Vanès

Brain, and the years before anyone was listening

VANÈS began as a Berlin-based singer, songwriter and producer, and the Berlin grounding still shows in the music: low, blunt bass under a soft top line, electronic texture doing the work a guitar would do elsewhere. Her listening as a teenager was Billie Eilish, BANKS, Ariana Grande and Lana Del Rey, which is an honest account of where the sound sits — the quiet-voice-over-heavy-production trick learned from the first, the R&B phrasing from the second.

The debut single, "Brain", came out on 3 December 2020. What followed was not a quick ascent but several years of sessions in three cities — Berlin, Los Angeles and Cape Town — working with producers and songwriters both on her own releases and on songs for other artists. That second strand matters: a writer who has had to serve someone else's record tends to arrive at their own with tighter structures, and VANÈS's songs are short, hooked and unfussy about getting to the chorus. She has also played support for Lolo Zouaï, an early sign that her material could hold a room that had not come for her.

By the time she gave interviews around her 2026 single she was 25, queer, and based in London rather than Berlin. The move is audible in the work as well as in the credits — the newest songs were written and cut in London rooms with London collaborators.

The records: two EPs and a run of singles

The first EP, "You Can't Hide", arrived in March 2023 and gathered the harder, bass-led end of her early catalogue. Her Apple Music discography also shows a 2021 single, "Clone", and tracks including "Girls", "Nightmare", "Obvious", "Patrol", "Drowning" and "Hurricane" from that first stretch.

2024 was the heavier year. "God's Favorite", "Kiss Me Slow", "Cherry Red" and "I Miss You, Olivia..." all came out across it, and they fed into the EP "Can I Be Your Favorite?", recorded in Los Angeles and built around her coming-out. "Cherry Red" was the fourth track from those LA sessions and was released with a video in production alongside it. The record is more pop and R&B than the Berlin material — cleaner drums, more space, the writing less armoured.

"Kiss Me Slow" turned out to be the one that moved. It appears in her catalogue in both 2024 and 2025, re-serviced with sped-up and slowed-down edits as it found an audience online, which is now the standard way a song that is working on short-form video gets fed back into streaming. It also set up the problem of the next release: how to follow a song that had already been chosen for her by other people.

STARF*CK and the deliberate change of register

The answer was written at GRRLS CLUB, the first all-female writing camp she had joined, in London in 2025. "STARF*CK was born on the third day," she has said, and it was cut at Pirate Studios in Dalston with co-writer Darcy Blu and producer Coletti, with further production from Jomo Kru. Her own description of the session is the useful one: "There was just something in the air when it comes to this song, it just got stuck in your head after the first session."

It was not originally the lead. She tested snippets on TikTok, found that listeners went for what she calls "the more baddie dark pop songs", and promoted it accordingly — fan response selecting the single rather than a label deciding it in advance. The track came out on 3 April 2026 through APOLLO Distribution. She places it "somewhere between Chase Atlantic and Billie Eilish", and explains the title plainly: "I love how playful and aggressive it sounds at the same time. It matches the contrast in the track: soft, almost innocent vocals sitting on top of dark trap-pop production."

Lyrically it sits inside a power dynamic rather than above it — "that moment when you realise you might be getting played but instead of walking away you decide to play along because you know you're still the one holding the cards." The video was shot with photographer Cosima Wynona and graded over roughly twenty hours to land what she wanted: "this high quality but also some of that home-made effect."

The conditions it was written in explain a good deal about the record's restlessness: "My life felt like pure chaos — playing shows, dealing with a breakup, never at home and writing new songs in between."

Where she stands in October 2026

"STARF*CK" was framed as the opening of a new era rather than a one-off, and she has stuck to that: "This is the first single of many more to come," with the project teased but not announced, and later releases chosen by how fans react rather than fixed in advance. The follow-through is on the record — "BABY IT'S OKAY" came out on 14 August 2026 and is currently her most recent release.

The sequencing is worth noting. "Baby It's Okay" was already in her live set in early February 2026, more than six months before it was released, which is the modern order of operations for an artist whose audience is being built in public: road-test, measure, then release. The EP she promised alongside "STARF*CK" has still not been dated, and there is no album.

Industry recognition so far has been at the distribution and blog tier rather than the awards tier — recordJet made her its Artist of the Month for June — which places her accurately: an artist with a committed audience, a touring record and no major-label apparatus behind her.

The touring year

Her 2026 live work has been concentrated in the UK and Ireland. Across late January and early February she opened six shows on XANA's Until It Wasn't tour: Chalk in Brighton on 27 January, Strange Brew in Bristol on 28 January, the O2 Institute in Birmingham on 30 January, Òran Mór in Glasgow on 1 February, Village Underground in London on 3 February and the Ulster Sports Club in Belfast on 5 February. Village Underground remains her most recently documented show.

Before that she worked festivals rather than headline rooms — It's Fine Festival in Berlin on 14 September 2024 and Dykonic Festival in Dublin on 9 August 2025. The pattern is a support-and-festival career rather than a headline one, which is the stage where the audience is assembled rather than cashed in.

The London review of the XANA night called her set "effortlessly cool and vocally impressive" and noted the room filling out and phones going up during it — the specific thing a support act is there to achieve. Her own listings thin out between single campaigns, which is consistent with how she is working: release, test, tour behind it, repeat.