Painfully Happy (Deluxe): Nanette’s Final Chapter of Healing

Painfully Happy (Deluxe): Nanette’s Final Chapter of Healing

Press play on Painfully Happy (Deluxe) and it doesn’t feel like an ending, it feels like the moment right after you finally exhale. This is the closing chapter of a story Nanette has been telling since 2022, and by the time you reach the last note, you understand she wasn’t just making an album, she was documenting a process. Grief, healing, emotional growth, and the strange, quiet hope that shows up once heartbreak stops being the loudest thing in the room. You don’t listen to this project so much as you sit with it.

A Story That Started in Bad Weather

To understand where this deluxe edition lands, you have to remember where Nanette started. Her self-written, self-produced debut Bad Weather cracked the Top 10 on the African Apple Music charts and earned her a SAMA nomination, announcing a Durban-born artist unafraid to write from somewhere real. From there she kept building, standout features on Kelvin Momo’s Amukelani, a genre-blending sophomore project in The Waiting Room that pulled in Blxckie, BGRZ, Nasty C, and Tellaman, and then Painfully Happy, the original EP, an intimate, refined body of work that crossed two million streams and soundtracked a sold-out night at Untitled Basement.

Painfully Happy (Deluxe) is what happens when an artist decides a chapter isn’t finished until it’s actually been closed. It’s less a bonus edition and more the last few pages of a diary she wasn’t ready to hand over the first time.

Crossing Borders to Find the Center

The emotional core of this deluxe edition is “Taking Me Places,” and the story behind it is almost as striking as the song itself. It was written during a songwriting camp in Lagos, produced by MashBeatz and Christer, and built alongside acclaimed Nigerian songwriter Mbryo. Less than 24 hours after it was written, it was performed live for the first time at Obi’s House in Lagos, still warm, still unfinished in the way only a brand new song can be.

There’s something worth sitting with in that timeline. A song born in one country, tested in front of a room in that same city within a day, and now living inside a project rooted in a very different kind of healing back home. It’s a small, concrete example of a much bigger shift happening across the continent, South African and Nigerian artists no longer just featuring on each other’s tracks but actually building songs together, in the same room, in real time. “Taking Me Places” isn’t a collaboration bolted onto an album for reach. It’s proof of what happens when the wall between two scenes just quietly stops existing.

The Feeling of Finishing Something

What makes Painfully Happy (Deluxe) hit differently from the original EP is the sense of completion running underneath it. The first version of this project introduced the ache. The deluxe edition is where Nanette lets herself walk through the other side of it, not by resolving the pain neatly, but by giving it room to become something steadier. Grief doesn’t disappear on this record, it just stops being the only thing in the frame.

That arc tracks with everything Nanette has built her name on. She’s an artist who has shared stages with Mariah the Scientist, Sasha Keable, and Shekhinah at WAV Festival, who recently opened for Ella Mai in Cape Town, and who’s picked up international recognition through Apple Music’s ALPHA campaign and a spot on Spotify’s Ones to Watch 2025. But none of that changes the way she writes. If anything, it sharpens it, an artist with a growing stage and an unshaken commitment to telling the truth on record.

Why It Lingers

Painfully Happy (Deluxe) isn’t built to be background noise. It’s built for the listener who wants to sit inside someone else’s healing for forty-something minutes and come out the other side a little more convinced their own is possible too. Between the Lagos-born “Taking Me Places” and the quieter, more resolved corners of the tracklist, this project closes a chapter the only way an honest one can, not with a neat bow, but with the sense that something genuinely got better along the way. And once you’ve sat with it, you understand exactly why she needed one more chapter before she could call this story finished.