Community Picks is a weekly series where artists submit a release to be voted on by members of the Nina community. Once a week, the release with the most votes will receive editorial coverage. This week’s winner is the album Hollywood by Andreas Raser. The record is full of inventive, melancholic pop that takes cues from a variety of genres: dream pop, trip hop, indietronica, and slowcore among them. We sent over some questions to the duo of Camille Clair and Albert Dietrich, read the interview and listen to the Hollywood below.

Where are you from?

Andreas Raser: The band consists of Camille from Los Angeles and Albert from Hamburg. We met and started making music while studying art in Frankfurt. Now we are based in Vienna.

How would you describe your music to someone who has never heard it?

It's melancholic, sometimes off-kilter pop music. Some of the songs are more complex with synthesized elements and some are more paired down and acoustic. The lyrics tend to be a bit sad. 

Tell us about your release on Nina.

We started experimenting in the sound studio of our school in 2021. Eventually our collection of recordings started to resemble songs and we thought about working towards an album. Some of these early tracks we shared with a friend, Speckman, in Hamburg and he was super supportive, ultimately inviting us to release on Polly Records which he is one of the founders of. The songs are quite sentimental which is how the title came to be. Camille grew up in Los Angeles and, once removed from it, began to identify with the caricature of the city: Hollywood.

What kind of tools do you use to make music?

We are using a Gibson, a Roland SP-404, and a Casio SK-1. Our configuration for recording and for performing are essentially the same.

Who are 3-5 independent artists you think people should check out? 

Ruby Throat, Ada, Oxhy, Cindy Lee.