Northern Dial Artist Profile

Kiesza

Calgary, Alberta, Canada

Calgary-raised singer, songwriter and dancer Kiesza built an unusually varied path into pop before her breakthrough, studying at Berklee College of Music and developing as a songwriter before moving into electronic music. That preparation collided with club culture in 2014 when "Hideaway" became an international hit, reaching No. 1 in the United Kingdom and the Top 5 in Canada. Its one-take video, built around Kiesza's choreography and physical performance, became inseparable from the song and helped distinguish her from a crowded wave of mid-2010s dance-pop crossovers.

Her debut album Sound of a Woman expanded that momentum into a broader pop and house vocabulary and topped Billboard's U.S. dance/electronic albums chart. At the 2015 JUNO Awards, Kiesza won Breakthrough Artist of the Year, Dance Recording of the Year and Video of the Year, turning a global breakout into one of the most successful Canadian pop debuts of the period. She also collaborated with artists including Duran Duran, Pitbull, Jack Ü and Joey Bada$$, while her songwriting background connected her to a wider international pop network.

A 2017 taxi collision left Kiesza with a traumatic brain injury and forced a prolonged break from the pace of touring and recording that had followed "Hideaway." Her return with Crave in 2020 therefore represented more than a routine second chapter: it re-established her as a self-directed dance-pop artist after a major interruption to her career. Kiesza's Canadian significance rests on both the scale of her international breakthrough and the way she fused songwriting, dance and house-derived production into a distinctly performance-driven pop identity.