No guilt. And no more screaming. I’m not yours. I don’t owe you anything. Those words arrive late in Žltá, the yellow chapter of Ničiteľ’s new album Biela, over guitars that finally lift after minutes of grinding weight.
The Slovak trio has spent two records pushing against the same wall. This one starts opening doors instead.
Biela is out digitally on July 7, with the 12″ LP planned for autumn. Nine songs, all named after colors: Biela (White), Čierna (Black), Modrá (Blue), Sivá (Grey), Purpurová (Purple), Žltá (Yellow), Zelená (Green), Červená (Red), Hnedá (Brown).
It’s the first Ničiteľ record that doesn’t hold one theme all the way through. Matka worked around humans and nature. Anna worked around patriarchy and the damage it does to women. Biela lets the topics scatter: climate anxiety, corrupted church, unequal life opportunities, transience of life.
The title track is the piece that carries the last of those, and that’s why it names the record.
Tomáš, who plays the bass and writes the lyrics, says the move was intentional. “It was a conscious step away from a concept album in the sense of focusing on a specific theme. It was a good and needed change from the creative side after two albums focusing on one specific topic, to have it open this time.”
The nine colors weren’t planned either. There was no list. “We did not start with a list of colours,” Tomáš says. “One song came after another. Most of the time we started with the topic we wanted to talk (and scream) about and afterwards tried to find the colour and context that would fit lyrically when composing a song about that topic.”
Colors show up in the lyrics with different weights across the record. Sometimes they sit at the center of the piece, sometimes they just pass through. The yellow lily grief in Žltá is one of the direct ones.
Biela is also the first Ničiteľ album with Tamara on vocals. She’s an active visual artist as well, and when the band started talking about carrying the album into painting, she took the whole visual side. Each of the nine songs will get its own painting, in its own color. Two of them, Brown and Green, are already finished. The release show in autumn will double as a vernissage of her work.
The color idea, Tomáš says, was already in place before Tamara joined. “We are lucky and happy that she was the one to realize the concept.” Martin, the drummer, is also a studied painter, so the visual instinct was already sitting in the band. Tamara made it central.
Žltá got picked for the first video for a couple of reasons. Out of the nine songs, four have Patrik Korinok co-producing the final sound. Žltá is one of them.
“So also from this side, thanks to his input, it felt like the right pick from the colour palette,” Tomáš says.
The song keeps the weight the trio has been carrying across their records, but Tamara’s voice pulls the register somewhere new. The crust and sludge foundation is still there: guitars low and slow, drums patient underneath. What Žltá adds is the shift between the tearing energy the trio has always leaned on and the passages where the song lets go and lets you breathe. Tamara’s vocal eases the pressure without losing the weight, then drops back into the low end and lets the band grind again. That push and pull is what carries the piece forward from where Anna ended.
The video was directed and edited by Peter Čaja, who also worked on the Anna spí clip.
Biela drops as a pay-what-you-want digital release on Bandcamp. A 12″ vinyl release is planned for autumn. The Slovak labels Salto Mortale Music and JDOS and also the Czech label Panic movements records are already on board for the co-release. If you are a DIY label and want to participate within a co-release, get in touch with the band through: [email protected]
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