Neris Kayahan loves performing, but sharing her feelings on her own album was quite scary

For Psychology student Neris Kayahan, 2025 was the year she shared her music with the outside world for the first time. Her debut album explores a personal journey from unreciprocated affection to emotional growth. “Writing songs helps me understand what I’m feeling. It’s therapeutic.”

On a big shelf in her studio apartment, second-year Psychology student Neris Kayahan from Izmir, Türkiye, has a collection of a few vinyl records: Melodrama by Lorde, The Life of a Showgirl by Taylor Swift, and an old ABBA classic. Between these albums, each by artists she grew up inspired by, she has made space for her own creation: the debut album Love, Almost, that she released in September. Almost 20,000 Spotify listeners enjoyed the nine tracks that explore love, loss and self-discovery.

Finding her voice in music

Music has been a huge part of Neris’s life from a young age. “I was playing the piano since I was seven years old”, she says. “But then I had a Russian piano teacher who was a little bit strict. At some point, I was supposed to take exams. I was too stressed. And that’s when I stopped playing classical piano.”

Still, stopping classical piano did not end her connection to music. Years later, she began writing her own songs, using the same instrument. “I was in eighth grade when I wrote my first song, together with one of my best friends at that time. We had this piano room at the school, and we spent a lot of time there”, Neris recalls. “We came up with a melody and wrote lyrics to it, and that was the first thing that I ever made. Then I figured I really liked it.”

Writing songs was not the first artistic talent Neris discovered. Before that, she was writing poetry in her mother tongue, Turkish. “I thought, if I’m into poetry, then maybe I can do music as well.”

She still finds it easier to write poetry in Turkish. However, when it comes to songwriting, English feels more comfortable. “All the music that I’m listening to is in English”, she explains.

From hobby to album

Despite having released three songs in Turkish, Neris initially did not plan to make an album before her producer encouraged her to record. “I have a friend in Türkiye who’s producing for me”, she says. “He told me: You have so many songs, why not make an album?” Together, they selected nine out of twenty songs that were mostly written during high school.

Recording began in Izmir in November 2024 and she continued working remotely through video calls once back in Rotterdam. The album was done by June 2025, but she hesitated before releasing it to a wider audience, she admits. “I was like, what am I supposed to do now? How do I promote it?”

For months, making any promotional plan held Neris back from putting her work into the world. “Also, I was very anxious about people listening to some of the songs that were very personal to me.”

Turning emotions into music

“Most of the songs are about this one guy from high school”, Neris shares. “He’s not someone I like thinking about right now. But it started with the idea of him and turned into thoughts like: Maybe love is not meant for me. Why am I going through all this?” However, later songs capture the shift from unreciprocated affection to emotional growth. “It became a reflection of how I perceive love and all the chances I feel I missed.”

For Neris, songwriting is not just a form of art, but more of ‘getting her emotions out’. “Sometimes your mind tells you everything’s fine, but deep down something’s bothering you”, she explains. “Writing songs helps me understand what I’m feeling. It’s therapeutic.”

No wonder she draws much inspiration from artists like Taylor Swift and The Cranberries. “Sometimes I find myself writing the same chord structures or using the same words that Taylor does”, she admits. “I feel like I get a lot from her discography, not as in sounds but mostly in lyrics and how she portrays the feelings of people.” Neris explicitly mentioned how Taylor Swift with her Evermore album helps listeners understand that love, marriage, and frienship are not forever, but heartbreak, pain and suffering are not forever as well, a message expressed in the titlesong.

The hardest lyric to write was in ‘Worth a Lifetime: ’Your love was like a deep breath you took. But mine was worth a lifetime’. “This sentence means that for them, the feeling was fleeting, but for me, it stayed”, she explains. These lyrics still resonate with Neris even years later, calling it her ‘own prophecy’, since every relationship she has had seems to follow the same pattern of ‘getting attached too much’.

Live performances

At the music event EURvision in May, organised by Studium Generale, she performed her original song Coffee Dates. “It was a great experience”, she says. “It was the first time ever I performed an original song, and it was so much fun.”

Earlier, she frequently sang as a vocalist in her high school’s music band back in Izmir. “I performed for the first time when I was in fourth grade”, she recalls. “I sang Dancing Queen by ABBA on stage. I remember going shopping with my mom to get flare pants, and she did my makeup with little flowers on my face because the goal was to look like one of the ABBA members. It was so exciting, adrenaline and happiness all mixed together. I still feel the same way when I’m on stage.”

Although she experiences social anxiety, Neris says performing feels completely different from releasing her songs. “It’s fun for me to perform someone else’s songs. I love having a stage presence. I find it exciting. The social anxiety part comes in when I think that so many are going to hear my feelings.”

Future

Neris prefers to keep music as a hobby for now. “It’s not like I’m going to make a career out of music. There’s so much competition”, she says.

Yet she’s already working on her second album. “I’ve written most of the songs over the past year, and I feel like my musical personality has grown a lot”, Neris shares. The new record will feature twelve songs and explore the concept of love and unfinished stories.