Berlin-based indie duo Nick & June take us inside their cinematic “not-a-breakup” album ‘New Year’s Face,’ a widescreen portrait of two artists and ex-lovers rebuilding themselves through sound and song as they embark on a new chapter. Through sweeping arrangements, spectral textures, and unflinching songwriting, they craft a soundscape where intimacy becomes epic and every quiet moment feels lit from within – reminding us what it means to be human in all its fragile, absurd, and wonderful totality, and of the risks we take just to stay alive.
Stream: “New Year’s Face” – Nick & June
All the good songs are on sale, all of me is a waste.
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Nick & June’s latest studio album starts like a confession you didn’t mean to speak out loud – bruised, bright, and painfully self-aware.
Intimacy and distance collide in songs that ache from the inside out as two artists openly reckon with who they once were and who they’re still becoming. A love lost, and in its aftermath, a deeper self comes into view. That’s the beauty, the heart, and the soul of New Year’s Face: Hushed and cinematic, tender and towering, it drifts between salt-air melancholy and glittering euphoria, tracing the fault lines between past and present as two former lovers keep finding one another in the music. These songs feel like standing in front of a mirror at midnight with all your old selves crowding the glass – a fragile, glowing, quietly defiant portrait of transformation, of learning to live with every version of “us” and “I” at once, and calling that collision a new beginning.
All the good songs are on sale,
all of me is a waste
All of you is truly sad
All the good songs are on sale,
all of me is a waste
All of you is f*ing sad
Lucky bombs…
I wish your
New Year’s face
just stayed
– “New Year’s Face,” Nick & June
Independently released December 5th, 2025, New Year’s Face marks the third full-length album from Berlin-based duo Nick Wolf and Suzie-Lou Kraft – and their first full-length created as a true two-piece, following years of evolution, reinvention, and metamorphosis. Formed initially as Wolf’s solo project before Kraft’s arrival reshaped its center of gravity, Nick & June have spent years carving out a world of intimate, atmospheric music defined by vulnerability and spellbinding sound. Their latest album arrives two and a half years after 2023’s widely praised EP Beach Baby, Baby, which Atwood Magazine hailed as “a beautifully seductive, soul-stirring record of intimate reflections and raw reckonings,” and one that signaled a turning point in the band’s sound and songwriting. Where that EP captured Nick & June in a state of dreamy, cinematic fragility, New Year’s Face finds them stepping into a fuller, more fearless version of themselves – leaning deeper into the tension, tenderness, and creative alchemy that only they share.
“This record grew out of a strange, unexpected moment in our lives,” Nick Wolf tells Atwood Magazine. “After our relationship ended, we went to Bridgeport, Connecticut, to make music together, not knowing what would come of it. Being in that room, making songs with someone who knows you so well, was both confronting and liberating. The album became a way to explore memory, change, and what it means to start over. It’s a new beginning for us, and a kind of experiment in understanding ourselves through music.”
There’s a strange kind of courage in choosing to sit at a piano with your ex and start again – to take the ashes of a shared life and see what shape they might take in song. New Year’s Face lives inside that risk: the tension of two people looking at the past without flinching, trusting that something worth keeping can still rise from what’s left. It’s the rare kind of collaboration that doesn’t ignore the fracture, but lets the fracture become part of the art.
“We boarded that flight to New York with no real idea of what awaited us,” Suzie-Lou Kraft recalls. “Just a handful of phone demos and a loose sense of where the songs might go. But once we stepped into the studio, every track shifted, grew, found its true shape – through the sessions themselves and through the features that joined the journey. It’s funny to me that some of those scrappy phone recordings – vocals, synths, guitars – still made it onto the album. In the end, it became a union of late-night bedroom fragments and fiercely intense studio work, meeting in a space that felt completely new.” That tension between the intimate and the expansive – between the raw spark of an idea and its fully lit world – is the engine of New Year’s Face, and the reason the album feels so alive in its searching.
That evolution extends far beyond geography or circumstance. For Nick & June, New Year’s Face isn’t just the next chapter after Beach Baby, Baby – it’s a different language entirely. “I don’t think the two can really be compared,” Kraft admits. “Beach Baby, Baby was recorded with just the two of us in a small home studio, while New Year’s Face carries the fingerprints of so many other artists. There’s Peter Katis’ incredible work, of course, and all the musicians who were in the studio with us – or who shared their ideas and their talent to shape what the album became.”
