“I left the music industry because I didn’t understand why we turned the most beautiful thing in the world, music, into a commodity,” says singer-songwriter Naaz (24) on Friday evening in Carré in Amsterdam. She had talent, an audience and a promising future: a happy chatterbox with life ahead of her. But she turned her back on it all. Until May 2022, with a new single and an entire album earlier this month: Never Have I Ever. Completely independent now.
There were more reasons for her silence, it turned out last month. She became depressed, struggled with PTSD, turned out to have been abused. She retired and married, but did not find happiness that way either.
But Naaz proves strong. Her new album is a statement of resilience and she underlines that with exclamation marks in Carré. A bit awkward at first, her voice a bit unsteady. But the properties that made the jump-in-the-field such a sparkling appearance at the time, it appears to have not lost anything. On her socks she bounces just as charmingly over a stage, stumbles, laughs, cries, shouts, runs, is very much… Naaz. But she touches more – no eye remains dry. Because of what she sings, about the journey she has had to make to liberate herself, because she talks about it so forcefully between songs, and also because she stands there so completely blissfully happy and unchained.
Standing ovation
Naaz’s new music sometimes has an edge of the nineties, a bit of Alanis Morissette in the choruses of ‘Never Have I Ever’ for example. But the teenage angst which then touched young people in recognizability, she reverses: she does not deepen that uncertainty and fear, but wants to offer tools. In Carré, Naaz is the motivational speaker that everyone who has anything to struggle with deserves. Being proud of yourself, seeking freedom, following your dreams – when you write it down like that it all sounds pathetic, but when Naaz shouts it to a room you believe it. It is not for nothing that she receives a standing ovation after the second song, while she herself cannot say anything at that moment, in tears. It’s not nothing.
Songs like ‘One Day’, ‘Disappear, Disappoint’ and the Kurdish ‘Azadî’, with images of the Iranian revolution on the screens, deserved such a full Carré: the intensity of Naaz, beautifully accompanied by violin and piano and crazy bass lines like in ‘Good Story’. Older songs like ‘As Fun’, ‘Someday’, ‘Taped’ and the luscious ‘Words’ worked just as well as they did during the first era of Naaz. But it was the new songs ‘Alive’ and ‘Life Explained’ that turned out to be natural closures.
She was also strong in the ballads. Sitting cross-legged on the edge of that illustrious stage, she sang the fragile ‘Heart Drive’ very convincingly, just like the even more beautiful ‘Disappear, Disappoint’. Another victory is that sudden single ‘Sad Violins’ from May last year: a more scared with full-fat beats by a bouncing Naaz who gets the lyrics from her toes. “She’s back, she’s back!”
Also listen to this interview with Naaz in the NRC podcast Het Hour
View an overview of our reviews about pop