HEZEN is an award-winning London-based French singer/producer. Her dark electronic pop fuses experimental beats with epic and infectious hooks.
With Caribbean, Tamil, and Jewish origins, she grew up outside Paris with a family history of displacement, resistance, and resilience. Finding escape in fairy tales, myths, and science-fiction, she began writing songs as a young teenager. She studied politics and her postgrad brought her to London where she discovered the electronic music scene.
Her influences include Bjork, Massive Attack, Sia, James Blake, and Lana del Rey. Self- taught, she produces and mixes herself and was awarded a Next Pencil at the 2019 D&AD awards for “Best Composer” for her score of Prada’s sci-fi short “Nylon Farm”. Drawing on themes of femininity, strength and vulnerability, she creates a seductive and dangerous universe that is organic and synthesised, tender and brutal.
‘Safe + Bound’ is HEZEN’s second EP, tackling a range of subjects from loneliness to depression, desire to revenge, connecting the dots between deeply personal experiences and collective phenomena. It continues to build on the contrasts that define HEZEN’s work: finding comfort in the unknown, awe in chaos, and strength in the ephemeral nature of life. As the four-track EP unfolds, we surrender to the sweet paradox of arriving home to a place that’s never the same.
“Safe + Bound is the place where I used to live for many years, until last year’s spring. That’s when I came out of a year-long episode of depression, and when these songs started to come out. It felt like going through a portal between two dimensions, and I wasn’t the same person when I landed. The other side, the here and now I had never, until then, “embodied”, that is, occupied fully with my mind in my body, with my feet on the ground, has been so alien and brutally surreal to me. These songs are like little amulets I collected over a year, each representing a feeling, an emotion that, once upon a time, I would have tried to bury deep down. They’re reminders that there’s beauty everywhere. Even in loneliness and chaos.”