Get ready to float away. Meet Annika Zee, a multimedia artist from Toronto now based in Brooklyn. At the mere age of 22, she credits herself as a producer, composer, musician, and visual creator. At the age of 13 she started recording music and just this past January she released her debut EP tape, titled Aging Aesthetics. While Zee worked on various collaborative projects while at NYU, this project is all hers. Crediting the likes of Dev Hynes, Sean Nicholas Savage & Grimes as her idols, Zee’s music is contemplative & comforting, layered with soft soundscapes and calming textures intermixed with her silky vocals. As Annika explained to Spin…
“Aging Aesthetics is an exploration of aesthetics in the modern age. I feel like the trope of the sad female singer songwriter can be somewhat limiting, so my intention with the tracks on this tape was to limit myself to the boundaries of the genre to see how I could challenge them. Through sounds and lyrics, I tried to explore the contrast between masculine and feminine, ownership and power in relationships, as well as question how media affects the way we present and perceive image, sexuality, and emotion.”
Annika also created the art for the tape and single, which she said to the FADER represent a “selectively cropped, hyper-real, hi-def image of the self, reflecting the digitization of real life and questioning how image is portrayed in the internet age.”
While Aging Aesthetics may only be 5 songs long, the impact hits deep. Zee’s lo-fi jazz lounge fuzz slowly burns and creeps around every corner. The keys on “Valentine” sound like they’re being played on a forgotten dusty piano as Zee confesses “I only want what is never meant for me, but still it feels true, you could be mine”. On “Crazy” she reflects on loneliness through a filter of accepting compassion. It’s the kinda music you light a candle to as you dance alone in the dark.
Listen to Aging Aesthetics below.
On The Rise is our spotlight series on new and emerging artists. We last featured Sophia Black. Stay tuned for next week’s On The Rise artist!