Shanti Celeste: ‘I’d love to start a band’
The Chilean DJ and producer – who has ruled dancefloors for 15 years – pushes past impostor syndrome and towards slower, more pop-focused sounds on lovestruck new album ‘Romance’. It blows her future from here wide open
Over the last 15 years, the Chilean-born, Bristol-based DJ and producer Shanti Celeste has become one of the most exciting names on the circuit. Alongside contemporaries including Moxie, Peach and Saoirse – who often play energetic, giddy b2b2b2b sets together – she has been one of the defining stars of the last decade and beyond in leftfield British dance music through her DJ sets and a set of consistently excellent productions. With new album Romance, Celeste both honours her history in house music and pushes thrillingly beyond it.
The genesis of the new album began in the lockdown of 2020, the year after the release of Celeste’s debut album, Tangerine, but fully began to take shape three years later, when she was in the throes of new love. These feelings are splattered all across Romance.
The album was trailed last summer with the release of the technicolour club banger ‘Ice Cream Dream Boy’. “Dreams become reality / I manifested you into existence, and now you’re here!” she sing-speaks with a vibrancy that can only come from within the thrall of a new romance. It since became one of the defining dance tunes of summer 2024, blasting out of festival stages across the world.
Though the song didn’t make the cut for the album – it was sonically “too happy” for the world Celeste was creating on Romance, she says – its lovestruck lyrics and the foregrounding of her vocals became a defining aspect of the record. “I write from feelings,” she says. “Good positive feelings, generally. I find it hard to write when I’m sad, because I just don’t feel like being creative.”
She would write down her feelings “longhand, in journal style,” before picking out the parts that appealed to her. “I wrote things that sounded nice and romantic to me, and then the lyrics came from that.” Across the album, these feelings of infatuation are front and centre. “Let me get close to you,” she sings on the blissful house of ‘Unwind’, while ‘Thinking About You’ sees her discussing her late friend, also her first boyfriend. On Romance, love is past as well as present, and between friends as well as romantic partners.
While her own vocals and lyrics have been sprinkled across Shanti Celeste songs for the past ten years, the journey to foregrounding them like this has been a long and difficult one. “I’ve never really written songs before,” she says. “I had a theme of romance and of me falling in love, but what that looks like in terms of actual lyrics being written was so abstract to me.”
The songs were also being written for a world where exclusionary purism – especially with regards to gender – continues to thrive in the electronic music world. Celeste says: “There are always people in dance music who are bitter or something. I’m an artist, and I want to evolve – I don’t just want to be making house music for the rest of my life without pushing myself in in any way. I mean, I probably will be making house music for the rest of my life, but it’s probably going to have some vocals in it. Why wouldn’t I evolve?”
Though house music forms a portion of Romance, its most interesting and surprising moments come from when Celeste moves away from the thud of a bass drum and higher tempo. Opening track ‘Butterflies’ revolves around a bongo rhythm and soulful lyrics sung in Spanish, while ‘Light as a Feather’ is a slow and slippery ode to R&B.
The first hints of this change came back in lockdown, when Celeste was finally able to spend her time listening to music without her work hat on, deciding whether any given song would work for her to play in a club environment. Instead, she spent her days listening to NTS Radio, making playlists on Spotify and buying music on Bandcamp, with music ranging from soul and R&B to new wave, post-punk and beyond.
“That’s why I wrote the album,” she affirms. “I wasn’t listening to house music at all.” Though playing and consuming house remains Celeste’s enduring love, this period of time – and the album it inspired – has triggered a move towards different sounds and styles, songs built around their lyrics, and a different outlook on the future.
“Everything has to be so singular in electronic music, and you have to stick to whatever you’re doing,” she says. “That really applies to you as a producer. For me as a woman, I’ve always felt like I’ve had to do everything myself. I’ve done it all myself, until very recently, where I actually started to get someone else to mix my tracks, because I just hate it. I did it really well for 10 years, but the last three years, I’ve just been like, ‘I’m just not going to do it anymore, because I don’t really have anything to prove’.”
This realisation and freedom brought collaboration to the fore on Romance, something Celeste had rejected in the past for fear of not being taken seriously. Now, it’s something she wants to take further in the future. “I would love to be in a band,” she says. “Get someone playing keys, guitar, bass, and actually make some fucking music. I just think that would be so sick. I’m looking for a band! Put it in there – it’s an advert!”
This release from the restrictions that had previously dogged her stretches beyond Romance and into every part of Celeste’s creative live in 2025. The other day, she recalls gleefully, she dropped Tim Deluxe’s dance behemoth ‘It Just Won’t Do’ in a set after seeing a video of Fatboy Slim playing it to 250,000 people at his legendary Brighton Beach show in 2002. “It’s made me less afraid of just playing a pop banger every now and again,” she smiles, revelling in the limitless future that now stretches in front of her. “I want to write loads of really sick vocal house bangers, basically.”
Most immediately for Celeste though is the wish to create her first purpose-built studio in Bristol. “I feel like I’ve got to the point where I’m bored of my process, and because I have this new, exciting thing that I know that I can do – singing on my songs – I want to make my studio more exciting for that purpose,” she says, before pausing and laughing. “And so I can start my band!”