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When the French singer-songwriter Zaho de Sagazan, 24, was a teenager she earned the nickname Petite Tempête — “Little Storm.” “I was crying all the time,” she says. “I didn’t know what to do with all my angst.” But after her twin sister introduced her to the work of the English singer-songwriter Tom Odell — with which she quickly became obsessed, learning all his lyrics and teaching herself to play his songs on the piano — she realized that music could be a means of processing her dark emotions. By 2020, she was sharing videos of her original songs, which blend elements of synth-pop, electronica and chanson Française, on Instagram. Her expressive, sometimes husky voice caught the attention of Warner Chappell/Virgin Music, which released her first album, “La Symphonie des Éclairs” (“The Symphony of Lightning”) in spring 2023. It went platinum in 2024 and earned four awards at Victoires de la Musique, the French version of the Grammys. Tomorrow, a reissued edition will hit streaming platforms with new material, including “Old Friends,” which de Sagazan recorded with Odell. “I basically slid into his DMs,” she says. “We’ve been friends since. Singing with him is one of the few things I dreamed of for myself.”
De Sagazan was born and raised in the working-class shipyard town of Saint Nazaire, on France’s Atlantic coast, reared in a family of artists and free spirits with few rules and plenty of encouragement. Her father, Olivier de Sagazan, is a painter, sculptor and performer who has collaborated on immersive exhibitions and videos with musicians including FKA Twigs. During her adolescence, de Sagazan spent hours holed up in her room, alone at the piano, writing about themes including self-doubt, addiction (she recently quit smoking weed, a decade-long habit), climate change and romantic love — though she says she hasn’t yet experienced it herself. She moved to Nantes at 17 and attended university for a while to appease her mother, a schoolteacher, though her ambition was to make music or start a label. To earn money, she worked as a home health aide. “I thought I’d become a nurse or work in a hospital,” she says. “I wanted to care for people. Music is another way of doing that.”
In the less than two years since her debut, de Sagazan has gone from a relative unknown to a viral star who has charmed everyone from Iggy Pop (“She can sing, she can write and she’s got a lot to say,” he pronounced on his BBC Radio show) to the designer Nicolas Ghesquière, who used her music in his spring 2024 Louis Vuitton presentation. He’s also dressed her for several public appearances, including the opening of the Cannes Film Festival in May, where she performed a whimsical rendition of David Bowie’s “Modern Love,” and the closing ceremony of the Paris Olympics. There, in the emptied-out Tuileries Garden, she sang Edith Piaf’s “Sous le Ciel de Paris” a cappella, accompanied by a 34-person choir and wearing a two-tone ruffled skirt. It was a surreal moment for de Sagazan, who points out that the song “represents the city and French elegance,” while her own wardrobe is full of oversize Kraftwerk tees and athleisure. “I’m not at all Parisienne,” she insists.
She expresses her true self, she says, during her own free-form, pared-down shows, dancing wildly, often in cycling jumpsuits. “The American thing, with wild light effects, backup dancers, and outfit changes, doesn’t speak to me,” she says. She will, however, soon be performing in the States, with sold-out shows on both coasts scheduled for December. “I hope they walk away thinking, ‘What a nice, simple girl, with great songs, who’s completely free,’” she says of American audiences. “But only after they’ve gotten a massive rush of energy.”
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