Nieve Ella’s “19 In A Week” Is Her Love (and Hate) Letter To Growing Up
Grecia Haro-Flores
UK’s West-Midlands 20-year-old Nieve Ella sings, “Feeling like I'm grown, but I'm still in the backseat. Caught up in a world where I don't understand me,” in her newest single, “19 In A Week.”
Photo by Frank Fieber
The single release is featured in her debut EP Young and Naive—highlighting Ella’s love-and-hate relationship with growing up and society’s expectations for teenagers nowadays. “I felt like I was a lot of steps behind in life compared to the people I grew up around,” says Ella.
The track provides a three-minute escape of harmony-filled, 90s guitar pop realness. Much like the rest of the tracks on Young and Naive, it gives a sense of comfort, reassuring the listeners that they aren’t the only ones experiencing teenage feelings. Each song on her EP carries the “emotional weight of [Ella’s] adolescence and the lessons [she’s] learned along the way.”
Ella projects her feelings of falling behind in her dream-like music video directed by Benji Beacham. While everyone is enjoying themselves at her birthday party, Ella is rather dispirited and gloomy. The closing scene shows her party guests taking fistfuls of her birthday cake, while she shows no reaction. Ella’s indifference towards her party and guests could represent how she feels like an outcast or how many teenagers attend parties for the fun of it, but don’t necessarily care about the individual being celebrated.
Her EP, Young and Naive, featuring “19 In a Week,” is available on all streaming platforms.
