Sunday’s Child 9, the Germany-based project of Nicole Faux Naiv, slips into the present moment with Your Apple, a single that feels equal parts intimate confession and quiet experiment. Known once for her dream pop guise as Nicole Faux Naiv, she has now fashioned a different guise entirely: leaner, stranger, and altogether more daring.
Comparable touchstones (This Mortal Coil, Nico, Zola Jesus, Mazzy Star) offer useful compass points, but Your Apple is more elliptical than any lineage suggests. There is no reliance on genre trappings; rather, a willingness to wander into unmapped corners where folk, ambient, and ethereal wave hold uneasy company.
Her palette is spare but richly hued: piano keys pressed as if reluctant to break the silence, synthesizers humming like low lantern light, guitars drawn out into long, deliberate sighs. Field recordings – the clatter of air, the hush of a room – creep into the mix, not as ornament, but as part of the breath itself. This is music that seeks to fold the outside world into its frame, blurring the line between composition and confession.
“Poetry is formed in the soul and is then released into the outside world,” says the artist. “The process itself is poetic.” One hears this credo in the piece’s shape: voice pared to its essence, a fragile murmur laced with quiet authority. It is a song that listens as much as it speaks.
The video, created by Adem Yildirmaz and Nicole Stieben, is a fractured vignette: Nicole multiplied in prisms, wandering through the silence of her own mind. It resists explanation, instead demanding one’s complicity. We glimpse her in fragments: an artist in solitude, yet never still, restless in stillness.
Watch the video for “Your Apple” below:
Nicole’s earlier works, Moon Rally (2022, Bronzerat Records) and Life In The Dream Sphere EP, were praised for their refinement—produced alongside Robbie Moore and performed across Paris, Strasbourg, and Berlin. Yet Sunday’s Child 9 marks a decisive turning: a turn away from polish toward something deliberately unsettled. A 2023 appearance in Tokyo, with help from musician Noriko Sekiguchi, hinted at this restlessness. Now it crystallizes.
An album is promised in October 2025 via her own Romantic Rebirth imprint. If the quiet elegance of Your Apple is any indication, it will not flatter the ear so much as unsettle it: an act of poetry released, in her words, from the soul into the world, strange fruit proffered with an outstretched hand.
Listen to Your Apple below and order the single here.
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