“When you’re first starting out, you think that joining a major label is the only route that you should take. It takes experience to realise that it’s not the dream. For a lot of people it’s a dead-end road.”
The Canadian artist Kiesza (real name Kiesa Rae Ellestad) would know. Her career started with a bang in 2014 with her breakout single “Hideaway”, a propulsive dance-hall track, which topped the UK Singles Chart upon release and became the third-fastest selling UK single of that year. Kiesza had released the single through an indie label, Lokal Legend, and was soon picked up by Island Records (owned by Universal Music Group), which put out her debut international album, Sound of a Woman, in October 2014. But major label glory wasn’t all it was made out to be. “Once I signed to a major label, everything slowed down,” she tells me via Zoom from her home in Toronto.
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