Biography

To Shalom, music is a safe space; a source of stability that she depended on to get her through all the hardships of adolescence. After moving to New Jersey from South Africa to attend Rutgers University, music became an even more tangible force as Shalom moved from listening to songs on her bedroom stereo, to being in the middle of the alternative house show scene in New Brunswick. At the end of 2020, Shalom had overcome bleak circumstances and found enough inspiration to release a three song EP, “the first snowstorm of the year” on Bandcamp. Saddle Creek discovered this short extended play and connected Shalom with Canadian record producer Ryan Hemsworth in February 2021. Together, Hemsworth and Shalom created and continue to create a body of work with lyrics centered around her whole life and the internal dialogue that accompanies it. Shalom takes a lot of inspiration from contemporary indie artists like Lorde, Lucy Dacus, Maggie Rogers, and Indigo De Souza, but her broad taste in music lets her find it anywhere from Florence and the Machine to LCD Soundsystem, and other artists who are able to encapsulate the human experience through songwriting. She reinterprets these inspirations through her unique perspective as a first generation, black & queer creative.