawing motivation from dance and a summer spent organizing Black Lives Matter protests. “This album was being made while the world was on fire in all the ways, and some of the most loving ways found their way into these songs because that’s what I was overflowing with throughout the experience.” she says. See the cover art and tracklisting below.

She’s shared two singles from the album so far, “watercolor” and “secretsecret,” which you can watch the videos for below. Both are gorgeously layered, R&B-flavored art pop; Nasimiyu says “watercolor” is “about a psychedelic awakening,” continuing, “It’s about that tender place of vulnerability that’s always hiding behind our outer shell. The song is a celebration of how much bravery it takes to shed our armor and to choose to live in our softness. ‘Watercolor’ is about letting myself get all the way to the other side of a good cry, and finding complete elation on the other side. Crying as cleansing. Taking an ‘inner shower.’ This song is about being the opposite cool, the opposite of nonchalant. It’s about allowing yourself to be as fully human as you can be. Bursting open with every color of the emotional spectrum all at once.”

“secretsecret,” she continues, is “a portrait of the most naive time in my life, as I was living it. I wrote it in a moment when I had let my hope in a bad relationship get the best of me in a way that pulled me out of touch with reality. This song sums up all of the confusion, self abandonment, and inner contradiction that made up one of the lowest, most heartbreaking periods I’ve ever experienced.”

P O T I O N S Tracklisting

1. Watercolor
2. Immigrant
3. White Lightning
4. Practice
5. Lovejail
6. Parasite
7. Secretsecret
8. Who Are You
9. Ceremony
10.Archipelago