Najwa

Born on February 14th, 1972 to Basque and Jordanian parents, Spanish actress Najwa Nimri Urrutikoetxea will today be familiar to many as the star of hugely popular dramas including Money Heist and Vis a Vis, but has also simultaneously made strides in her home country as a mononymous singer. First foraying into music as part of the soul group Respect and the jazz collective Clan Club, she later teamed up with record producer Carlos Jean to form the bilingual duo Najwajean, who have since gone on to release a string of spellbinding off-pop albums since 1998. Juggling her contributions to the duo with a career of her own, she made her solo debut in 2001 with the English-language trip-hop album Carefully, which entered the Spanish charts at #76, marking a modest improvement on her existing record with Najwajean. Continuing to enjoy incremental gains with her follow-up LPs on Dro East West, Nimri enjoyed a major breakthrough with 2006’s Walkabout, which reached #10 in her home country and was certified gold. After reuniting with Jean in 2008 for their fourth collaborative effort, the national #20 success Till It Breaks, she took a brief hiatus from the music industry to focus on her acting travails. Adopting a more risqué image and synthesising novel influences from genres like indie dance, techno, Latin trap and alternative rock in her ensuing works, Nimri has since enjoyed strong commercial performance in the streaming era, with the orchestral Amaral collaboration “Procuro olvidarte”, taken from the 2018 Quién te cantará soundtrack, and her 2019 rendition of the Money Heist theme, “Bella ciao”, both proving particularly successful. Her sixth solo album, Viene de Largo, arrived in 2020 to critical acclaim.