On seventh album, TRENCHES, Nahko Bear channels three years of soul-searching personal revolution into sound. Released on Sept. 1, the record reflects more than a thousand days of open-hearted self-excavation, avid learning/unlearning, and radical internal re-calibration.

In 2020, Nahko walked away from the corporate music industry, vanishing into rural Oregon to work intensely on himself and his relationship with the world. He returns with a record rich in the core qualities that have defined his career and delighted fans for over a decade – socially-conscious, super-positive folk and rock flecked with soulful alt-R&B, reggae, and gospel – now embroidered with a nuanced defiance of “cancel culture”, wide-eyed re-appreciation of himself, and a trademark stylistic eclecticism expanded into hip-hop, pop, trap, and more.

“All of us have been through so much in the last three years,” mulled Nahko. “The messages on this album will really resonate with people who’ve been through the trenches of this pandemic and whatever they’ve lost and whatever they’ve gained.”

Born to a Puerto Rican/Native American mother and a Filipino father, Nahko was adopted and raised in the suburbs of Portland, Oregon. Beginning his musical journey at 6 years old, Nahko began traveling widely in his teens, wrestling with identity, purpose, and perception. 

Busking on streets, selling CDs out of his guitar case, he earned a cult following. Backed by his band, Medicine For The People, Nahko’s 2013 commercial breakout album Dark As Night landed in the Billboard Heatseekers Chart top 10. Medicine For The People played major festivals including Outside Lands, Electric Forest, Wanderlust, and Bumbershoot, and sold-out Colorado’s 10,000-capacity Red Rocks Amphitheatre as headliners. 

 Fifth album Take Your Power Back was Nahko’s most profound and fully realized collection to date, described by When The Horn Blows as “powerful, emotional, and so heart-wrenchingly uplifting that it’s hard to find anything to fault.” Yet, dropping just as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold in 2020, the record was overshadowed both by global events and Nahko’s public shaming over online allegations.

Retreating to the Pacific Northwest, Nahko watched his community devastated by deadly wildfires that summer while reclaiming control of his career as his own manager and agent. At the end of 2021 he self-released the beautiful trouble EP, comprising of tracks started before the pandemic. A year later, in a semi-spontaneous outpouring of emotion and inspiration, the songs that became TRENCHES burst forth in the California studio of producer Adam Korbesmeyer.

 “Within seven weeks, we’d put together an album,” marveled Nahko. “The musical growth between Adam and I since we first started with Take Your Power Back has been immense.”

Without a label, a band, or public preconceptions looking over his shoulder, Nahko was able to enhance his signature world music and folk stylings with echoes of everything from Juice Wrld and Taylor Swift to Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver. TRENCHES is a frank expression of his musical journey and an eloquent response to recent personal controversy embraced by Nahko as his “liberation.”

 “I get to be rebirthed into this place where I get to call the shots,” he explained. “And it’s now moving out of the mentality of I’m just surviving to where I’m actually thriving.”

Each TRENCHES single will be accompanied by an acoustic visualizer video. The day after the album’s release, Nahko will build upon his successful 2022 headlining tour of Europe with another solo Euro trek, followed by a tour of non-traditional U.S. venues and festival sets in Australia.

“TRENCHES has something for everybody,” he concluded. “A range of emotions from anger to accountability and redemption; sorrow and mourning to soaring joy; forgiveness to rejoicing.”

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