OAKLAND, CA. The alt-rock independent musician has always been unafraid of channeling hurt into verse. With her new single "Burning," Naomi Neva has perhaps released her most potent and intimate work. Now streaming on all platforms, "Burning" is a raging meditation on childhood trauma, shattered friendships, and the uncanny superimposition of personal and planetary crises.
"Burning" envelops you in smoke and sirens. Its eerie guitars and thundering percussion reflect the chaos Naomi was tapping into. Evacuating her childhood home as wildfire consumed her neighborhood, the fire department got right to Naomi's house, and she remembered her dad trying to take a shortcut through the hills and nearly driving them into the flames. That guttural picture reverberates throughout every second of the song. Though fraught for the person in whom Naomi's voice part tremble, part roar brittle and hoarsely defiant, finds these memories buried in ash, unearthed in a moment of medical crisis and emotional unspooling, there's a rawness here that you can't fake, a rare feel that the song isn't just in pain but made of it.
"Burning" is more than an elegy to the past. It's a mirror reflecting the present. In Naomi's hands, personal grief and environmental dread merge, igniting something urgent and universal. The song accumulates in waves, restraint, and eruption until it lands like a wildfire. It is beautiful, terrifying, and impossible to ignore.
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