Many artists can pinpoint the exact moment they first understood the power of music. For Celeste, it happened in her grandfather’s old Jaguar while cassette tapes of Aretha Franklin and Ella Fitzgerald played over and over again. The raw emotion of those recordings would go on to shape Celeste’s own contemporary version of soul music — smoky, jazz-inflected and emotionally devastating. Like the artists who first inspired her, Celeste sings with the kind of vulnerability that seems to momentarily stop time itself. After winning the famously prophetic BBC Sound of 2020 poll and breaking through globally with the breathtaking single “Strange”, Celeste has since established herself as one of the defining voices in modern British soul. On the 2025 album “Woman of Faces”, the long-awaited and much-discussed follow-up to her chart-topping debut, Celeste pushed her sound into even more cinematic and uncompromising territory. Strings, sparse arrangements and ghostly jazz influences move through songs about heartbreak, identity and survival, while Celeste’s voice remains the gravitational center of it all — capable of shifting from a whisper to overwhelming force within a single phrase. This summer, Way Out West welcomes one of the most emotionally arresting voices of her generation.