B-Side Guys

néomí frames “Didn’t I” around questions that reveal their own absurdity the moment you ask them out loud: “Did I do enough?” and “Was I enough?” The Dutch-Surinamese singer-songwriter explains these are precisely the wrong questions, the ones you ask yourself when carrying someone else’s chaos in a fractured relationship. Following her acclaimed 2025 EP Another Year Will Pass and 2024’s award-winning debut album somebody’s daughter, this first 2026 release (out February 6 via Nettwerk) documents what happens when you finally realize the person sabotaging things repeatedly should be the one interrogating their own behavior, not you.

The production commits to sparse instrumentation and slow-burning emotional arc, néomí’s signature blend of ethereal folk and cinematic pop minimalism doing exactly what Dork described as “emotional depth over big production.” Since her 2022 emergence with EP before, she’s built a reputation for poetic lyricism and vulnerability that earns Laura Marling and Phoebe Bridgers comparisons without sounding derivative. “Didn’t I” operates in that same territory, wielding intimacy as power through what she calls an “inevitable kind of love, one that you wish in the end didn’t happen at all.”

The track reflects what néomí describes as newfound clarity around letting go of guilt and reclaiming perspective. Writing songs functions as diary-keeping for her, everything sincere, everything honest, which means “Didn’t I” captures the specific frustration of being held responsible for another person’s self-destruction. The Sunday Times called her work “intricate, intimate, texturally spare, lyrically observational and arresting,” and this single demonstrates all of those qualities while stepping fully into something harder: not just documenting heartbreak but recognizing when the heartbreak was never yours to fix. Headline dates across the Netherlands in October will test whether that quietly devastating intimacy translates to stages in Haarlem, Utrecht, Tilburg, Rotterdam, and Nijmegen, but based on “Didn’t I,” she’s ready to stop asking the wrong questions.