Dilhan Şeşen

The surname, and the decision to go sideways

Dilhan Şeşen was born in Istanbul on 7 January 1998. Her father is the musician Burhan Şeşen; İlhan Şeşen, another fixture of Turkish pop, is her uncle. That lineage guarantees a certain kind of introduction, and most Turkish reference material still opens with it. Her own work has been organised, more or less from the start, around not sounding like an inheritance.

She has been explicit about this. Interviewed in a Moda café on a rainy April afternoon for a piece published in July 2023, she said she felt at ease precisely because what she does is completely different from what her father and uncle do — and that her father grasps the distinction, and would have been disappointed had she simply carried on his line of work. In the same conversation she allowed herself a small, pointed wish: that in time something might be written about her rather than about the family she came from.

An earlier interview, published by BirGün on 16 November 2020, caught her mid-pandemic and less certain. Asked where a young musician's future lay, she said she could not see one, and fell back on the position that if she could live the present properly the future would assemble itself. She described her father less as a parent than as someone she could be understood by without speaking.

From a guest vocal to a debut album

Her first appearance on record was not her own: a vocal on "Sıcaklardandır", from İlhan Şeşen's 2018 album Hediye. Her solo run began the following year and moved quickly through collaboration. "Acıtır Yara" arrived in 2019, followed by "Ne Varsa Halimde" with Birkan Nasuhoğlu and "Neresi Olmalı" with the novelist and songwriter Tuna Kiremitçi. In 2020 came "New Boundaries" with Moawk and the oddly spaced "K a ç t ı m", the single she later described as having surfaced on a sunny day during a tired stretch. "İsimsiz Çocuklar Ülkesi" and "Temas" followed in 2021, "Olta" in 2022.

That accumulation became Kumdan İnşa Putlarla, her first album, released on 14 April 2023 through Gülbaba Records. The title translates roughly as building with idols made of sand, which is about as close to a mission statement as she has offered. By the venue's own description the music sets electronic beds against live instruments rather than choosing between them — a useful summary of why the record sits under the alternative heading rather than in the pop lane her surname would suggest.

A launch show followed on 4 May 2023 at %100 Studio inside the Zorlu Performing Arts Center, programmed under the venue's Lokalize strand, doors at 20:00 and music at 21:00. It was a room of a few hundred, which has remained roughly the scale she works at.

lilacnoia: the other half of the job

Şeşen does not outsource her images. She works as a filmmaker and visual artist under the name lilacnoia, shooting and cutting her own music videos and publishing painting and photography alongside them; she was studying cinema and television while the first album was being finished. The videos are not promotional afterthoughts but her reading of each song, and in the 2020 BirGün interview she made the point that the visual telling matters as much whether the song is hers or a cover.

The practical consequence is a catalogue with unusually consistent handwriting for an artist at this level. Promotional clips for "Temas" in 2021, "Her Meyve Bir Yara" in 2024 and then "Gör Şu Halimi", "YERLE BİR" and "SON KEZ" across 2025 come from the same eye as the records. The alias also attaches to the release side of her recent work, which suggests a musician who has decided that owning the apparatus is cheaper than negotiating with it.

Kaçak Elektrik and a harder run of singles

The period after the album was spent in singles rather than in silence. 2024 produced "Şeker" and a radio edit of it, "Her Meyve Bir Yara", "Laleler Beyaz" and "Temenni", the last recorded for the Gündoğarken Patika series. 2025 opened with "Gör Şu Halimi", then "YERLE BİR".

Those tracks fed KAÇAK ELEKTRİK, a short record issued in 2025 — the title means stolen or illegally tapped electricity, and the song titles run in capitals: "Bİ TÜRKÜ", "SON KEZ", "KİM Kİ O?", "İSYAN", "YERLE BİR". The typography is doing some work. Where Kumdan İnşa Putlarla was the record of someone assembling an identity out of guest slots and acoustic-leaning singles, the EP is louder about its refusals, and it is the material that has reshaped the live set.

Her most recent release is "Senden Daha Güzel (+1 Versiyon)", issued as a single in 2026 and currently the newest entry in her catalogue.

Where she stands in September 2026

The past two months have been the busiest stretch of her career so far, and all of it has happened in Istanbul. On 15 August 2026 she played Zorlu PSM at 21:00, a show listed in Hürriyet's weekend concert round-up of 13 August with tickets at 550 lira — mid-market pricing for a headline club date in the city.

On 1 September she appeared at the İstanbul Büyükşehir Belediyesi Harbiye Cemil Topuzlu Açıkhava Tiyatrosu, the open-air amphitheatre in Harbiye, on a fourteen-strong bill of women assembled by İstanbul Vakfı under the title "Şarkılarla İstanbul'da Yanındayız". Gates at 20:00, music at 21:00, tickets from 1,125 to 7,500 lira, proceeds going to housing, education and book scholarships for female students who have moved to the city to study. The line-up put her alongside Gaye Su Akyol, Kalben, Ceylan Ertem, Yasemin Mori, Nova Norda, Deniz Tekin, Eda Baba, Aylin Aslım, Nilipek., Yasemin Mori's contemporaries in Gülinler and İstanbulites, Ceren Gündoğdu and Dicle Olcay. It was comfortably the largest room she has stood in, even on a shared bill.

She followed it on 19 September at Paribu Art's Yan Sahne. Two dates are confirmed ahead: Blind in Beyoğlu on 28 October, doors 20:30, promoted by İmge Yapım with tickets from 550 lira, and Babylon on 9 December. Songkick currently logs her as touring in one country with two shows to come, which is an accurate picture of an artist whose circuit is a single city rather than a map.

The rooms she plays

The venue choices are the clearest signal of where the career actually is. %100 Studio, Vestel Amfi at Zorlu PSM, Yan Sahne, Blind and Babylon are all rooms in the low hundreds to low thousands, booked by people who programme on the strength of the record rather than on chart position. Babylon in particular has been the standard graduation venue for Istanbul alternative acts for two decades, and a December date there is a meaningful marker rather than a routine booking.

What is missing from the picture is a run outside Istanbul. There is no verified 2026 date in Ankara, İzmir or abroad, and the festival appearances that have been advertised sit inside Turkey. For an artist five singles deep into a harder second phase, that is the obvious next problem to solve.