2013 Candice Demellza |verified| May 2026

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.”

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.

“They want a single. A ‘moment.’ But I don’t write moments,” she says, finishing her coffee. “I write the ten minutes after the moment ends.” 2013 candice demellza

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.

In 2013, the internet was still a collage—Tumblr’s grainy GIFs, early Instagram’s Nashville filter, and the last gasp of the indie sleaze era. Demellza’s visual world taps directly into that vein. Her music videos (self-directed, shot on a friend’s Canon 60D) feature thrift-store lace, flickering CRT televisions in empty fields, and the kind of melancholic, sun-bleached loneliness that defined the early work of Lana Del Rey —minus the calculated glamour. At just twenty-two, the Cape Town-born, London-based singer

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.

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. “I just wanted to make songs that sounded

“Next year. Maybe.”