Shanti Celeste

Cumbria raves, then the Idle Hands counter

Shanti Celeste was born in Chile on 20 October 1988 and moved to England at twelve, to Kent's Bank in Cumbria, after her mother married an Englishman. Her route into dance music was geographical accident rather than plan: Lake District raves at fifteen, and at seventeen a friend — the Bristol producer Kowton — showing her how to mix on vinyl.

She arrived in Bristol at the end of the 2000s to study illustration at the University of the West of England, and the city did the rest. She became a resident at Super Ultra Mega at the Lab, and in 2011 started working behind the counter at Idle Hands, the Stokes Croft record shop that functioned as the informal switchboard for Bristol's dance scene. With the shop's owner Chris Farrell she co-ran the BRSTL label, which released her first record, the Need Your Lovin' (Baby) EP, in 2013. Days Like This followed on Idle Hands in 2014.

The records travelled faster than she did. By 2015 she had a Best Newcomer DJ nomination at the DJ Awards, and in 2016 she left Bristol for Berlin.

Peach Discs, and a debut album that held up

In 2017 Celeste founded Peach Discs with Gramrcy, a friend from her Bristol years. The label became both her own home and a platform for producers she mentors, and it spawned a club night, Peach Party. A BBC Radio 1 Essential Mix in December 2018 and a monthly NTS show gave her a broadcast footprint that has outlasted several scene cycles.

Tangerine, her debut album, landed on Peach Discs on 15 November 2019: ten tracks, forty-six minutes, trailed by the singles Voz on 1 October and Moons on 30 October. It was the record that moved her out of the twelve-inch economy and into album conversations. Metacritic logged an 82 from six reviews. The Line of Best Fit gave it nine out of ten, Exclaim! eight, Pitchfork 7.3; the Guardian's four-star notice described club music with subtlety and depth. It placed eighth in Mixmag's albums of 2019, thirty-sixth in DJ Mag's and sixty-sixth in the Quietus'.

A Cutie EP on Hessle Audio in 2022 counted as a different kind of milestone — Hessle being the Ben UFO-affiliated label whose approval is difficult to buy. Then, in 2024, Ice Cream Dream Boy on Peach Discs and Method 808 turned out to be the hinge.

Romance: the pivot she kept telling people about

Romance arrived on 16 May 2025, a joint Peach Discs and Method 808 release, nine tracks long. It began during the 2020 lockdown and took its final shape around 2023, during a period of new love. The significant fact about it is structural rather than thematic: only three of the nine tracks are built on house beats. The rest sit in downtempo R&B and neo-soul, with Celeste's own singing — in English and in Spanish — carried at the front of the mix for the first time.

She did not do it alone. Shivum Sharma worked on lyrics, Hal Sutherland on chord arrangements, and Batu, who records as Omar McCutcheon, supplied what Celeste calls the ear candy — the textural detail in the margins. The harpist Miriam Adefris plays on Butterflies and bookends the record, which is part of why Resident Advisor's Katie Thomas reached for a comparison to Kelly Lee Owens. Thinking About You is a tribute to a friend who died. Note To Self is a Balearic-leaning piece about self-acceptance. The title track began with Orbital at Glastonbury and ends up as stacked vocal loops over an elastic bassline.

Celeste was open about how exposed the record made her. She described bearing her soul, and called it daunting. She was also blunt about why she did it anyway: an artist who spent a decade and a half making house music wanted to know what else was there, and asked why evolving should require permission. Reviewers who came expecting club utility mostly met it on its own terms — pink, sincere and more emotionally exact than its surface suggests.

Her stated ambitions after Romance were specific: a purpose-built studio in Bristol, a band with keys, guitar and bass, and a run of vocal house records.

2026: remixes, a relocation, and other people's records

Celeste spent six years in London before moving back to Bristol in 2024, citing a need for balance. That is where she is based now, and the work since has mostly been outward-facing rather than another album.

Romance has been unpacked through 2026 as a remix project, with Midland's Where Were You In 2005 Remix, two Hotline mixes by The Trip, Amaliah's reworking of Butterflies and Ciel's Cotton Candy Clouds refix of Softie. On 3 March 2026 her remix of Play It As It Lays appeared on Hayes Bradley's Audience Remixed EP alongside versions by Special Request, Priori and Yu Su. The most conspicuous outside commission came on 25 June 2026, when Heavenly Recordings released her remix of Kneecap's Cold At The Top — a Belfast rap record, a long way from Peach Discs, and evidence that the singing album has broadened rather than narrowed the calls she gets.

Alongside that she has kept the NTS residency running and Peach Discs releasing.

Club Celeste and the current diary

The touring vehicle right now is Club Celeste, a party she curates and books herself rather than a headline slot she is dropped into. On 14 March 2026 it took over Nowhere in Manchester with Midland, Call Super, Gabrielle Kwarteng and Zaltsman, plus an after-party in the venue's Loft room where Celeste closed back-to-back with Daisy Moon for two hours. A day-and-night edition ran at The Cause in east London, at the venue's Dock Road site.

The festival summer took her to Chamonix and Lisbon in early July 2026 and to Brunch Electronik in Barcelona over the weekend of 7-9 August. The autumn is Manchester-weighted: dates at Depot Mayfield on 26 September and again in the first days of October, a Leeds appearance at Under The Arches in early October on a bill that also carries Ricardo Villalobos, Raresh, Seth Troxler and Nina Kraviz, and a London show at KOKO in Camden on 24 October 2026.