Shanti Celeste | Romance

Shanti Celeste’s second album, Romance, combines a delicate genre shift with a tender emotional reveal—an unguarded portrait of love in its most human forms.

Celeste, long known for her radiant club productions, turns her gaze inward. Romance isn’t just a pop record—it’s a soft unravelling. There’s still rhythm here, but it moves with tenderness, not urgency. Opener Butterflies sets the tone: Spanish lyrics laced with tension and desire float above airy percussion and gentle harp, expressing the fluttery chaos of new love—not its perfection, but its volatility.

While her earlier work leaned on abstraction, here Celeste places her voice at the centre. On tracks like Unwind, a house groove masks a deeper need for closeness, the kind that’s hard to articulate in daylight. “Can we get closer somehow?” she sings—not as a request, but a quiet plea.

Moments of sadness weave through this record, rising again in strength. But Thinking About You, a dedication to a lost partner, doesn’t wallow in sorrow—it shines. Over a springy beat, she insists that love, even when it ends, doesn’t vanish. It lingers, reshaped but ever-present.

Love here isn’t fantasy—it’s domestic, awkward, and real. On Softie, she sings, “This is where we’re at / Time to get a cat.” It’s a line that says everything about intimacy: the decisions made not in candlelight, but over washing up and shared routines.

Rather than chasing pop’s polish, Celeste embraces its vulnerability. Her hooks are simple, her lyrics often unadorned, but that’s the charm. She’s not trying to be profound—she’s trying to be honest. And in a world full of overthought love songs, that honesty feels radical.

Romance doesn’t break the mould. It doesn’t need to. What it offers is rarer: love that’s clear-eyed, imperfect, and fully felt.