Rarely has a band sounded so much like their name. It’s as if Egyptian-Austrian artist Leila Hassan and collaborator Francesco Cavaliere picked it out before the instruments themselves. Just like the beaches where you would find these spiky creatures, Sea Urchin’s guitars sound sunny and mellow; their synths, underwater. Tapping into a magical-realism frame, their 2016 debut, ‘Yaqaza’ (arabic from dreaming) pays tribute to everything from Sicilian salt miners and unknown Algerian pop stars.
Photography by Philippe Gerlach