The most intriguing pop artist working now has never been signed to a major label. She’s not from the United States, nor the UK, nor any other anglophone country, for that matter. Her spectral trip-hop incantations are a departure from the maximalist, four-on-the-floor Brat bops ripping through the internet. And yet, her songs have beguiled listeners and scaled the charts in 50 countries and counting.
Over the past year, Iranian-born singer-songwriter and producer Sevdaliza has built an airtight case for her impending global stardom. An unexpected DM from Madonna led to her multiple cameos on the pop icon’s recent Celebration Tour; another chance DM, from Colombian Grammy-winner Karol G, resulted in their latest joint hit, “No Me Cansaré,” or “I Won’t Get Tired.” Sevdaliza has walked on runways for Y/Project and Iris Van Herpen, and, come October 28, she will make her debut on the Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.
“I did a lot of soul-searching within my music,” the 37-year-old tells Vogue. “I built a fanbase worldwide. And I feel like I’m ready for the US.”
Earlier this summer, Sevdaliza landed on the Billboard Hot 100 for the first time with “Alibi,” an operatic murder ballad set to the Latin rhythms of funk carioca and reggaeton. With powerful vocal assists from Brazilian drag sensation Pabllo Vittar and French pop star Yseult, Sevdaliza’s multilingual ode to inter-femme solidarity became the top song on TikTok, and by September 20, the trio was called up to the main stage at Rio de Janeiro’s legendary Rock in Rio festival. Nearly 100,000 people flooded the festival grounds to see Karol G that balmy Friday night, but the Colombian hitmaker momentarily ceded the center stage to her comadres—who cat-walked toward the screaming fans, assassin-like, as they performed “Alibi” under the hot red lights.
“Everybody knows that Brazilian fans are special and intense, but that week was on a different level,” Sevdaliza says a few weeks after the show. The night before she performed, hundreds of fans had camped out beneath the balconies of her hotel, the famed Copacabana Palace, pleading with artists, like festival headliner Katy Perry, to pose for photos. “There were a lot of different artists staying where I was,” Sevdaliza recalls. “There was always someone screaming!”
I meet Sevdaliza at Soho House Holloway in West Hollywood, where she’s in the library, wrapping up lunch with her partner and three-year-old child. Once the baby is wheeled away for naptime, our conversation spans matters of womanhood, body politics, and the nomadic spirit that eventually led her to Latin America—themes that also show up in her music.
“I’m Persian,” she says. “But we have the same intensity and passions [as Latinas]…and we have the same problems. There is a lot of misogyny, a lot of oppression. There is a lot of corruption in the government. I understand all these layers. But there’s something about spreading the beauty of positivity and music and dance that uplifts everyone, especially when they are oppressed.”
Sevdaliza, née Sevda Alizadeh, was born in Tehran in the shadow of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, during the tumult of the Gulf War. The artist was five years old when she and her mother fled the country, finally settling, along with her father, in a refugee camp in a small town in the Netherlands. “I think I was severely traumatized because I don’t really remember [Iran],” she says. “Tehran was being bombed when I was one, and we had to go to the shelters every week, or every two days. My mom tells me that I was crying all the time when I was in the Netherlands. I was crying every time they left. I was crying when the news came on. To me, that just sounds like trauma.”
While her mother was able to attend college, her father worked double shifts as a produce salesman and a postal worker. Young Sevda, who soon towered over her peers, took up basketball to pass the time; by 16, she’d left home and landed a position playing on the Dutch national youth basketball team. Although she never took formal music classes, records by Biggie and Janet Jackson kept her company in those lonely days. “We were [one of the] only immigrant families where I grew up,” she says. “I experienced heavy racism. I didn’t really have anyone around [who] looked like me, or thought like me. I felt like an alien.
“But I don’t blame my parents,” she adds. “My parents actually gave me the opportunity to have this life. If not, I would probably be in prison, or dead. I’m very, very outspoken.”
At 24, after earning her master’s degree in communications, Sevdaliza learned how to craft beats on Ableton in her apartment in Rotterdam. The brutalist chill of the area inevitably seeped into works like her 2017 debut album, ISON, which she released under her own label, Twisted Elegance. With co-producer Mucky, Sevdaliza shaped her own subterranean R&B groove, evoking the trip-hop noirs of Portishead and the theatricality of FKA Twigs in her haunting, melismatic verses.
