Fifty Percent Nura

You know the feeling. Your favorite duo quietly stops being a duo, both members start releasing solo material, and you want to love it—genuinely want to, because you love them—and for a few listens you almost convince yourself you do, and then around the fourth or fifth play something shifts and you’re sitting there being honest with yourself about the fact that neither of them is the thing. The thing was the two of them together.

That’s where I am with SXTN.

Juju and Nura made Berlin hip-hop that sounded like Berlin at its most specific: crude, alive, funny, slightly threatening, the particular energy of two women who had decided they didn’t need permission to be in the room. Seeing them live—I would have let either of them do whatever they wanted to me, both at once if they were in the mood, no hesitation, no questions. That’s the hold they had. You don’t get many artists like that.

Now there’s a hiatus, or a split, or they got on each other’s nerves—the official explanation keeps shifting and none of it matters much. What matters is that Juju has an album coming called Bling Bling (the Intro is already out and it’s promising), and Nura has released Sativa, which is a pleasant, mellow, gliding club track that is, to be fair, exactly fifty percent of what I want.

Sativa is fine. It’s chill. It moves at its own pace and doesn’t do anything offensive. And that’s precisely the problem—SXTN was never fine, never chill, never content to merely glide. A YouTube commenter named Alex Houlden put it with the clarity comment sections occasionally manage: Why not just be SXTN again? You’re both releasing music anyway, and alone you’re both not as good as together.

Hard to improve on that. Nura’s solo album Habibi is out now. I’ll listen. I’ll want it to be something it can’t quite be.