Wolf echoes that sentiment, framing the shift as both creative risk and personal necessity. “We wanted to put ourselves in a new situation, to push our own limits, to experiment, to really go to extremes,” he says. “It’s about testing what we’re capable of, both individually and together, and seeing what comes out of that pressure.” In that sense, the album isn’t just a reinvention – it’s a proving ground.
Wolf candidly describes New Year’s Face as fragile, euphoric, and true – three words that echo through every corner of the record.
And as Kraft explains, the album’s title emerged much the same way the songs did: unexpectedly, intuitively, almost like a spark catching light. Taken from a line in the opening track (“I wish your New Year’s face just stayed”), the phrase felt less like a lyric and more like a revelation – a distilled expression of renewal, reckoning, and emotional release.
“The line came to me and stuck with me,” she says. “It sparked this feeling – a rush of renewal, expression, euphoria – we tried to capture exactly that inside a song and once all the tracks were finished, ‘New Year’s Face’ somehow reflected the bigger picture of the entire record.” That spark became the record’s compass – a feeling that flickers through every song and finds its fullest expression in the opening track.
New Year’s Face begins with a song that feels like a curtain lifting on the album’s entire emotional universe. The title track is as intimate as a whisper and as overwhelming as a tidal shift – a slow-burning overture where Kraft sings “all the good songs are on sale, all of me is a waste” with a rawness that feels almost unbearable in its closeness. Synths flicker like distant lights, and the refrain “I wish your New Year’s face just stayed” becomes both mantra and wound – a plea for a moment of joy, or clarity, or connection to last just a little longer. It’s the sound of two people daring to face each other with all the lights on, setting the emotional stakes for everything that follows and establishing New Year’s Face not just as a collection of songs, but as a cinematic encounter with memory, rupture, and reinvention.
If “New Year’s Face” opens the door, “Dark Dark Bright” blows it wide. One of the album’s indisputable standouts, it feels both intimately confessional and impossibly large – a song that starts like a diary entry and ends like a film score. Kraft’s lines cut with startling vulnerability: “Your voice warms me up, my sorry is my fate,” and “a dark, dark, bright sorry in my mind,” a phrase that captures the entire emotional paradox of the record in one breath. The track swells from gentle pulses to a sweeping, cinematic climax, bold and bruised and beautifully disoriented, as if trying to hold both the ache and the light at once. It’s Nick & June at their most expansive – a fever dream of memory, longing, and the shimmering contradictions that make us human.
Give me a reason to marry in Norway
I’m too tired, I saw it on TV
I shot a hole in my pocket and in my faith
Your voice warms me up, my sorry is my fate
At Hollywood scenes, we used to sing
A dark, dark, bright sorry in my mind
This a love, but also a last song
A dark, dark, bright sorry in my mind
A secret guide for secret lovers
We are sad, sad superstars
Sad, sad superstars
Moments like “2017” carry that intimacy forward with striking clarity. Featuring guest vocals from The Antlers’ Peter Silberman, the song is a soft-focus ache built around flickering memories and unanswered questions, drifting toward Kraft’s central line – “Who’s still living in 2017?” – which lands like a sigh you didn’t realize you were holding. “I really like the enigmatic lyrics from ‘2017,’ which merge into a translucent chorus,” Kraft notes. “I think they’re clever.” Silberman’s presence heightens that ache, draping the track in a spectral tenderness.
The collaboration itself unfolded with the same unforced energy. “Ever since I discovered The Antlers’ album Hospice back in 2009, I’ve been a huge fan of Peter and the band,” Wolf says. “That we’d end up recording songs together – it still feels kind of crazy.” The three met alone in a Bridgeport studio for a weekend of instinctive, unplanned creation, the song taking shape in shifting pulses and accidental time signatures that feel less like technical choices and more like the natural rhythm of memory. The Antlers appear again on the glowing “Pinker Moon,” deepening the record’s atmosphere with their signature sense of gentle, otherworldly weight.
Across the album, Nick & June explore tension and duality with a rare emotional precision. “The Boy with the Jealous Eyes” is a haunting character vignette, delicately sketched and emotionally piercing. “You Are the Voice That’s Hunting My Soul for a Show” becomes one of the record’s thematic anchors – a searching, shape-shifting meditation on shadow and light, on the contradictions and internal battles that define us. “We are the bright and the dark,” Kraft sings, embodying the album’s core belief that no one is one thing, and that living truthfully means holding both.
