Ikonika - SAD (2025)

SAD can be read as ‘sad’ or ‘S.A.D’, the letters are interchangeable, from low mood to the type of depression that comes and goes with the seasons.

“This is an album travelling through seasons in your mind. It’s as close to my final form as I’ve known”, Ikonika aka Sara Chen says, describing in evolutionary Pokémon terms, their 'Sad and Sexy' new album.
With SAD, things have changed. Taking the reins as producer, songwriter, and singer for the first time, SAD marks a distinctive push up from their past as a producer. It's Ikonika, transformed, intimate and of course beautifully made – with their sultry, unvarnished vocals directing the journey across an arc of ten tracks. An album for pop lovers and club music lovers alike.
At a crossroads a few years back, both personally as a new parent, and with their future in music, Ikonika decided to forgo a potential future as an enigmatic keys and buttons producer, and step into the hot light of the frontstage, picking up the mic to start singing and performing, all to their own lyrics. Simultaneously, they reckoned with being queer and trans in public life and its reverberations: 'finding my voice without fear speaking first' as Sara shares. The goal became to be 'undeniable, celebrated and rewarded'.
The album's airy production reflects the music they DJ and enjoy; there's credit to a plethora of African electronic music on the album. Sara is half Egyptian and tracks such as ‘WHATCHUREALLYWANT’ feature rhythms that their long ago dad taught them on the Egyptian tabla, carried over and spoken into other hand drums such as the djembe. A log drum preset on a DX7 cartridge used for their early trailblazing Hyperdub records, would become a prelude to their later prolific interest in Amapiano culminating in an early 80s-ish wedding music sound – fiddly solos, overlays and trills. Through their close knit circle of dancing queers too, Ikonika became inspired by more music of South Africa; Gqom and Bacardi.
Ikonika got pen and paper out with interdisciplinary artist and writer Tice Cin to add further nuance to the narrative world of SAD. Cin finishes SAD on 'Make It Better,' barring in her North London vernacular, as the only vocal guest on the album. Cin comments, “my verses think on how, too often, people are underestimated, when they’ve already lived double the lives of their doubters. In your final form, rareness is celebrated and Ikonika’s rareness makes them a shiny!” Ikonika was encouraged by Tice to 'see SAD from a writer's point of view,' taking the listener into SAD WORLD. Ikonika then wove a storyline into the project, a journey that begins on a sloshing train and ends on a stolen Lime bike. In light of a recent diagnosis of Autism (which Sara first clocked through videos on socials), every lyric is towards activating an understanding of self. Living post-diagnosis has offered the direct clarity that so many live without and has shifted Sara’s life.
Album opener and lead single 'Listen to Your Heart' emphasises a sense of grappling with anxious control: layers of nervous questions dissolve over each other, which are answered by the simple chorus 'Listen To Your Heart' as wailing moog and rhythms criss-cross. 'Sense Seeker' with JLSXND7RS yearns with desire as Ikonika stretches out over hypnotic triplets and self-shaken shakers, before the song drops into a serene chorus of chimes and heartstrings, “the worst sound to me is a metronome”, Ikonika confides. The languid 'Your Vibe' is a seductive paean par excellence. Track 9, ‘Drums 1 (Take It)’ with Zambian Producer SHE Spells Doom, eases in a straight-forward dancefloor-bop with Ikonika's mantra as a constant, guiding the intention. Keep an ear out for the best cameo on the whole record too, from Sara’s own little one!