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With the group Lunik they both became pop stars. Now, with MiNa, they’re spreading shooting stars over the heavens—delicate songs that fulfill every wish as they fade away. Jaël Krebs and Luk Zimmermann, the singer and guitar-playing producer of Lunik, have created a musical foster child with MiNa, and have provided their child with a creative playing field. “Playground Princess” is the name of the debut of the two Bernese musicians. Nota bene: it is a debut in the minor key.

These are not cheerful songs that the two offer us. They are sometimes fragile, at other times self-confident, but always thoughtful and mostly serious odes to life and love, with all their imponderability and all their magic. In spite of this, with MiNa no one will leave the room unhappy. Rather, they’ll leave with the feeling of having found a new musical mainstay a companion for the hours that aren’t counted by the sundial.

MiNa developed not out of a need, but rather from the desire to once again set new musical parameters. “With MiNa we had the opportunity to create a totally new project,” says Jaël Krebs. “Lunik’s sound is relatively concretely defined in our heads. MiNa gave us the chance to toss away all the outside limitations to just sit down in the studio and let our ideas run free.”

First they experimented in the direction of electronic music. Later their joint preference for acoustic pop miniature won out. Many of the songs are principally accompanied by acoustic guitar; in others the instrumental range is supplemented by drums, a banjo, a recorder or a melancholic synthesizer. Production also takes place on a smaller scale. In their studio they worked for the most part as a duo: when Luk Zimmermann played drums, Jaël Krebs was in the control room and when Jaël was at the piano or the Farfisa organ, Luk took over the production.

What started small has grown into very big pop music. It is music that doesn’t strike to appeal to everyone or to fit the current pop model. “Many pieces have no refrain or were recorded on the first take,” says Luk Zimmermann. “And a lot lives from the charm of the incomplete.”

It was presumably this unrestrictedness that favored the beauty that emanates from the album. It is a beauty that takes its time to tempt, only to impress itself, ultimately, all the more deeply on your heart. There is, for example, the simultaneously whispered and sung opener “Sorted Out”, in which Jaël Krebs sounds like a siren with a folk guitar. There is the murder ballad “Living in Between”, performed in duet with Pål Angelskår, the singer of the Norwegian group Minor Majority (a sort of Nordic Tindersticks). Or the confident slightly mischievous pop song “Praying Mantis” and at the other end of the emotional scale the hymnal “At the Start of It”, a big-city blues tune underpinned by sad Western guitar. It is music that searches for breadth and yet never flees.

MiNa have christened their first child “Playground Princess”. She has developed into a brooding princess. One that in spite of her fragility will prove herself in the wide world, as long as that world doesn’t stop thirsting for music that is magnificent and profound.

Ane Hebeisen