For Shay Lia, music is a means of self-discovery. With no music events where she lived, the French-born, Djibouti-raised singer-songwriter (born Shanice Dileita Mohamed in 1993) stoked her passion by watching music videos and concerts online. When she moved to Montreal for university, she began making music herself. In 2014, Lia nabbed her first feature and songwriting credit for KAYTRANADA’s “Leave Me Alone”—the first of many songs together—and later that year released her debut single, “3 Months”. Her musings on relationship highs and lows thrived in the languid, hazy space between electronic music and R&B. But on her Solaris EP (2020), Lia ventured into the sunny, global rhythms of Afrobeats and baile funk, along with lyrical themes of self-confidence, planting the seeds for her genre-spanning debut album, FACETS (2023).