NikNak announces new album Azul with immersive new single ‘Earthseed’

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Award-winning turntablist and producer NikNak has announced her new album Azul, arriving 27 November via Lapsus Records. Out now, first single ‘Earthseed’ offers a taste of the Leeds-based artist’s latest dive into Afrofuturism, where underwater recordings, modular synths and intricate turntablism collide.

Following 2024’s Ireti, Azul is an 11-track journey NikNak describes as an “immersive afrosonic fiction inspired by nanotech, space and water”. The album follows an explorer who crash-lands on a distant, water-covered planet after being pulled through a malformed black hole. As her damaged ship begins to merge with the surrounding landscape, the boundary between machine and nature starts to dissolve.

That world-building runs deeper than the science fiction. Much of Azul took shape during a residency in Ilhabela, Brazil, where NikNak recorded underwater sounds using hydrophones, alongside a Torso S4 and modular synthesis. The experience fed directly into the record’s aquatic atmosphere, particularly on ‘Celestial Rift’. It also marks her first album in some time made entirely without guest features, keeping the focus firmly on her own sonic universe.

‘Earthseed’ was originally part of an experiment in making something darker, and the track stayed with NikNak long enough to nearly become the album’s title. She hopes listeners will feel transported into another world, describing her aim as making music that feels like “a page from a comic book or graphic novel”.

Across the album, water becomes both a physical presence and a metaphor for transformation. ‘Yemaya’ channels the power of the sea through modular synths, while closer ‘Beached’ brings a nod to NikNak’s Jamaican heritage with a hint of bashment. Beneath the futuristic imagery sits a more personal thread: while making the record, she returned to swimming lessons after years of anxiety around water, a shift she believes found its way into the music.

A celebrated artist whose practice moves between composition, improvisation and live turntablism, NikNak became the first Black turntablist to win an Oram Award in 2020. In 2025, she took home the Pop-Experimental award at ZKM’s Gigahertz Festival. Her musical foundations span dub, reggae, neo soul and hip hop, alongside jungle, garage and dubstep — influences that continue to shape her restless approach to sound.

On stage, Azul will take on another form, with NikNak scratching over the tracks in real time and developing a cyborg persona for her audiovisual performances.

With Azul, NikNak builds a world where water repairs technology, the unfamiliar begins to feel like home, and sound becomes something to inhabit rather than simply hear. But, as the album’s story hints, that sense of calm may not last for long.

Azul is out 27 November via Lapsus Records. Listen to ‘Earthseed’ here.

Tracklist