April 11, 2025 |
The London-based artist Tsatsamis says he found “salvation” when he discovered Lady Gaga’s Born This Way as a teenager, with the empowering pop song’s bold, powerful stance helping a shy outsider have the courage to fully own his queerness. It’s this type of connection he hopes to forge with the next generation through his own sound.
Thanks to glitzy basslines and his euphoric and emotional vocal bridges, Tsatsamis sounds a lot like George Michael (he’s also of Greek origin) if he were produced by Kaytranada. Full of kooky synth lines and smiling in the face of disaster energy, Let Go, from new album Our Shame, is about seeing a scary fog and diving into it without fear. Good Time, meanwhile, is a love letter to blitzing through Soho’s gay bars. On this latter song, Tsatsamis sings about failing to recognise something he used to love, ensuring a dose of healthy self-reflection in the middle of a sweaty dance floor. “I like to make euphoric, introspective melancholia and songs that have an atmosphere of fatal lust.” He pauses before laughing: “I hope that’s not too conceited to say!”
Tsatsamis wears DSQUARED2
In Tsatsamis’s music, there’s always a feeling of dancing through the pain. Moving forward, a big focus, he says, is to make electro-pop that’s genuinely therapeutic. “There’s something so meditative about electro-pop or dance-pop music. The way you can get completely lost in the beat, the melodies, the production, and then the way the lyrics can speak to you as an individual,” he says. “It can make you feel like the song was written directly for you, or about you. I feel like with my first two EPs [2022’s Versions and 2023’s Their Versions], a lot of the inspiration behind the production for the songs came from chasing and replicating that feeling. If people want to play it in a club and dance to it to purge their demons, well, that’s even better.”
Taken from 10 Men Magazine Issue 61 – MUSIC, TALENT, CREATIVE – on newsstands now. Order your copy here.
THE NEW NOISE
Creative Editor PAUL TONER
Portrait ELLIOTT MORGAN
Text THOMAS HOBBS
Fashion assistant GEORGIA EDWARDS
Production ZAC APOSTOLOU and SONYA MAZURYK
