Brighton, UK · soul

Celeste

3 festivals played ↓

Smoke-voiced British soul — torch songs with modern nerve, a BRIT-anointed voice built for the spotlight and the string section.

Celeste Epiphany Waite was born in Culver City, California, to an English mother and a Jamaican father, and moved to England as a child, settling first in Dagenham before, at age five, moving to Saltdean on the outskirts of Brighton. She later studied Music Technology at Varndean College.

She recalls singing hymns at church as an early musical memory, and discovering Aretha Franklin through her family home before finding Thelonious Monk and Koko Taylor as a teenager. When Celeste was sixteen her father died of lung cancer, and she wrote her first song, "Sirens", in response.

Before releasing music under her own name, Celeste provided vocals for electronic producers including Avicii, Tieks and Real Lies, while self-publishing songs on SoundCloud from 2014. Her solo debut EP, The Milk & the Honey, appeared in 2017 on Lily Allen's label Bank Holiday Records, followed by Lately in 2019 after she signed to Polydor Records.

She won the BRITs Rising Star award and topped the BBC Sound of 2020 poll, and her debut album, Not Your Muse, followed in 2021, entering the UK Albums Chart at number one. It brought nominations for the Mercury Prize and, at the Brit Awards, for Album of the Year, Best Female Solo Artist and Best New Artist. Her song "Hear My Voice", written for the film The Trial of the Chicago 7, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song.

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soul