2013 Candice Demellza |link| Official

The song’s hook is deceptively simple: “You held me like a heavy hand / I let you, I let you.” It’s a gut-punch of post-relationship fatigue, set to a beat that stumbles like a heart missing a few valves.

There’s a certain alchemy to the best kind of debut. The kind that doesn’t announce itself with a billboard or a buzz single, but instead travels on a USB stick passed between friends or a late-night SoundCloud link buried under a cryptic caption. That’s how Candice Demellza arrived this past spring. And if you haven’t heard the name yet, you will before the leaves fall.

Her debut EP, Saltburn , dropped in April on the tiny independent label Glass Wax. No PR blitz. No radio plug. Just seven tracks of lo-fi electronics, warped cello samples, and that voice. The lead single, “Heavy Hand,” started as a bedroom recording on a broken Tascam 414. By June, it had been streamed over 400,000 times—a viral drip, not a flood. 2013 candice demellza

By Lydia Cross | September 2013

For now, 2013 belongs to the quiet ones. And no one is quieter—or louder—than her. Listen: “Heavy Hand” by Candice Demellza is available on Glass Wax Records / Bandcamp. The song’s hook is deceptively simple: “You held

As we part ways on a drizzly Kingsland Road, she pulls out a battered notebook. On the cover, scrawled in silver Sharpie: Candice Demellza – LP1 (do not steal). She catches me looking and winks.

At just twenty-two, the Cape Town-born, London-based singer and producer occupies a strange, thrilling limbo. Her voice—a husky, almost detached alto that can crack open into something disarmingly vulnerable—feels both out of time and perfectly suited for the anxious, glittering early 2010s. Comparisons to a young Beth Gibbons or a less polished FKA twigs are inevitable, but Demellza shrugs them off with a quiet smile. “I just wanted to make songs that sounded like the inside of a rainy car window,” she told me over coffee in Hackney. “Pretty, but smeared.” That’s how Candice Demellza arrived this past spring

“Next year. Maybe.”