Two songs on a Saturday night in October set out the last three years of Sasha Keable's career. On 10 October, with Danny Dyer as host, she was the musical guest on Saturday Night Live UK. She opened with "options", a single that was nine days old, and came back later for "WHY", the 2024 song that did more than any other to find her a new audience. One was the new record and one the song people already knew, on the same night, on Sky's live sketch show. In early 2024 she had given herself twelve months before she quit.
Read enough of what's been written about Keable over the past five years and the same story comes up, told from slightly different angles. Put the accounts side by side and they don't always agree.
The ultimatum
The plainest version comes from Crack's October 2025 cover story. After what the magazine calls "a decade-long battle for creative control", Keable decided early in 2024 that if she wasn't where she wanted to be within a year, she would write for other artists instead. By the end of that year "Hold Up" had spread on TikTok, and Beyoncé had named her in a September 2024 GQ cover interview as one of the artists she was listening to.
The earlier chapters explain why the ultimatum mattered. Keable signed to Polydor at 17, went to the BRIT School in the same year as King Krule, and co-wrote and sang on Disclosure's "Voices" from their 2013 debut, Settle. She told British Vogue in August 2025 that she wanted to make R&B while the label pushed her towards pop. "For nine years, it felt like I was told I was wrong for wanting to make the music I wanted to make." After she left the label came two years of silence, then two more years of trying to love music again. As she told Crack, the people around her "made me hate the industry", not music.
Vogue's description of 2025's Act Right was "her fifth project" that "in many ways feels like a debut". The 2021 EP Intermission, with "Killing Me" featuring Jorja Smith, was the hinge. She told Clash in September 2021: "I feel like for the first time it's coming through in my work." Yet the wider breakthrough took another three years and a heartbreak to arrive.
"I've never felt the need to prove it … I don't feel I need to prove to anyone how Colombian I am."Sasha Keable to Latinolife, 2025
The Colombian side
This is the part of the story most UK coverage mentions in passing, often in a single word: "British-Colombian". Her mother is from Bello, just outside Medellín, and grew up in Niquía. She trained as a nurse in Colombia and arrived in London without English, working as a hospital cleaner. Keable told Latinolife that she was "raised by multiple Colombian women … my mom, my nana and my sister", and that she has gone back to Colombia every year since she was a baby. Family life, she said, "revolved around Elephant", meaning Elephant and Castle, for decades the centre of Latin American London. She told Vogue she tried to protest the closure of its shopping centre: "I knew what it meant to my community." Revista Diners in Bogotá adds detail that UK outlets haven't: dancing at Carnaval del Pueblo with her sister, cumbia and vallenato on Saturday mornings while the house was cleaned, and a map of Colombia tattooed on her left palm.
What she won't do is perform that identity on demand. She doesn't sing in Spanish, and she's clear about why. "A lot of people when they find out I'm Colombian, they're like, oh my God, you should make music in Spanish," she told Latinolife. She'll do it "when it feels right", and says, "I don't feel any massive pressure to do it." She has started writing in Spanglish, said she'd love to make a cumbia record "later down the line", and has no interest in making reggaetón, though she's happy to dance to it. She also described being told she "doesn't look Colombian enough", and replied: "I can cuss you out in Spanish, so shut up."
The song itself is in English, and it's set in Miami. But the video was shot in Colombia, directed by Josefina Santos, with local Colombian crew in the credits. The published credits file the shoot under "ACT III COLOMBIA". In 2025 Latinolife wrote that her heritage came through "in more subtle ways than brandishing a flag". She pointed to her styling, to flowers ("a huge thing in our culture"), to the Medellín-area aesthetic of Act Right, and in correcting a director who sent her Mexican references. With "options" it's in the footage.
London has had a Latin music scene for a long time. In 2020 the Guardian profiled a generation of UK-raised Latin artists, including Dukus and Desta French, building a Spanish-language urban sound. Keable came at it from another direction. She broke through in British R&B, in English, to a BRIT nomination and a national TV stage. Few British-Colombian artists have been as visible in UK music, and SNL UK put her in front of a mainstream Saturday-night audience.
What the coverage tends to miss
Most profiles read her as a heartbreak writer, and the songs support that. Act Right, she told Vogue, "is based on a betrayal". But across the interviews, humour is just as constant. In 2025 she told Glamour, discussing "Act Right", that she writes from a "fuck you" place "because it gets it out of me", and that she would "rather write the truth than sing about my breakfast". "options" turns a messy post-breakup reunion into something closer to a joke at her own expense.
The other thing that gets missed is that she's a craft obsessive. What sounds like a choir on "Feel Something" is her own stacked vocals, a technique Vogue calls her signature and she won't explain yet: "I'll give away the sauce one day." She told Vogue that on a FaceTime call set up by Parris Goebel, Rihanna "must have wheeled" "WHY" "about 20 times". When Crack met her, fans were still campaigning for "Tai Chi", an unreleased song she had played on Tiny Desk, under the line "Justice for Tai Chi". It finally arrived on ACT II in February.
There are contradictions too. She is the self-described "loud mouth from South London", in her words to Culted, and her vocal delivery is a big part of her appeal. Yet Crack reported that she planned to move to Los Angeles in January 2026 for at least a year. Vogue places her childhood in Eltham, and Crack found her in a Deptford flat she was about to leave. And an artist written up for a decade as a voice for hire, Disclosure's singer and a features name, is now the one other people want to work with.
Where it leaves her
The facts of 2026 so far: a BRIT nomination for Best R&B Act; a place in NME's 100 essential emerging artists; ACT II in February; Blue Note dates in New York and Los Angeles; tours and support slots with GIVĒON and Olivia Dean; Roots Picnic in London and Philadelphia; "options" on 1 October; SNL UK on the 10th; and a billing at the Roundhouse for the 20th anniversary of Amy Winehouse's Back to Black. Complex reported two MOBO nominations and more than 200 million streams. She has 3.1 million monthly listeners on Spotify.
Last year she told Vogue she was "optimistic" about a debut album "late next year". That would be about now. Nothing has been announced. When it is, we'll be listening for whether the Spanglish writing she mentioned makes it on.