Nick Hakim’s new album COMETA is out now. COMETA is truly a collaborative effort and the highlight for Hakim is having so many special guests from his community that play supportive roles–this talented roster of peers includes Alex G, Isaiah Barr, and DJ Dahi. Hakim refers to the bassist Kyle Myles as the glue that has held his musical life together for the past decade along with the pianist Jake Sherman, drummer Vishal Nayak, and guitarists Joe Harrison and Dylan Day. “Happen” includes Abe Rounds on drums and Alex G on piano, and “Slid Under” features Helado Negro on synths. Hakim’s younger brother, Danny Hakim, wrote the chords for “Perfume,” a sweet song about falling in love with someone’s scent, which he also plays acoustic guitar on.

The album title is the Spanish translation of “kite,” which is a symbol for elevation in Hakim’s personal life. He sees this as a really beautiful way to speak about feeling uplifted and gravitating toward the idea of being in your own orbit while everything else floats around you like comets in space. Hakim points to a specific lyric from “Happen” that fully encapsulates this concept: “A supernova/ Exploded and changed my world.” 

COMETA is a collection of romantic songs that explore various iterations of love that are guided by the full scope of Hakim’s own personal experiences from the mutual love he shares with his community to embracing self-love and falling in love with someone in a way that made him feel like he was floating. “The common thread is I’m lucky to have a support system and love not just in a romantic way, but in friendship with the people that I have around me,” he explains. “It’s really about different lenses looking at moments where I felt captivated and then in moments where I was trying to tap into how someone else might have felt or how I wish I felt sometimes.”

This dizzying outer body sensation is another theme that anchors the album as Hakim uses the extreme distance between a kite and a comet as a metaphor for the depth of one’s love for someone else and being so humbled by it. After spending time reflecting on the misguided path of seeking validation from others, what he’s ultimately learned is that you lose parts of yourself in the process. “The key is to find that extremity of love for yourself,” Hakim says. “It’s about growing into someone you want to be; it’s about finding pure love within yourself when the world around us seems to be crumbling.”

Of all the instruments that he has mastered over the years, Hakim believes that singing is his strongest. When you listen to COMETA, it’s very clear that Hakim challenged himself as a vocalist as he seamlessly guides the listener through every song. While the presentation of his work is important, more than anything, Hakim wants the music to speak for itself. Without a doubt, it most certainly does. “I’m not making conceptual records, I’m reflecting in the moment,” he says. “Every single record that I’ve made is just a reflection of feeling into a certain space and dealing with beautiful and really difficult things that we all deal with. I’m just trying to observe things, create them, and make them into songs. I also just really love instruments, they have their own language, and I feel like it’s so fucking interesting… I would not know what I would be doing if it wasn’t for this.”