There is a specific moment in the process of getting to know yourself when the work of facing everything, the mistakes and the traumas and the dark sides that most people spend enormous energy avoiding, gives way to something that feels less like excavation and more like emergence, the moment when all that difficult interior labor begins to produce not just understanding but actual strength. AŸA, the Berlin-based musician and filmmaker and producer born Avia Shoshani, has captured this moment on Guidance, released May 22, 2026 as the first look into her upcoming studio album, and the track is a beautiful visual poem about finding strength within yourself, born from an intuitive studio session and representing a deep internal shift that the music itself enacts rather than merely describes.
The origin of the track tells you something important about how it works. Sparked immediately through music rather than conversation, born from an intuitive session with acclaimed producer Kurtis Wells, Guidance emerged from the kind of creative process where the music arrives before the words and the meaning, where the feeling finds its sonic form first and the understanding follows. This is a different and often more honest way of making music than the conversation-first approach, because it allows the emotional truth to express itself before the conscious mind has had the chance to shape it into something more managed or more explicable. The deep internal shift that the track represents was something AŸA was living rather than analyzing, and the music captured it in the moment of its happening.
Sonically, Guidance mirrors the delicate process of opening up with genuine precision, beginning like a chill gentle breeze whispering a quiet calling, carried by a shy voice slowly finding its ground. This opening is the sound of vulnerability at its earliest and most tentative, the voice not yet confident, the calling not yet fully heard, the breeze gentle rather than forceful. The decision to begin the track in this state of tentative emergence rather than in a position of established strength is what gives Guidance its emotional authenticity, because finding strength within yourself does not begin from strength but from exactly this kind of shy and uncertain reaching toward something not yet possessed. The track earns its eventual power by starting from genuine vulnerability rather than performing confidence from the outset.
As the song develops, the lyrics take shape through AŸA’s masterful interpretation, growing resonant alongside the percussion that underscores the narrative of facing one’s fears to break free. The growth of the track from its gentle whispered beginning into something more resonant and more grounded is the sonic enactment of the internal process it describes, the shy voice finding its ground and the percussion providing the increasing structure and momentum that the journey toward freedom requires. This is the kind of song architecture that mirrors its content, the music moving from tentative to grounded in parallel with the emotional movement from fear to freedom, the form and the meaning developing together across the track’s runtime.
The music video that accompanies Guidance extends the song’s emotional depth onto the screen as a beautifully hand-crafted living visual poem, created entirely without the use of AI. Co-conceptualized and directed by renowned artists Einat Dan and Birgit Mörtl and captured on analog film by Director of Photography Peter Bromme, the visuals evoke the feeling of watching a colorful spring burst into bloom after a harsh winter, capturing the exact moment every frozen corner of the human soul defrosts and awakens to finally be free. The choice of analog film and the explicit commitment to human creation without AI is consistent with the song’s themes, the handmade and organic quality of the visuals reflecting the genuine human process of transformation that the song describes, the warmth of the analog medium matching the warmth of the thaw it depicts.
The spring-after-winter imagery is the perfect visual correlative for the song’s emotional content, the defrosting of the frozen soul being one of the more apt metaphors for the process of emerging from a difficult internal period into renewed life and possibility. Winter in this imagery is not simply cold but frozen, the soul’s corners locked into stillness and inaccessibility, and the spring thaw is the awakening of everything that the freezing had preserved in suspended difficulty. The exact moment of defrosting that the video captures is the moment Guidance is about, the transition from frozen to flowing, from locked to free, and the analog film captures this with the kind of textured warmth that digital perfection could not provide.
AŸA’s broader artistic trajectory gives Guidance its deeper context. Born out of personal and political crisis, her work has consistently focused on transforming hard raw truths into accessible and deeply resonant experiences where audiences can feel seen, and Guidance continues this project, the personal process of facing trauma and finding strength being rendered into a form that listeners navigating their own versions of that process can recognize and inhabit. Her unique fusion of Moroccan and Yemeni roots with contemporary pop, developed since she established herself as one of Berlin’s favorite live acts in 2017, gives her music a cultural depth and a spiritual dimension that distinguishes it from the more surface-oriented end of contemporary pop, the heritage informing the work without confining it.
The accomplishments that AŸA has accumulated reflect an artist whose work has been genuinely recognized across multiple contexts and geographies. Her 2021 single Let Me Go was broadcast on ARTE TV in Paris, her single Wondergirl won the prestigious Listen to Berlin Awards, her work has been synchronized in German film and featured in major theater and circus productions globally, and she has performed at Kesselhaus Berlin alongside fourteen international musicians. The promotional tour in South Africa where she performed at historic venues like Constitution Hill adds another dimension to her international reach, the engagement with a place of such profound historical and political significance being consistent with the spiritual and political seriousness that runs through her work. Her independent label Yalla She Said Productions provides the infrastructure for her to push culture forward through the raw and deeply spiritual storytelling that defines her artistic identity.
AŸA’s own words about the song capture its essence precisely. Getting to know herself meant facing everything, the mistakes and the traumas and the dark sides, and the hope she expresses is that listeners resonate with the empowering feeling of being proud of yourself and guided, that despite all the hardships and the crazy times we live in, you can still rise above it all and keep your energy high and stay kind and truthful to who you are. This is the philosophy that Guidance embodies, the conviction that the difficult work of facing yourself produces not just understanding but strength, not just survival but the capacity to rise and to remain true to who you are.
The guidance the title refers to is ultimately internal, the strength found within rather than received from outside, the shy voice that begins the track finding its ground and its power through the process of facing what needed to be faced. AŸA has made a song that thaws the frozen soul and awakens it to freedom, and in capturing her own internal shift she has created something that can guide others through their own.
