BEDOUINE - Neon Summer Skin

This time the wait has been longer. After three albums released at two-year intervals, it took a full five years for Bedouine's new record: a return that, for the first time, places the singer-songwriter's cultural and family identity at the heart of the project.

Azniv Korkejian (the artist's real name) was born in Syria and raised in Saudi Arabia. She later settled permanently in the United States and rose to prominence with the support of Matthew E. White. The songwriter's refined fingerpicking and her evocative, crepuscular arrangements won over both audiences and critics, especially thanks to the adventurous album "Bird Songs Of A Killjoy", where a poetically folk style in the vein of Judee Sill/Joni Mitchell was paired with a remarkably ambitious and exceedingly elegant instrumental body. With her third album, "Wayside", Bedouine partly came to terms with her origins (her family is Armenian), pulling out bittersweet songs as fragile and confessional as they were tender. A choice that somewhat chipped away at the austere, solid image of her early work, paving the way for the most autobiographical record of her career.

The new album "Neon Summer Skin" consolidates the author's refined, cultured fusion of West Coast, soul and folk, with an increasingly personal style detached from any purely speculative ethno-folk temptations.

Bedouine's fourth album is an act of love conceived after a trip to Saudi Arabia, a final farewell to the family who decided to return to Armenia. The songwriter tells of her childhood spent in an Iranian orphanage, but above all of the hardships that forced her parents into constant migration. The nature of the songs doesn't upend the project's stylistic course: even when her mother's voice introduces the delicate "Canopies" (a dialogue about her days in the orphanage), the music remains anchored to a delicate baroque-pop, crowned by the exemplary string arrangements of Drew Erickson (who has previously worked with Lana Del Rey and Mitski).

What escapes a first listen is a more decisive variety among the compositions, kindred in their sumptuous, velvety elegance yet rich in worthwhile variation. Indeed, the bossa nova-tinged movements—now more sensual ("Deghma Cheega"), now almost ethereal and intangible ("Na Na Na")—not only further broaden the album's sonic spectrum but also introduce instrumental elements tied to the author's childhood. The journey through memory passes through two instruments: the first is the trumpet Bedouine played back in elementary school, the second is the piano, the main source of innovation in the economy of "Neon Summer Skin".

This semantic revolution runs through the long introductory passage of "On My Own": the flowing piano notes, the decisive cadence of the drums and the almost cinematic orchestral touches open a time gap where Carole King meets Paul McCartney; the D'Addario brothers (Lemon Twigs) are complicit in so much beauty, also responsible for the psychedelic inflections that frame the flowing harmonies of "Long Way To Fall".

The sober, cultured chamber-folk for piano, voice and orchestra of "Always On Time" (complete with flute) and the soul-funky stride of "One Thing Right" are tasked with foreshadowing the album's emotional center, the title track, a song dedicated to the author's daughter, a minimal, intensely poetic folk ballad that, alongside its melancholy fingerpicking outline, boasts a breathtaking horn solo. That the mother/daughter confessions of the aforementioned "Canopies" follow next feels almost natural, but what's striking is the author's ability, throughout this journey into feeling, to keep needless emotional and figurative redundancy at bay. A restraint that animates the whole album.

The faint dissonances and the almost noir orchestral sophistication of the more elaborate "White Patent Leather" add further evolutionary touches, confirming that "Neon Summer Skin" is not only the songwriter's most mature album, but also her most courageous.

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16/06/2026