NERVO Wants to Educate You About Child Trafficking Through a Future Rave Banger: ‘Becoming a Mother Was the Turning Point’

Katie Bain
·5 min read

They may not have realized it at the time, but the crowd at Tomorrowland 2022 got a lesson on the grim realities of child trafficking, right as they were raving.

This transmission came during a trio of sets from NERVO, who during each installment of the three weekend Belgian mega-festival played a new song with lyrics inquiring, “Did you know she doesn’t always have a choice/ Did you know he doesn’t always have a voice?”

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“If you look around, things might not appear as they seem,” the female spoken-word vocal continues over a moody future rave production. “If your eyes are open, you can help set her free.”

NERVO hopes this track will inspire this exact effect. The song, which is not yet named, was produced to raise awareness of child/family separation and child trafficking, with NERVO’S final Tomorrowland performance on July 30 coinciding with the United Nations’ World Day Against Trafficking in Persons, a global occasion to raise awareness about the issue. (Hear an exclusive preview of this song below.)

The track is the centerpiece of a campaign the Australian duo — twins Liv and Mim Nervo — is collaborating on with Hopeland, a U.K.-based organization that works to prevent children from becoming separated from their families and to help prevent children who’ve experienced such separation from being trafficked. The UN notes that one in every three trafficking victims detected is a child.

For NERVO, the partnership is literally a family affair, with Liv’s three-year-old daughter, Ace Paloma, featured on the song, announcing in a small but mighty voice that “Together, we can help! Spread the word.”

“She wasn’t even three then,” says Liv, speaking to Billboard over Zoom from Ibiza, “and she was a bit scared of the microphone at first. But she styled it out.”

According to Hopeland’s 2021 annual report, more than 25 million children around the world are separated from their parents, including up to 9.4 million children who live in orphanages. Hopeland’s mission is to ensure that children have safe, loving families, contending that kids who are separated from their families become more susceptible to trafficking and that the huge amount of foreign funding that goes into orphanages fosters the active recruitment of children into orphanages.

This devastating issue may feel a long way from the happy-go-lucky confines of raveland, but it’s one the Nervo sisters were compelled towards by a very personal reason: their own kids. Both Mim and Liv gave birth to daughters in 2019, with Mim since having a second child. (Since becoming a mom, Liv has been vocal on social media about how Ace Paloma’s father has abandoned Liv and her daughter, with Liv discovering that he’d been hiding another committed relationship in which he had two children.)

“I’m partly ashamed to admit that becoming a mother was the turning point,” says Liv. “There’s a lot of people that have a stronger social conscience [than I did before], and I admire them for that greatly. But going through that personal journey and raising my daughter on my own — there were some abandonment issues I had with her father — made me look at the world and see other kids who’ve been abandoned by both parents and by society. It made me practice a lot of gratitude for my own situation and my own privilege, and want to do something — like, anything.”

That something became Hopeland, the organization founded in 2014 by Nicholas Evans and Deborah-Lee Furness, the wife of Hugh Jackman. After being introduced to Hopeland via David Guetta’s manager, NERVO linked with Evans, and together they brainstormed on how they could get involved. Eventually, the group decided the most effective route would simply be for the sisters to do what they do best: make music.

Thus, the spark for the song was created, with Hopeland and NERVO collaborating closely on lyrics, which nod towards the issue without being entirely overt. (“Is someone looking for me?” Ace Paloma inquires in her feature.) The song marks Hopeland’s second high-profile musical collaboration, after the 2019 release of Coldplay‘s “Orphans,” which focused on the global refugee crisis.

“This project with NERVO has been particularly special, because we’ve been on a journey of how to communicate such a big issue,” says Evans. “How do we give people something to do with it? That’s what we’ve been doing with the NERVO team — building a lot of content so we can direct people to a site to learn about the issue and understand how they can support different organizations who are tackling it.”

Part of the strategy behind this campaign is its length, with the song’s June debut at Tomorrowland marking the public launch of a partnership that will continue with information sharing across social platforms and, eventually, the song’s release. This release date is yet to be determined, with the NERVO camp still in label discussions. All profits from the track will go to Hopeland, and Liv assures that this collab is “just the beginning,” of NERVO’S partnership with the organization. “We’re going to keep rolling with this and keep doing more,” she says.

Both sides believe this extended campaign will help catch attention in the dance world and beyond, helping people to better understand a massive issue often hidden in plain site and to then use Hopeland as a resource for how to help to support organizations focused on solving it.

They way they see it, this will all be a lot easier to accomplish with a track you can really dance to.

“A lot of songs about these kind of issues are kind of cheesy,” says Evans. “So how do we create something that keeps engaging people on global issues so they don’t just check out? That’s where it’s been really great — with these guys being so creative and finding ways to engage people that are really confronting, but with a song that’s also really banging.”

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