Niykee Heaton

Early life

Nicolet Aleta Heaton was born on December 4, 1994, in Geneva, Illinois, located outside of Chicago, but notes a stronger connection to the time spent in her mother's native South Africa.

After writing her first song at age 5 and teaching herself to play guitar at 9, Heaton dedicated her childhood years to making music. Despite realizing early on that she wanted to be a musician, she never saw herself as a performer and just wanted to make music, developing a stage fright. She gave herself vocal training by singing along to a Diana Ross greatest-hits CD, since her family couldn't financially support her musical education. Heaton has an older brother and a sister Rachel, who beat liver cancer and died in 2007 at age 21 while waiting for a second liver transplant, whom she regularly notes taking inspiration from. Heaton also struggled with bullying throughout her school years.

Career

In 2011, while still enrolled in high school, Heaton began uploading clips recorded in her bedroom on YouTube, including covers of contemporary hit songs along with occasional originals, for which she accompanied herself on acoustic guitar. In December 2012, on her eighteenth birthday, her cover of Chief Keef's "Love Sosa" particularly was featured on the website WorldStarHipHop, promptly helping to propel Heaton to prominence, and subsequently taking meetings with several record labels. Heaton graduated high school six months early and self-financed the recording of a host of her own songs, opting to take a step back and build "a catalog that we were proud of" with her manager Lauren, eventually signing with All Def Digital in 2014, a YouTube-based label founded by Steve Rifkind and Def Jam-founder Russell Simmons, in partnership with Capitol Records. She topped Billboard's Next Big Sound chart on April 24, 2014.

On September 23, 2014, Heaton released her debut EP Bad Intentions digitally in the United States, topping the Billboard + Twitter Trending 140 chart and reaching the top ten in the U.S. iTunes Store on the day of its release. On April 28, 2015, she posted an open letter online expressing frustration with her label and explaining the delay for her music. On June 13, 2015, she launched a website, NBK (Naturyl Born Killers), stating "NBK is the movement," where new music was then independently released for free regularly in following months. Heaton later clarified, "We are now in a place where we can create music that I want to create, and we are no longer tied to the people that were holding me back," revealing she had started producing music herself as well. On October 20, 2015, she premiered her debut music video for a song titled "Lullaby," on Apple Music. Also in October, Heaton announced her first headlining concert tour, The Bedroom Tour, with twenty dates throughout the United States and Canada, beginning on November 13 in Houston, Texas and concluding on December 18 in Los Angeles, California. On March 18, 2016, Heaton released The Bedroom Tour Playlist, a mixtape titled similarly to the tour, compiling remixed and remastered material she had shared online and debuted on live shows in previous months. She is currently working on her debut studio album. She kicked off The Centerfold Tour, her second North American tour containing forty-three shows, on October 6, 2016, in Athens, Georgia.

Artistry

While talking about her songwriting, Heaton said, "My music is a direct reflection of who I am. My writing is everything to me because that's all I had growing up. I had a really tough childhood and at a point when I was very young, I sort just stopped speaking because I stuttered," mentioning her inability to have friends, causing her to always be alone due to her mother staying with her sister in the hospital, her father being drunk and the rest of her family living in South Africa, so she "would just write all the time." "Even when I'm not writing literally about things that have happened to me, all the pain of my childhood and losing my sister ends up getting pushed into my music," she adds about her creative inspiration and wanting to be proud of the message in her music, "It shapes my songs and builds this deeper meaning under everything, which is one of the most important things to me." She has mentioned being heavily influenced by Bob Dylan and Tom Waits and is also a fan of hip-hop, pointing out rappers like Kanye West, 2 Chainz, Jay Z, Drake and Nicki Minaj as other inspirations.

Heaton addressed claims regarding her social media presence in platforms such as Instagram overshadowing her music saying, "If I can use what I have aesthetically to draw people in, then why not use it? I'm not going to put on a turtleneck just to prove a point, or to make people feel more comfortable according to society's standards." Heaton notes her writing style and musical roots come from growing up with "older siblings who listened to a lot of soul and blue grass and alternative," and her sister's love of poetry, having discovered rapper Lil Jon when she was ten, which sparked her interest in hip-hop music, describing her sound as "those two worlds colliding, like folk, rhythm, and Shakespeare sonnets mixed with Kanye trap beats."

Tours

Headlining