“I write to tell stories,” says Neomi Speelman, the Dutch/Surinamese singer-songwriter who performs under the moniker néomí. Most of the time those stories are personal, but they’re also universal stories of endurance told with her own intimate style and unique sense of perspective. “Life is fucked up, but it’s life and you have to live it anyway.”
With a delicate sound carrying the weight of an old soul, néomí’s stripped-back style blends the lush ambience of contemporary indie-pop artists like Phoebe Bridgers, Justin Vernon and Julia Jacklin with the troubadour flair of sixties protest folk. Her approach to writing – equal parts confessional and philosophical – has been shaped by Joni Mitchell’s belief that a good song needs to have gone through “a period of sensitivity to a moment of clarity.” Otherwise, it’s just complaining. “I thought that was a nice way to think about it,” néomí says. “You’re not just coming to complain, you’re telling a story for a purpose. You want to say something in the hope that it will resonate with people, and they’ll feel heard or inspired.”
Music wasn’t the obvious path for néomí growing up in Zwijndrecht, an industrial town just outside Rotterdam, though it was always a presence at home. Her mother would always sing around the house, while her father’s music taste (Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles) rubbed off on her. She took piano lessons on her mother’s encouragement and didn’t get on with it but credits it now as her “first experience with music.” It wasn’t until years later, when she came across a live video of Ben Howard performing his campfire folk hit “Old Pine,” that she decided to pick up a guitar, teach herself how to play, and write songs of her own. “It just felt very real and honest,” she says of folk as one of her biggest formative influences. “I could just listen to those artists, and they would tell me a story, and it would inspire me. Also just the combination of a guitar and a voice… like, how can this simple thing be so beautiful?”
That approach informed her debut run of EPs, 2022’s before and 2023’s after. Both collections of torch songs that marry minimal acoustic arrangements with slow-burn meditations on love, the vulnerability of her words is made powerful by the lack of embellishments around them; the strength of her songwriting laid bare by its simplicity. Her debut album somebody’s daughter, released through PIAS in May 2024, doubled down on her knack for distilling big feelings into precise poetry while expanding her sonic palette. The arrangements skew more pop, propelled by faster tempos, bouncy bass lines and skittering percussion. Meanwhile, the lyrics plead for empathy. They remind us that everyone has a story, and everyone makes mistakes. They ask for forgiveness, or to be seen as a complete person rather than held up as a perfect one, but it was also written during a period of uncharacteristic frustration. “I’m not normally an angry person, but a lot of things happened that made me really angry,” she explains, adding that things often came down to a difference in perspective between how she sees things compared to other people – something she struggled to understand or reconcile. “I think you can hear that in the songs.”
Inside néomí are two wolves: the old school folk artist, and the contemporary indie-pop artist. On two upcoming EPs, to be released through Nettwerk in 2025, they find a place to co-exist. The first leans towards full band arrangements and fuzzy synths, the second back into the guitar-and-mic simplicity of her early inspirations – “a bit more cottage core,” as she puts it. What ties them together is a newfound warmth and ease that has come partly with age, partly with experience, and partly off the back of two years in therapy that furnished her with a greater acceptance of who she is and how she works. “On the album, I was fighting against life and not accepting things for how they were. I was very much lost in my own brain,” she explains. “People make mistakes, that’s a part of life. I still find it very hard to make mistakes, and I’m still disappointed by life sometimes, but now I can look back or look forward and be like: this is the situation. It was bad, and maybe it’s still bad, but it’s alright because I have no control over it. That’s really what these songs are about.”
That inner peace has cracked néomi’s songwriting open even further on the EPs. Still finding most of her inspiration in connections, whether it’s between lovers or friends or even animals, the songs have deeper roots in the world – her sound more earthy and pastoral, her observations deeper and more lived-in. Whether she’s contemplating a relationship that’s hard to let go over rootsy guitars on “The Dog,” or deepening the inevitable passage of time on “Another Year Will Pass,” each song finds an even keel.
All the tracks were written in the Netherlands – either in néomi’s old flat in The Hague, on the balcony of her producer who lives a short cycle away, or in her parent’s garden at night with a cigarette and her dog by her side. Many of them were written in Zwijndrecht, which provided its own inspiration in the form of being an incredibly boring, uncreative environment. “It’s so shit. Like, really shit,” néomi laughs fondly. “Everything is grey. It’s very industrial. But it puts me at ease. I’m really intrigued by people who live a different life from mine. Not worse or better perse, but simpler, both in what they do and also what they expect from life. It feels like they don’t expect a lot and they are fine with that. I see them walking around the park with their kids, going to the same jobs every day, doing the same stuff every weekend with the same friends they’ve had since high school – and they’re happy. That feels very judgemental but that is not the point I’m making. A lot of the times I envy them, I envy that their brains are wired differently to mine. I guess we’ll never know what is better, I don’t even think there is a ‘better’. I wish I was like that. That’s their life, and they’re ok.”
Growing up in an environment that offered nothing in the way of stimulation, and that she felt nothing in common with, néomi spent a lot of time observing and reflecting. Writing songs, then, became a way of having a conversation with her own body and mind – a way of searching for identity and purpose in surroundings that forced her to find those things on her own. “When you grow up in a shitty city or town like that, you have to find out who you are,” she says. “That’s what I like most about Zwijndrecht. Life is so simple there. So a lot of songs were written there as well – just me, my dog, and my cigarettes. That’s all I need.”
The lynchpin of the two EPs is “Sit Back Baby” – a song that felt like it flowed out of nowhere to lift her up, rather than something she ushered into existence herself. “Sit back baby, let it go,” she sings over two chords, the simplicity of the song’s structure mirroring the simplicity of its sentiment. She runs through a list of troubles that she wanted to let go of, like finding it hard to be honest, or not finding yourself beautiful, or trying not to fall in love – things everyone goes through on the way to learning how to simply be themselves. But, in néomi’s case, the sentiment stems from a much scarier place.
If you can let go of something like that, there’s not much left to rattle you. A powerful sense of calm radiates through “Sit Back Baby,” the beating heart of the EPs, and ripples out from there. It’s not about downscaling emotions, but finding peace in holding your hands up, taking the beautiful with the bad, and accepting the things you can’t control. It’s a message néomi hopes will come as an empowering one for people.
“Life is a lot of things. It’s losing the thing you love most, but it’s also trying not to lie about having the last cookie, and it’s your dog who ruined your couch and is now sitting there like ‘it wasn’t me…’” she smiles. “It’s the bad stuff, but it’s the beautiful stuff too.”
néomí 