November Ultra – open arms

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November Ultra makes music that feels like you’ve fallen into someone’s diary. Extremely intimate, it welcomes you in, offers you a seat and puts its arms around you to share its stories.

Music – and singing, specifically – has always been a source of happiness and peace for Nova. She began singing when she was a young child and immediately fell in love with the way it made her feel. “There’s a video of me where I’m yelling that I love to sing,” she explains. “My dad’s coming home and just wants some peace and he’s like, “We can sing tomorrow”. I’m like, ”I don’t want to sing tomorrow – I want to sing today until tomorrow.”

She is, as she acknowledges herself, an obsessive person – a trait she shares with her Spanish grandfather, Ramón. It was him who kickstarted her love of singing, teaching her first song – a Spanish song from the copla genre – when she was three years old. He introduced her to musicals from the ‘60s, like The Sound Of Music, which she would beg to watch again as soon as it had finished, which have gone on to influence the theatrical element of her own songs. Ramón’s enthusiasm, passion and knowledge have been “so instrumental and so important” to every aspect of November’s work.

On “Soft & Tender”, November asks: “Is that your morning voice? I really love your morning voice.” “I recorded the second verse on a Sunday morning so that really is my morning voice,” she laughs. “You can see that it’s not the same texture in vocals [as before], but that’s what I like – I’m embracing the story of how I made that song.”

These little moments and characters that appear also belie the musician’s love of language. Before she was able to focus on music full-time, November worked in audiovisual subtitling, in which she has a master’s degree, and growing up with Spanish and Portuguese parents in France meant she has spoken three languages since the age of six. Bedroom Walls itself features a trio of tongues – English, French and Spanish, each of which symbolize something different.

As a singer-songwriter, she divides her time between recording studios and her DIY bedroom-studio, working for others as a topliner/songwriter (Jaden Smith, Kungs, Barbara Pravi) while recording, exploring and producing her own songs on Ableton. November Ultra went viral on TikTok last summer when Camila Cabello posted a video on TikTok using the song ‘’Come into my arms’’ which went viral and saw November Ultra’s TikTok getting more than 8M views and a lot of Duet Me videos leading to her becoming one of the Billboard Song Breaker in August.