Nina June on the Seal Skin Tour: 'The concert should feel like a movie of your own life'

April 2026, interview

With her new album Seal Skin ~ Anthems of a Woman, Nina June takes you into a world of poetic, cinematic pop. In an exclusive interview with Amare, she explains how her music blends personal stories with universal themes, and how this will evolve into a total experience on Friday, April 24, live at the Nieuwe Kerk in The Hague, where the audience will be swept away, just like in a movie.

Your new album is called Seal Skin ~ Anthems of a Woman. What does this album mean to you personally?
I wrote this album as a soundtrack to my life. 'Seal Skin' is a mythical, feminine figure born in the sea who eventually comes ashore to build a life with a man she meets. She then tries to live up to all kinds of expectations, but as a woman, this ultimately doesn’t make her happy. For me, this is a very relatable theme: as a woman, you feel all kinds of expectations in life, and it’s very much about finding your own form, how you want to shape your life for yourself. You’re being pulled in all directions, but what do you want for yourself? What is your own form? That’s what the album is about for me. About all the layers of your identity. Women are portrayed as one-dimensional and kept small, but with this album, I want to show all the different colors. So it’s a very personal and autobiographical work.

The music is narrative, personal, and is often described as cinematic. Do you see your music as a kind of film in sound?
Absolutely. I immediately see images in my mind, and what I love about cinematic music is that other people can listen to it and see their own images from their lives. I do indeed create it almost as if the music were already part of a film. That way, it becomes an experience you can be swept away by, rather than a series of separate songs.

And how does that experience translate to the stage? Is this tour a concert or truly a total experience?
A total experience! It’s certainly a concert, but one with transitions and a certain flow. There’s an opening tune, and the entire concert becomes a kind of soundtrack. The audience can sit back and let it all wash over them, and then I hope that the images, experiences, and memories from their own lives are given plenty of room to emerge.

Is there a difference between what visitors can expect from the Seal Skin Tour and what they experience at home through the album?
I produced the album over a very long period of time. What you hear on the album are the final versions, partly recorded in London with a 12-piece string orchestra and partly in the Netherlands with all kinds of musicians. But the beauty of a live experience is that every night is different and you almost create it together with the audience. There’s a synergy between the musicians on stage, the space, and the acoustics, and it’s fantastic in the Nieuwe Kerk. It’s a unique experience, because a night like this will never come again, and you create it together. I hear from many visitors who’ve been to a concert that the music resonates very differently. Listening to the record is like looking at a work of art, but at a live concert, you’re right in the middle of it!

“The Nieuwe Kerk becomes a fifth band member.”

You said it yourself: the Nieuwe Kerk is a special, intimate, almost sacred place. What kind of influence does a space like this have on your music and performance?
Actually, there are four of us in the band, but the Nieuwe Kerk becomes that fifth band member—or rather, orchestra member. The church joins in, because singing in a place like this adds an enormous extra dimension to the music. I’ve sung in the Nieuwe Kerk before, and it really gives me wings. It also changes the way you sing. The acoustics and the natural reverberation in a place like this are unique, so I adapt how I sing - and how the four of us sing together - to that space. The silence also plays a role in the music, and I think the audience will really notice that. It’s an experience you can’t get anywhere else.

What do you hope the audience in The Hague will feel when they’re sitting together in that space?
I hope they can experience the concert like a movie, a soundtrack to their own lives where there’s room for their own images, memories, feelings, and experiences. These are my personal stories, but the themes are very universal. It’s about love, loss, grief, and reinventing yourself. It’s about letting go of everything, regaining your strength, and also about vulnerability. And I think those are universal themes, where everyone has their own story. That’s what makes it special to me. When visitors come to me with their own stories after listening, it means my story has become their story. That’s the highest achievement for me.

“My stories become the audience’s story.”

For anyone who doesn’t know you or your music yet: which song should they start with? And why?
From the new album, I think they should start with The Lighthouse (Particles). It’s a song about the beacons in our lives. When we seem to have lost our way, hopefully we all have a few people in our lives whom we know will stay put and always be there. I see that this song resonates for that reason and is listened to a lot on Spotify. But… of course, they can also just go to my Spotify and start at the top with Rainbow Ashes. We’ll definitely be playing this song, as well as my Spotify hit We Watched It All Come Down, during the tour. These songs are from my previous albums, and many people already know them, but they don’t yet know that I’m Dutch or that my face belongs to these songs. I hope to change that a bit more with this tour.

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