The five friends who make music under the name Quase Nicolau – Francisco, Gonçalo, Melo, Nuno and Zé – came together as they moved from high school to university, coming from backgrounds as diverse as classical training, jazz and folk. rock and blues learned at home. What united them, as it still does today, was the desire to compose and sing songs in Portuguese.
After a year and a half of rehearsals and first shows, the band debuted with Alvorada (2021) which took them to the stage of the Emergente Festival in 2021 and the arrival of the theme “Pouco, Tanto” took them to the podium of FNAC Novos Talentos 2022. After performing at stages such as Casa do Capitão, Centro Cultural da Malaposta and BOTA Anjos, the Alvorada cycle ended in style, with shows at the FNAC Live 2023 Festival and the Paredes de Coura 2023 Festival.
Work was then underway on the band’s first full-length album. The eleven new songs, from the beginning conceived as parts of a whole, were composed from 2019 to 2022 and partly tested during the Alvorada concerts. To give them an equally new and fair voice, however, the band felt they needed other ears. This is how João Correia (Tape Junk, Lena d’Água, Jorge Palma, Bruno Pernadas) joined the project as a producer, under whose guidance the songs were pre-produced in the spring of 2023 and produced from the summer of 2023 to the spring of 2024.
Over more than a year of life, from the beginning to the end of all seasons, the search for unique sound of each song was sought, without a plan or blueprint for the arrangements, intending to deepen the sung word and make the album a small world. To the choral arrangements and the mix of acoustic and electric instruments of Alvorada, an electronic component was gradually added, previously unheard of in the band’s discography. Among the samples and manipulations, there is also room for a growing variety of instruments, from the metallophone and melodica to various keyboards, synthesizers, percussions and everyday natural noises, not forgetting the participation of guest musicians Vasco Robert on piano and João Capinha on tenor saxophone. , alto saxophone and transverse flute.
Over the instruments are the five voices of Quase Nicolau, all tones from bass to tenor, serving the most urgent and direct, most danceable, but also most intimate and poetic songs that the band has presented so far. With “PRIMEIRO AMOR”, Quase Nicolau inaugurates 2025. The third track on the album and the first of three ballads that make it up, it is a moment of sad but tender farewell, in which two words near the end resonate, perhaps above all, “ never resentment”, founded on the feeling and certainty that, when love is deep and true, it somehow lasts, and cannot result in its opposite.
In “PRIMEIRO AMOR” some of the musical experiments made by Quase Nicolau on his new album are also evident, from unusual tunings to different or uncertain time signatures, from the use of the simple and modified metallophone to the human voice transformed into a rhythmic and melodic sample. The desire to not overload the song, to have the courage to sing unadorned, to be as vulnerable as possible, presided over everything. If “O QUE FOR” brought the choirs, “PRIMEIRO AMOR” brings the voice alone, a register to which Quase Nicolau will return.
The single, which will be followed by two others until the album’s release in the spring, is accompanied by a dance music video choreographed and performed by Catarina Gonçalves and Lucas Ribeiro, dancers from the Companhia Portuguesa de Bailado Contemporâneo, and photographed by cinematographer Martim Varela. (Prisma), who had already collaborated with the band in “O QUE FOR”.
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