Eliza Shaddad explores vivid temptation in new single ‘My Body’
Eliza Shaddad explores vivid temptation
in new single and video for ‘My Body’
The second single from upcoming debut album Future due out this Autumn
Cred: Mel Tjeong
Eliza Shaddad ~ ‘My Body’
“Eliza Shaddad is the kind of artist and person that leaves an impression” – The 405
“An artist blessed with incredible potential” – Clash
“Nakedly confessional” – FADER
“Impeccable vocals…emotionally packed…powerful and energetic…raw and candid”
– Wonderland
“Her candidness, susceptibility, and alluring delivery combine for a cathartic excursion”
– Stereogum
~
Today Eliza Shaddad shares a second single and music video to ‘My Body’ from her long-awaited debut album ‘Future’.
Eliza Shaddad’s singular artistry is the product of an incredibly diverse and borderless upbringing. Born to Sudanese and Scottish parents and raised across seven countries, she is the descendent of a long line of progressive artists and academics dating back to the 1800s. She holds an MPhil in Philosophy, speaks four languages and is a graduate in Jazz from the Guildhall School. Every facet of her music, from vocals to lyricism to performance and production, is the purest distillation of a self that has been emotionally and intellectually schooled by constantly shifting and widening perspectives. This is a sound honed by a woman who has striven to reassert herself through multiple national identities, academic fields, and musical cultures.
But Eliza confesses she is not the first woman in her family to have had such an experience. Coming from a family of matriarchal over-achievers, Eliza is simply the daughter who has picked music as her path through life, and she’s rapidly reaping the rewards.
Her new single ‘My Body’ is the second to be taken from her upcoming album Future. Drawing on a love of 90’s grunge and trip hop it’s a triumph of deep dark grooves and laconic vocals. The kind of moody, hooky track that has garnered her comparisons to Warpaint and Cat Power. Recorded in the same studio in wildest Devon where she worked on her Run and Waters EPs with Mercury-nominated longtime collaborator Chris Bond, ‘My Body’ is, in Eliza’s words, a song about “Being betrayed by your body. Knowing full well that you need to be alone, but doubting it every night.”
The video, directed by Joe McCrae is ‘a reflection of Eliza’s restless state. Shooting on different cameras and incorporating layering and animation helped show the transitions in, and out of consciousness and the blurring of these worlds – lost in thought, until thought becomes dream”
Key to the respect the industry shows for Eliza’s work is the fact that she manages to be both a serious grafter and a true fighter for the causes she believes in. She co-founded the female arts collective Girls Girls Girls with fellow musician Samantha Lindo; and for six years has been working to empower women within the arts through special cross-disciplinary events across the UK, and to raise awareness and funding for the anti-Female genital mutilation charity ‘Orchid Project’.
Eliza’s extraordinary fanfare couldn’t go to an artist more deserving. Through the very extremes of her complex identity Eliza personifies progress. Not beholden to any one political, musical, or intellectual culture, she represents everything that we’re coming to celebrate about identity. Identity is amorphous. To think otherwise, no matter who you are or where you come from, is to close your mind and to box yourself off from the shapes of things as they really are. The only certainty about Eliza is that she is asserting her true selfhood, in all its subtlety and labyrinthine complexity, in defiance of a landscape that prefers what it can label with a convenient word or pithy phrase. And by the sounds of songs like ‘White Lines’ and ‘My Body’, she’s doing it with startling, but wholly expected, aplomb.
‘My Body’ is out on Beatnik Creative. Debut album Future is due later this year..
Eliza Shaddad Online: Official | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube | Soundcloud | Bandcamp
Cred: Mel Tjeong