V (Candid)
Niia
Released October 10, 2025
AllMusic Favorite Jazz Albums 2025
YouTube:
https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_nY0uRb9FCD9M4te2kAiI-i9qm5m97Uhfs
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About:
The genre-blurring provocateur born Niia Bertino revisits her earliest musical ambition: to be a jazz singer in the tradition of the greats, using her impossibly expressive vocal instrument to tell stories of loves complexities, with both humor and heartrending pathos.
Supported by visionary young talents like the writer-musician-producers Spencer Zahn and Lawrence Rothman, the hitmaking songwriter Chloe Angelides and fantastic L.A.-based players working on the axis of jazz and indie, V reimagines the jazz vocal recording as something cinematic, emotionally raw, and subtly subversive.
In place of well-worn standards, Niia has crafted an album primarily of bold original music. Instead of familiar acoustic instrumentation, V seamlessly meshes the studio imagination and electronic textures of experimental pop with the thrilling interplay that only live, jazz-rooted musicianship can bring. And in lieu of the winking, veiled storytelling of the Great American Songbook, Niia V is lyrically brazen, hysterical and postmodern; her stories exist in that creative sweet spot between self-love and self-loathing.
This is the sound of a modern day Jazz Singer.
Track Listing:
1. fucking happy 03:47
2. Ronny Cammareri 04:27
3. Throw My Head Out the Window 04:52
4. I found the restaurante 03:47
5. with Feeling 00:44
6. Pianos and Great Danes 03:07
7. Again with Feeling 05:39
8. Dice 02:31
9. Maria in Blue 03:12
10. The Awful Truth 06:53
11. Angel Eyes 03:11
Personnel:
Niia: vocals
Spencer Zahn: bass
Vancil Cooper: drums
Benjamin Bock: synthesizer
Engineer: Brad Lauchert
Mixed by Jon Castelli and Brad Lauchert
Mastered by Dale Becker
Photography: Douglas Irvine
Creative Director: Yang Li
Direct Metal Mastering by Jeff Powell
Management: Chelsi Zollner
Co-produced by Spencer Zahn and Lawrence Rothman
Review:
Niia Bertino’s V marks her return to jazz after several years spent exploring indie pop, edgy R&B, and neo-soul. Its striking black-and-white cover photo reveals her posing with a heretic fork around her neck. The implement was a torture device used during the Middle Ages to punish people who challenged orthodox rules. The set was co-produced by Spencer Zahn and Lawrence Rothman. Both wrote or co-wrote songs for the set, as did Chloe Angelides and the date’s saxophonist Nicole McCabe. Niia’s vocals and piano are backed by an assortment of contributors including bassist Anna Butterss, McCabe, drummer James McAlister, trumpeter Jon Natchez, and brass multi-instrumentalist CJ Camereri.
Opener “F****** Happy” has wedding vibes with piano, bass, and drums weaving experimental pop textures. The singer emerges from the jazz tradition before framing it in neo-soul. It’s a breakup song that sounds alternately intimate, theatrical, and poignant. Butterss’ electric bass introduces Niia’s wordless vocals in “Ronny Cammareri” (titled for Nicholas Cage’s character in the film Moonstruck). Its layered, reverbed horns and skittering percussion showcase modern jazz fusion. “Throw My Head Out the Window” offers a sensual groove with its drum’n’bass trap kit attack, adding pillowy keys and unsettling synths and bells. The effect is bolstered by Niia’s cool, collected yet deeply romantic vocal entreaties with McCabe’s passionate alto sax adding fills and a killer solo as Niia balances sexual energy and the desire for escape. “I Found the Restaurant” is a minimally adorned modern jazz ballad penned by Niia with Zahn and Rothman. Its minimal instrumentation includes piano, vibes, and Camereri’s emotional trumpet. The single “Pianos and Great Danes” is spiny with an organic junglist rhythm track, rumbling funk bass, and chunky piano and synths colliding over Niia’s vocal. Its compulsively erotic lyrics are an attempt to create a sexual escape for a depressed woman (“Please let’s f*ck/I just need to kill my mind …”). The track is bookended with the 44-second “With Feeling,” an instrumental by McCabe, and “Again with Feeling,” a sultry then sunny modal jazz exercise introduced by piano, bass, and drums. Niia’s lyric juxtaposes personal development with inner demons, bridging them with the mantra “…Try again/Try again/Try again…”. “Maria in Blue” weds tango and indie pop to jazzy neo-soul. Her forthright yet emotionally turbulent vocal is weighted by emotional cracks; she’s barely holding her broken spirit yet offers a steely resolve, “Do not cry the same tears twice . . .” “The Awful Truth” joins jazz, neo-soul, and experimental indie pop in a humid, atmospheric mix that seemingly emerges from yet exists inside an aural ether. Niia closes with her excellent read of the jazz standard “Angel Eyes.” Her bluesy phrasing is classy and utterly haunting. V is masterful; it’s at once as provocative, disciplined, and brave as the array of styles woven into her jazz approach. In consistency and quality, V creatively offers Niia’s continued revelation as a modern jazz singer who exists in a place of her own in the musical slipstream.
Thom Jurek (AllMusic)
