For most of the 2000s, Sasha Perera was the voice of Jahcoozi, the Berlin trio she formed with Robot Koch, a band built for sweaty rooms: bass-heavy, brash, somewhere between grime, dancehall and electro. Everlast, released on 28 October 2013 by the Los Angeles label Friends of Friends, is what happened when she stepped out of that noise and listened to what was left.
What was left was a guitar, a voice and a lot of space. The twelve songs on Everlast are semi-acoustic and unhurried, built from gently plucked strings, sparse loops and drums that feel more remembered than played. "Dreamt That Dream" moves like a 1990s R&B ballad with everything but its skeleton removed. "Bizarre," the lead single, is the record in miniature: unsettling on the first listen, then, a few plays later, a song you find yourself humming. Gonjasufi turns up on "Giddy," his cracked voice a natural fit for music this frayed at the edges.
The record's mood has a lot to do with where Perera comes from, or rather with the fact that the answer is not simple. Born in London to Sri Lankan parents, she has lived in Berlin's Kreuzberg since the early 2000s. She has described Berlin as the first home she chose rather than the one she was born into, and Everlast sounds like music made by somebody at ease with belonging to several places and none. Some songs drift into other languages. None of them tries to resolve the question.
It would have been easy to hear Everlast as a detour, the side project of a club artist. It turned out to be the main road. A remix edition the following spring, with reworks by Shlohmo, Planningtorock and Hype Williams, showed how much the songs could carry. All of This, written across Berlin, Istanbul and Mumbai and released in 2017, deepened the downtempo, half-organic sound. Home, in 2021, was a pandemic record about leaving and staying, and the most direct she has been. And in October 2025 came Just Wanna Live Some, her fourth album for Friends of Friends, which pulls the whole thing back towards the dancefloor she once left: experimental rap, footwork rhythms, saturated ambient passages, and a feature from the Berlin rapper Andy S, whose track she had first played in a Boiler Room set.
Along the way she has worked with Nina Hagen, Aho Ssan, Maral and KMRU, played CTM, and kept up a parallel life as a DJ with a reputation for bringing the first wave of grime to Berlin. Twelve years on, Everlast still sounds like the moment all of that became possible: the point where the MC discovered she was a songwriter, and decided that quiet could be just as unsettling as loud.