In her 2020 follow-up, Shabrang, Sevdaliza mined the darkest corridors of her psyche the way an archeologist might excavate a cave—not from a place of despair, but curiosity. In songs like “Joanna,” she began to define the contours of her identity as a queer woman, which she hadn’t fully grasped until she started meeting her LGBTQ fans. “I didn’t really know I was queer until I started to make my art,” she explains. “I’ve always been a very outspoken feminist and supporter of LGBTQ [people], but I discovered who I am through the people that listen to my music.”
The experience of being a working artist during the COVID-19 pandemic, coupled with her pregnancy, inspired Sevdaliza to invent a “Femmenoid,” a robot proxy of herself that she named Dahlia. The Femmenoid features in the chilling 2021 video for “Homunculus - Oh My God,” directed by Willem Kantine, which sees Sevdaliza hunted down by masked agents who then use her body to program the robot that holds her in captivity. “Being pregnant made me think outside of the box,” she says.
Taking after her friend Grimes, with whom she would collaborate on the 2023 song “Nothing Lasts Forever,” Sevdaliza further toyed with technology by pairing Dahlia with an open-source AI voice model, designed in conjunction with the developers of Myvox, that can be used by anyone to record new material. (Sevdaliza would receive 50% of royalties from any published tracks.)
“I think the current climate of our industry can be very limiting for creative art,” she says of these experiments, which serve as allegories for the inhumane demands placed on women in particular. ”If I want to get to the core of what I love to do, which is creating multi-dimensional art experiences, I have to obtain some sort of commercial success.”
Other experiments, particularly with genre, emerged after giving birth to her child in 2021. “The conversation between me and my body is part of my journey in art,” Sevdaliza says. “Before, I was more destructive with myself. I always had problems with body image. I was creating the most heart-wrenching, darkest art out of that place. When I became a mother it just dawned on me…if I’m gonna be destructive with myself, it means I’m gonna be destructive with my kid. So I have to take care of myself. And I’m not used to taking care of myself. I’m used to hustling, struggling, suffering.”
This new relationship to her body eventually pitched Sevdaliza toward danceable Latin genres like bachata, reggaeton, and baile funk. She started studying Spanish, then she struck up an online friendship with Puerto Rican trans icon Villano Antillano, with whom she released the surrealist reggaeton track “Ride or Die” in April. The queer Dominican emcee Tokischa, known for her sexually daring lyrics and risqué visuals, was brought in for the sequel, which they recorded together in Paris.
“I really embraced Latin culture, and Latin culture embraced me,” says Sevdaliza. It was through her Spanish language studies that she happened upon the song “Rosa (Que Linda Eres).” a Cuban son standard interpreted by Colombian artists Magín Díaz, Carlos Vives, and Totó la Momposina. She trimmed the chorus of the song into a sample, which then served as the skeleton for “Alibi.”
“It wasn’t this premeditated thing,” Sevdaliza says of continuing to record with Latinx artists. “Like the Persian language, I think Spanish and Portuguese have massive potential poeticism. It’s rooted in the culture. Every country has its own dialect [and] its own terms, which give deeper meaning to the music.”
She eventually found collaborators in Pabllo Vittar—who would become the first drag artist since RuPaul to chart on the Billboard Hot 100—and Yseult, the French songstress who got her big international break at the closing ceremony of the 2024 Olympics. And Brazilian pop powerhouse Anitta loved “Alibi” so much, she ended up on the remix. (“I just love her strong feminine energy,” Sevdaliza says of Anitta. “I love when women own their entire being. She’s amazing in that way.”)
The success of “Alibi” prompted an artistic and personal paradigm shift for Sevdaliza. “I realized that I was done with the therapeutic side of music, and I wanted to start sharing joy, power, and wisdom,” she says. “Especially amongst women and queer people, oppressed people. ‘Alibi’ is a celebration of that.”
After struggling with chronic pain that tended to flare up in the chill of the Netherlands, Sevdaliza decided to follow the sunshine and head west. She’s since been working on music in places like Los Angeles and Miami—where, prior to Rock In Rio, she met up with Karol G to record “No Me Cansaré.”
“She is such a warm, genuine human being, and that made me even more inspired,” says Sevdaliza. “I played her the demo of ‘No Me Cansaré’ and we [started] crying really quick. It was a genuine connection between two women who are in a phase of their lives…we feel like we deserve a healthy, free love."
In a music industry that has historically wedged non-Western perspectives into the margins, the growing success of Sevdaliza’s worldly and heart-centered artistry is a testament to the changing tides of global pop music—and a generation of open-minded listeners who are eager for new voices.
“I’ve never made the music that’s gonna be on my next record,” Sevdaliza promises. “It’s gonna be a life-changing year.”