Skye Newman is the youngest of six children from Eltham, in southeast London — the SE9 postcode that titles both her projects — and she's named an aunt who sang jazz and blues as the person who actually shaped her ear for music.
"Hairdresser," her March 2025 debut single, cracked the UK top 20 almost immediately, but "Family Matters," the top-five hit that followed that June, is the one that mattered — a song that works directly through the trauma of her own upbringing rather than around it.
SE9 Part 1, her debut EP, came out that October, and SE9 Part 2 followed in May 2026 as the next chapter of the same autobiographical project; in the space of about a year she picked up BBC Radio 1's Sound of 2026, two BRIT nominations, a MOBO nod, and an Ivor Novello nomination — an unusually fast run of institutional recognition for a story she's still in the middle of telling.