Neapolitan singer and song-writer, La Niña, has taken the music industry by storm with her most recent album Furèsta. Incorporating elements of Neapolitan dialect, Arabic, and French, the album has acted as an ode to the history and traditions of Naples and all its influences – while also demanding a revolution of outdated limitations and injustices, especially those faced by women. To hear La Niña’s vocals is to understand the message of a language in which you may never speak. To watch La Niña is to understand that you are bearing witness to something, someone, actively demolishing and rebuilding the constraints of this moment as we understand it – reshaping the structures and foundations of music and language.
Photographed by HELOISE VYBIRAL
hube: Your music seems to transcend language itself, resonating with listeners on a deeply emotional level. Was this a conscious intention from the start, or did it unfold naturally over time?
La Niña: Music spoke before I ever did. Long before I could shape a lyric, I was drawn to breath, to raw sound, to the resonance of the unsayable. It wasn’t a conscious mission to transcend language – it emerged naturally, from feeling often out of place within language itself. Music became the one space that could hold what words couldn’t.
h: In an industry that often tries to flatten people into categories and aesthetics, how do you maintain your sense of dimensionality and depth?
LN: Depth, for me, is born from resistance – the quiet rebellion of staying true to oneself even when the world prefers a flatter version of you. I’ve never wanted to be a genre, an aesthetic, a brand. What I make comes from what I live – messy, layered, unresolved. That’s where the realness is. And it’s the realness that endures.
h: Your latest album, Furèsta, meaning ‘forest’, evokes themes of nature and space. What is the significance of these elements in your musical process?
LN: Furèsta is me moving through the world as a sensitive body. Nature, for me, is both sanctuary and stranger – it heals, but it also overwhelms. Walking through a forest is like being inside a song: you don’t grasp everything at once, but you feel held. That’s how I approach making music – I get lost, so I can return changed.
h: Your work explores the complexities of womanhood and the struggles that accompany it. What drew you to this theme – and why now?
LN: The woman I am today carries battles – personal and inherited. I didn’t choose this theme; it chose me when I finally had the voice and sound to hold it. To speak of womanhood’s contradictions is not just political – it’s an act of tenderness, a tribute to the women who shaped me, who survived in me.
Photographed by HELOISE VYBIRAL
Photographed by HELOISE VYBIRAL
Photographed by HELOISE VYBIRAL
h: You’ve described your relationship with Naples as that of a mother – one whose love is both nourishing and restraining. How has this dynamic shifted as your career expands beyond its borders?
LN: Naples is a womb. It nourished me, sheltered me, but it also bound me in its embrace. As my work travels further, I find myself seeing it with new eyes – from a distance, perhaps, but with more compassion. Like you’d look at a mother once you’ve finally become your own person.
h: Naples is a place of vibrant contrast – rich in cultural diversity yet rooted in a strong regional identity. Your music reflects this, weaving Arabic, French, and Neapolitan dialects. How do these influences coexist in your work, and how do they shape your sense of identity – musically and personally?
LN: I sing in Napoletano because it’s the only language that carries my weight – the weight of memory, street noise, prayer, defiance. It’s not just a dialect; it’s an atmosphere, a body I inhabit. The other languages you hear in Furèsta – Arabic, French – belong to the artists who crossed my path and left a trace. They echo through the album like distant lights. But napoletano is my ground zero. It’s the tongue in which I first learned to feel exposed, to speak with both rage and grace. It’s where my voice feels most naked – and most powerful.
h: Through your music, you seem to advocate for a kind of cultural unification. In such a fragmented world, what do you believe could truly bring people together right now?
LN: I don’t believe in a perfect harmony – I believe in dissonance that finds meaning. What could bring people together now isn’t some forced idea of unity, but the courage to stand in our differences and still reach toward each other. Music doesn’t erase the fractures – it sings through them. I don’t want to smooth the world out. I want to make it echo. If there’s any kind of unification in what I do, it’s about letting all these voices – wounded, wild, foreign, familiar – coexist without needing to agree. Just needing to be heard.
h: A person can live many lives and die many times in one lifetime. Have you experienced a personal or artistic rebirth?
LN: Absolutely – more than once. Every time I’ve broken, I’ve had to let part of me die in order to become something else. Art, for me, is a ritual of shedding. I don’t fear transformation; I live for it. That’s where my power lives – in the becoming.
h: How does your relationship to the sound that surrounds you – be it birdsong or a loud conversation at a nearby bar – make its way into your music, if at all?
LN: The sound of life insists its way into my work. The chaos of the street, birds calling at dawn, someone arguing three tables away – these are not background noises. They are reminders that the world is alive. Sometimes I record them. Sometimes I just let them haunt me into a new rhythm.
h: How do you pursue self-determination – as an artist and as a person?
LN: Self-determination, for me, is the art of refusal – saying no to the boxes, shortcuts, and stories written for you. But also the courage of saying yes: to vulnerability, to failure, to the unknown. Being an artist means choosing, over and over, to show up as who you truly are – even when it trembles.
ㅤ
ㅤ
Interview by ISABELLA MICELI