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If you take an in-depth look at comfortable, boebeck‘s first EP, you will gain an insight into the thoughts of a fragile yet heartfelt singer-songwriter who’s ready to step out of a family heritage that might foreshadow her artistic career from the beginning. This background is both a blessing and a curse, especially when your father is your home country’s most celebrated intellectual of his generation through contemporary music, literature and social studies, but these values also determined the ways boebeck’s identity as a songwriter came to be. These same questions of identity and defining one’s self are tackled on ‘i am not’, boebeck’s outstanding artistic debut. Here, the listener can be sure only about one thing: boebeck is on the best way to become the hottest early bet of the region’s contemporary, heartfelt and honest pop music scene.
Since the release of her first single ’i am not’ in 2021, boebeck has played on the stages of most Hungarian festivals, in the clubs of the country’s biggest cities and in neighbouring capitals like Bratislava and Vienna as well as in Brussels. Nonetheless, the most important endeavour of the past years was the recording of her self-titled debut album. Each of the eight songs speaks to past experiences, often relying on the listener to put the pieces together. Leaning into the woes of the past and attempting to find words that convey actual meaning, ’boebeck’ tells stories about rejection, exclusion, self-doubt, as well as shame and self-pity. Still, the songs seek to tackle these issues with irony and self-awareness, the latter being a central topic in boebeck’s artistic output in general. The visual elements of the album evoke the past in a simple way, featuring blocks of flats in the neighbourhoods where boebeck grew up and reflecting the sort of emptiness that the artist both dreads and is drawn to.
“These eight songs were written about and during the most difficult times in my life, I have no good reason to share any of these with anyone, and yet I feel like I have to. Oversharing is probably my greatest weakness, but I like to see it as an asset because of the freedom that comes with it – so this album could also be seen as an oversharer asserting their value as an oversharer. But simply put, I want to make meaning, and this album is mostly about that struggle: self-awareness on a disturbing level, as my mother would say,” said boebeck about her self-titled LP.
In the first year of her international career, she had the opportunity to open the HOTS reception at Waves Vienna, to work with producer Matt Lawrence on her new demo, and was chosen by Sóley as support on the Hungarian stop of her European tour. In cooperation with Liveurope, she has already performed with MiraLu Kovacs (AT), and Meskerem Mees (BE) too. This spring, in addition to an album release show in Budapest in March, boebeck will perform at literary events in her home country and at Ljubljana showcase festival MENT, as well as in artistic hubs in the capital and in rural Hungary. In the summer, she will perform at festivals that focus on alternative music like Művészetek Völgye and Fishing on Orfű, and, after a successful first concert in 2022, she will also return to Sziget Festival this year.
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