On stage in New York recently, Celeste was delighted to discover that many in the audience were new to her music. It felt like a kind of freedom to the Brit Award-winning, Mercury Prize-nominated singer-songwriter. New songs, old songs – all were received at face value. If only life could be like that all the time.

“Sometimes you play to an audience that is [semi-familiar] with your new song. They’re waiting for the ones they do know. But when you play to people who have no context or idea of what you do, everything’s new to them anyway. It gives you a lot of freedom.”

The 31-year-old was performing at Brooklyn’s 1,100-capacity Warsaw venue, as support to Sam Smyth. She was delighted to bring out older hits, such as Strange, a pulsating, ominous ballad from 2019, on which her voice glimmers like a knife against a soft-rock throb suggestive of Radiohead’s Pyramid Song.

But there was also new room for newer material, including her recent single This Is Who I Am, which features a keening violin riff and harks back to the glory days of trip-hop acts such as Portishead.

Most importantly of all, the trip across the Atlantic offered a welcome respite from the pressure building around the release of her second album, Woman of Faces, the long-awaited follow-up to Not Your Muse, her critically lauded debut, from 2021.

The artist born Celeste Epiphany Waite has a complicated relationship with the recording industry and the expectations it places on young musicians. She doesn’t come from a very glamorous background – no stage-school graduate, she – and sees herself as an artist first and pop performer very much second.

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