7/10

YASMINA KAÏNA's debut EP 'BITTERSWEET' understands that heartbreak rarely arrives cleanly. Across the project, the Danish-Moroccan artist resists the temptation to divide relationships into simple categories of happiness and pain. Love can be worth remembering and still need to end. Someone can be missed without being welcomed back. And a beautiful moment can become more intense precisely because you already know it won't last.

Musically, she draws together R&B, afro-pop and Latin influences in a way that reflects the range of sounds surrounding her from an early age. Her Moroccan heritage sits alongside the influence of a guitar-playing mother, Amazigh percussion through her father and formative listening that stretched from Shakira and Christina Aguilera to Natasja Saad and Amy Winehouse.

But instead of forcing those elements into one fixed style, the EP allows them to surface differently from song to song. 'Barcelona' brings a smooth R&B foundation together with Rhodes-like piano and electric guitar, while her captivating vocal shifts between vulnerability and greater force. The song doubles as a tribute to a city where she once lived, giving its romanticism a specific sense of place rather than leaving it entirely abstract.

'lost In marbella' then shifts the palette towards afro-pop rhythms and sparkling Spanish guitar, while 'why' carries some of those textures into considerably more wounded territory. Even 'from my mama', with its handclap-led rhythm and sunlit character, contains the disappointment of a relationship reaching its end. Throughout the release, she repeatedly places painful emotions inside music that retains colour and movement, avoiding the assumption that heartbreak must automatically sound bleak.

There's also something fitting about English becoming part of her artistic voice through music itself. Having learned the language later at school with encouragement from a music teacher and through singing Amy Winehouse songs, she now uses it alongside a musical identity already shaped by multiple cultures.

As a first substantial statement, 'BITTERSWEET' feels assured because it doesn't try to resolve its contradictions. Instead, YASMINA KAÏNA lets love remain what it often is in retrospect: beautiful, painful, necessary and difficult to separate into its component parts.