On The Rise: AKINE

This simple act of defiance plays a fundamental part in who AKINE is as an artist. Despite her young age, AKINE seems to do things by instinct, possessing a wisdom that goes beyond her years, and embodying a maturity that has meant she is able to take what she sees and transform those experiences into creative statements of intent. When she decided to take music seriously a year and half ago, she adopted the moniker AKINE, which is simply her nickname in Russian, Nika, spelt backwards with an additional ‘e’. She is a strong head on young shoulders who isn’t daunted by the prospect of speaking up for what she believes in or facing the things that she fears.

Born in Ukraine to an architect and a housewife, she is one of three siblings and when she was only 13, the family were uprooted from their home, after being displaced by the war and conflict, moving to France where she spent several years before eventually returning to Kiev. The experience had a lasting impact on AKINE, especially as she became increasingly frustrated by the way the adults around her turned to religion in attempt to fix the problems rather than coming up with concrete solutions.

Despite the fact that she was not brought up in a musical household, AKINE ended up turning to music for the outlet of her thoughts and emotions, and ended up writing her debut track “Pray For The Prey”, a hard-hitting song that ripples with dark pop undertones and addresses the issues that AKINE saw with being too reliant in religion for the answers.

“It was just an accumulation of seeing stuff on the news and my parents being upset over something or even just seeing a comedy show… And it also came from me being slightly angry - at the age of 13!” Explains AKINE of the song’s origins, outlining how important she feels it is to speak up if you have something to say. It was the second song that AKINE ever wrote, and was the first real example of what her songwriting skills were capable of, leading her to leave school and embark on the project full time with her sister.

Now, AKINE has just released her debut EP entitled Don’t Foster Fear. It’s a collection of songs that further exemplify her potential, where each song glistens with a slightly different hue, a different story or another concentrated study of an emotion. There’s a familiarity within AKINE’s sound, but it is hard to pinpoint where her inspiration comes from, a point that AKINE is aware of herself as she says “I’ve been really, really lucky to have people say that they haven’t heard things like this before and that it just gives them a different outlook. I think my music is just a bit different in terms of subject matter and I try to be very honest about everything.”

You can pick out the dark poetic tones, that would seemingly come from her love of Nirvana, but also the deep, epic pop of artists such as Florence and The Machine - an artist that she keenly insists that she would “do anything for - even just hold her coffee!”

But it’s AKINE’s perception of life and the way she crafts that into her own brand of epic pop that has the lasting impression and marks her out from her peers. She sources inspiration from everything she sees around her, as she says “Usually it can be one of two things. Either I’m having a hard day, or I watch something. I get inspired by movies a lot. I’ve written a song about a movie, but you’ll hear more about that later… Or even, as I mentioned, comedy shows. Stand-up for some reason seems to have an influence on me.”

AKINE has two tattoos on her arm - one is of a wasp and one simply says “breathe love”. The wasp is the same one that features on her artwork, and when asked why these insects feature so heavily in the artwork creative, she explains how it symbolises the way she tackles fear.

“So, I’m scared of a lot of things, and that’s kind of the concept behind Don’t Foster Fear, you know it’s just being scared of unreasonable shit… Things like bugs or funfairs or just elevators or long stairs. Just anywhere where I can fall really!” AKINE laughs, highlighting how she knows these fears are based on little substance, but still very real for her. “I’m most scared of wasps and I also got a tattoo of it, because I thought what is the smallest thing that I’m scared of, and how can I battle it and realise that it’s unreasonable.” It again shows AKINE’s resilience in a small but defined way, and this message also ended up forming the basis of the EP as a whole, encouraging the listener not to foster fear and to push forwards despite the challenges that we face.

It’s still early days for the young Ukrainian artist, as she continues to hone her songwriting skills and is gearing up for her first live shows, but it already seems that we can learn so much from her. Although she is softly-spoken in person, there is an effortless to the way she takes her musical purpose in her stride, moving forward with a confident, but modest pace and leaving uniquely powerful pop songs in her wake. When asked what success looks like for her, she simply says “Honestly, I’d love to be able to write music for as long as possible… And I guess success looks like ten Grammys…”At the pace she’s going, who knows what might happen?