This is a slow request
Of beats and gods to share
Your heart is a muscle, your heart is a star
I dance cheek by cheek
Cumulative likes drugs
I touch the skin I’ve lost
Pompous puffy past perfect pop star
I dance cheek by cheek
I dance cheek by cheek
And this is love. No, this is hope.
This is love. No, this is fear
This is love. No, this is not love
And this is love. No, this is hope.
This is love. No, this is fear
This is love. No, this is not love
Even the album’s quietest corners feel alive with revelation. “Anthem” unfolds like a slow exhale, reflective and radiant in its restraint, while “Husband & Wife” delivers the record’s most devastating emotional blow. Written in the wake of Kraft’s grandmother’s passing and arranged by Oscar-nominated composer Owen Pallett, the song swells from a whisper into a breathtaking crescendo – a farewell, a blessing, a love song carried across generations. “It didn’t even feel like the lyrics were coming from me,” Kraft recalls, and the track bears that sense of inevitability: A song that arrived fully formed, as though delivered rather than written.
For all its cinematic scale and emotional sweep, New Year’s Face ultimately feels like an act of profound vulnerability – a record that keeps circling the questions we tend to face alone, yet answers them in a shared voice. It’s an album built on tension and tenderness, shadow and shimmer, rupture and renewal, and it insists that transformation is rarely clean but always meaningful. These songs trace the fault lines of identity and connection not to dwell in the brokenness, but to honor the strange, shimmering beauty that rises from it. In the end, the record leaves you with that rare sense of having witnessed something both fragile and fiercely alive – a world cracked open and glowing from the inside.
Part of what makes the album resonate so deeply is the way it balances its emotional weight with moments of startling musical clarity. Nick & June stretch their sound in all directions here – lush orchestration meeting minimalist confession, spectral textures giving way to surging crescendos, whispered lines blooming into widescreen moments of catharsis. It’s the most expansive work of their career, yet never loses the pulse of intimacy that defines them. Even the quieter tracks feel charged with intention, as though each one is a room lit from within, inviting you to step closer, breathe slower, listen harder.
And for the duo themselves, certain moments stand as touchstones for everything this record became. “The strings on ‘Husband & Wife,’” Kraft says without hesitation – a choice that feels inevitable once you’ve heard Owen Pallett’s arrangements erupt into the song’s devastating final swell. Wolf gravitates toward the brass on “Trouble,” a moment of grit and resolve that cuts through the album’s haze like a flare in the dark. These favorites say something essential about New Year’s Face: It’s a record of contrasts and convergence, of softness meeting force, of two artists forging something bigger than themselves in the pressure and aftermath of change. That’s why it lingers – not just for how it sounds, but for what it dares to hold.
In the end, that’s the heart of New Year’s Face: What it reveals to us about ourselves.
“We hope listeners feel what it means to be human in all its fragile, absurd, and wonderful totality – who we were, who we are, who we might become, and the risks we take just to stay alive,” Wolf says. “Making this album taught us that same lesson.”
New Year’s Face doesn’t resolve its fractures so much as illuminate them – holding each one up to the light until something honest, tender, and unexpectedly beautiful shines through. It’s a record about choosing to keep looking, even when the past feels too heavy or the future too uncertain, and finding that there is still something worth building in the space between. What Nick & June have made here isn’t just a document of change, but a testament to the strange, resilient ways we remake ourselves in the aftermath of loss – and how music can reveal the parts of us we weren’t ready to see.
Experience the full record via our below stream, and peek inside Nick & June’s New Year’s Face EP with Atwood Magazine as Nick Wolf and Suzie-Lou Kraft take us track-by-track through the music and lyrics of their bold new album!
There is no right time,
no right time in a lifetime
Lick your fingers for the
sweetest cherry on the cake
Now the sweetest of all heartbreaks
A garden full of dares
Everybody’s there
Hello child,
I love you very much
Husband and wife
now together in the afterlife
– “Husband & Wife,” Nick & June
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Stream: ‘New Year’s Face’ – Nick & June
:: Inside New Year’s Face ::
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“New Year’s Face”
Nick: When I first heard Suzie’s demo, I instantly fell in love with the idea of a New Year’s Face. Thematically, the album kept coming together out of memories and moments of life, from childhood to death – that’s why we ended up making the song title the album title. The moment of a New Year’s face just fit perfectly: nostalgia, memory, hope, euphoria… and many more emotions colliding in a single instant.
“Crying in a Cool Way”
Suzie-Lou: I actually started writing “Crying in a Cool Way” with this arpeggio – it just came out on its own and set the whole vibe for the song. It was a bit unusual, not starting with guitar or keyboard, but it just flowed naturally. A lot of stuff, like the acoustic guitar in the background or the wall of voices at the end, is still from the original iPhone demo.
