Niia isn’t looking to revive jazz standards or wrap herself in vintage glamour. She’s too busy dragging the genre into the present and letting it bleed. On her new album V, the Italian-American vocalist and pianist builds something bold, beautiful, and unsettling from the ruins of tradition. Raised on the elegance of the greats and shaped by her own classical and jazz training, Niia isn’t rejecting the past so much as rewiring it to say something that still feels true.

At the center is that voice. It’s been praised by everyone from The New York Times to Rolling Stone, and for good reason. It doesn’t beg for attention or rely on tricks. Instead, it floats, cracks, hovers, and cuts exactly when it needs to. Niia’s delivery lives in a quiet tension, slipping between restraint and revelation like she’s walking a tightrope with her eyes closed. That sense of vulnerability is deliberate. “This album lives in the tension between control and collapse,” she says. “I wanted to write songs that could hold both.”

V does just that. It never settles into nostalgia, even as it borrows the harmonic richness of pianists like Bill Evans and the psychological texture of old film scores. Produced with Spencer Zahn and Lawrence Rothman, and featuring contributions from hitmaker Chloe Angelides and a circle of adventurous L.A.-based players, the album sounds less like a traditional jazz record and more like a noir film unraveling in slow motion. Live instruments blur into ambient textures. Lyrics spiral between confession and contradiction. It’s not clean, and that’s the point.

Forget torch songs and veiled metaphors. Niia writes from the gut and leaves the mess intact. These are songs about heartbreak and self-harm, about delusion and denial, about owning the damage and dancing in it. One moment she’s playing the victim with aching precision, and the next she’s admitting she pulled the trigger herself. It’s not self-pity. It’s something stranger and more human. “The good and bad live side by side, often in the same verse,” she explains.

V isn’t a concept or a tribute. It’s a world of its own, and it holds space for all of it — the humor, the horror, the heartbreak, and the occasional flash of hope. Jazz has always been about improvising through pain, and Niia understands that better than most. She just happens to filter it through a postmodern lens, one that’s cracked and beautiful in equal measure.