The extremely personal nature of this album is evident in the introduction to the song “Canopies.” What begins as a gentle prelude is actually a moment captured on a family trip to Houston, where Azniv Korkejian (AKA Bedouine) discreetly recorded a conversation with her mother and later wove it into the song’s opening bars. The track becomes a vessel for a story her mother once carried alone, her childhood spent in an orphanage, placed there by her own mother as a way to escape an abusive father. Nearby, in those years, her mother would sing into the air as if sending a message across distance, feeling her daughter’s presence in the breeze. The line she remembers, “the waves of Beirut’s beaches flutter, and how sweetly they blow my darling’s air,” drifts through the song like a thread of longing pulled taut across generations. The song’s emotional weight gathers slowly, the way a bloom turns itself toward the light. The song becomes an unspoken inheritance of longing passed from mother to daughter, crafted with the same tenderness that runs through the whole of this incredible new album, Neon Summer Skin.
Korkejian’s path to completing this album was a long, looping return to the earliest rooms of her life, the ones she did not realise she had been carrying with her through every move, reinvention and chapter of her twenties and thirties. Bedouine has always written from a place of emotional clarity, but this time the clarity came from the shock of recognising that childhood does not end cleanly, and that its afterglow can hit hardest when you think you have outgrown it. After visiting her parents in Saudi Arabia, sensing it would be her last before they retired to Armenia, she came home undone by an unshakeable feeling. “I wasn’t ready to stop being somebody’s kid,” she admits, and the songs began to gather around that revelation: the neon swimsuit she once lived in, the warm hush of summer afternoons, the ritual scenes of family life never fully examined until distance made them ache. For the first time, she found herself writing toward a single subject, letting specific memories guide her rather than sanding them down into universals. That focus pulled her back to the instruments of her childhood (the piano she practiced under her mother’s watchful eye, the trumpet she picked up in elementary school), and she followed their timbres into a fuller, more playful palette. She layered valved brass, organ, strings, and flute into arrangements that shimmer with bossa nova sway, jazz inflection, and a touch of psychedelia, co-producing with Gus Seyffert and stretching into new shapes with Jonathan Rado and the Lemon Twigs’ Michael and Brian D’Addario. What emerges is a record that mourns the end of innocence while sounding newly alive to the world, a sonic culmination of the life lived and the one she is still learning how to hold.
When the album opens with On My Own, the scene is almost cinematic in its quiet: a contemplative piano line, a soft drum pulse, the sense of someone standing in a familiar hallway listening to echoes that only they can hear. She thinks of the chatter, the sibling skirmishes, the small domestic storms that once defined belonging, and the song moves like a hand brushing along the walls of a childhood home. Yet there is a lift in the final guitar melody; a wandering, fluttering line that feels like a window cracked open to let in new air. The sound of someone stepping out of memory without abandoning it, letting the past glow behind them as they walk into whatever comes next, which happens to be Long Way To Fall, an indisputable album highlight; a gorgeously gliding and graceful song that summons up all the melancholy and yearning a listener can take, but wraps it in such undeniable piano frills and bending guitar lines straight out of the George Harrison manual, that the result is almost religious in its fervour. And a lovely little touch at the end (a Beatles nod perchance?) is some distinctly Liverpudlian chatter before a school hall piano chord ushers in Always On Time. More elegance abounds with this one: chamber strings, flute passages, and, returning to the memories the piano inspired in me from the start, an old-school bell signalling the close.
One Thing Right also features the tranquillity of flutes, minus the stillness, because here we have a steady seventies soul beat, funky horn fills and a lead vocal that meets the authentically emoted southern-style strut head-on. And finally, my attention returns to the emotional core of the album, the exactingly chosen title track, which really gets to the essence with the most stripped bare arrangement imaginable. I hate to repeat myself in terms of musical comparisons, but there is a mournful horn solo here that is so beautiful I cannot help but think of a certain four-piece band in 1966 recording For No One. And the acoustic guitar, just so expressive, it even leaves in the rougher edges as the strumming and picked notes begin to feel like they might collapse under the weight of the subject matter. Just one single line feels packed with enough pathos to perfectly capture the conflict of feelings at play here, as Bedouine sings, “everyone is older now.” The irreversible motion of time, memory, passage, loss, innocence, and hope in new life is all to be found and felt in this one poignant song. Still, it spreads across the whole of this impressively timeless album, too, one in which Bedouine has undeniably settled into her truest register.
Neon Summer Skin (June 5th, 2026) Thirty Tigers
Bandcamp: https://bedouine.bandcamp.com/album/neon-summer-skin
UK & European Dates:
Aug 29 — Berlin, DE // Berlin Folk Festival
Sept 1 — Copenhagen, DK // DR Koncerthuset, Studie 3
Sept 3 — Utrecht, NL // EKKO
Sept 4 — Brussels, BE // Ancienne Belgique
Sept 5 — London, UK // Milton Court Concert Hall
Sept 7 — Paris, FR // La Marbrerie