“Dark Dark Dark”
Suzie-Lou: Finishing this track was truly “Dark Dark Bright.”So many keys we tried, so many sketches we made… now it’s exactly where we wanted it to be.
Nick: We really spent a long time on this song. Especially on the lyrics, changing a word here, a word there. Sometimes you just write things down – and it’s exactly right. And sometimes you have a very precise idea for every single syllable. The horns from Ben and Kyle are absolutely amazing.
“2017”
Nick: Ever since I discovered The Antlers’ album Hospice back in 2009, I’ve been a huge fan of Peter and the band. To me, he’s one of the best songwriters of his generation. That we’d end up recording songs together – it still feels kind of crazy. The three of us met for a weekend alone in a studio in Bridgeport. I had just gotten back from a road trip along the East Coast, Suzie had flown to Germany and just returned to the US, and Peter drove down from Upstate New York. We sat on the floor, jumped in, and just started playing. No big concept. When I started the song, I didn’t even realize it wasn’t in 4/4 and that it jumps between different time signatures a few times. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t even be able to play a 7/8 on command. But sometimes odd time signatures, tempo shifts – they work best when you don’t even notice them.
“Trouble”
Nick: I remember listening to a lot of Sparklehorse and Beirut while Suzie and I were working on the song. I had a few parts – the chorus, the bridge – that didn’t really fit together at all. The verses and the guitar hook we found somewhere in Suzie’s GarageBand demos. And Thomas Bartlett once again did his amazing Thomas-Bartlett-things on the keys.
Suzie: “Trouble” was the last song we finished. It was all about experimenting with sound and aesthetics, playing around with tempo changes. My absolute highlight are the horns from Kyle and Ben, especially at the end – beautifully playful and heartbreakingly gorgeous. After that, Nick and I went for margaritas and celebrated our album with the best tacos and tequila.
“The Boy with the Jealous Eyes”
Nick: When we first talked to Lourdes (Russian Red), we told her we were working on an album and sent her a couple of demos. The fact that she actually said yes to recording a duet with us means a lot. During our Nick & June years we haven’t covered many songs – but we did cover one by Russian Red (Loving Strangers). There’s probably still a pretty bad recording of that somewhere. Lourdes couldn’t make it to the East Coast since she’s splitting her time between California and Spain. When Suzie and I were back in Europe, we met up in Amsterdam to work on the song.
“You Are the Voice That’s Hunting My Soul for a Show”
Suzie-Lou: The era of long song titles might be behind us, but for some reason, “You Are the Voice That’s Hunting My Soul for a Show” just felt like it needed to exist. The idea for the track had been in the works for a while, especially the refrain, which was kind of an extension of the themes we explored in previous single “Dark Dark Bright.” Nick and I spent a lot of time experimenting with the song – sober, drunk, during the day, at night. It took a while to figure out where we wanted to go with it, but eventually, we found a shared vision and the track began to take shape.
“Pinker Moon”
Suzie-Lou: “Pinker Moon” has been on a long journey. We recorded a first demo years ago, actually as a preparation for the Beach Baby Baby EP. The fact that it ended up on the album has a lot to do with us sitting down in the studio with Peter (Silberman) more or less spontaneously and just trying things out. Now the song has exactly that special quality it was missing back then. The breaking interlude, which almost feels out of place in such a restrained track, is one of many examples of how Peter (Katis), as a producer, really understood and translated where we wanted to go.
Nick: “Pinker Moon” was kind of a borderline candidate for the album. When we met with Peter (Silberman), we were really only thinking about recording one song (“2017”) together. But he really wanted to work on this one too – he said it reminded him of Yo La Tengo, which I didn’t even know at the time. Now I love them. So once again, thanks Peter!
“Husband & Wife”
Suzie-Lou: I don’t think any song before this ever came together so quickly and made so much sense as our Grande Finale. A love song, written in two minutes and produced as big as it deserved. A love song from my late grandparents to my dad, maybe to me. It means a lot because it was just there, and it didn’t feel like these words were coming from me. Having Owen Pallett, who arranged the strings on The Age of the Understatement by The Last Shadow Puppets – one of my absolute favorite albums – contribute to “Husband & Wife” makes it even more significant.
Nick: Possibly the best Nick & June song ever, for me.
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© Luka PoppNew Year’s Face
an album by Nick & June
