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 her trusted friend and 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.
