FEATURE:
Spotlight
to get to know the Scottish artist and D.J., sim0ne. Her extraordinary E.P., Zer0, was released in June. I shall come to that. There are some chats from this year that we need to get to. So we can discover more about this staggering talent. I really love what sim0ne is doing. Her E.P. is one of the best of this year. The Cold Magazine interviewed an artist who knows how to have fun. Talking About her own club night, Kylie Minogue and the then-upcoming E.P., it is an illuminating and incredible interview:
“sim0ne is a through-and-through party girl, a profession she threw herself into when she was just 15 years old. Now the founding mother of her own club night, club zer0, and a world-renowned DJ and rave fanatic, sim0ne spoke to The Cold Magazine just ahead of New Year’s Eve 2025-6 to talk about her upcoming EP zer0, catharsis and Kylie Minogue.
Before I interview Simone Murphy, better known as sim0ne, I know it’s going to be fun. Because, dear reader, not all interviews are fun. Some are like pulling a thorn out a finger. But I know this one will be.
The reason I know this is that, in the week before interviewing her, everybody I told had some story of bumping into Murphy at some London club and repeated the same glowing words: oh, she’s so lovely; she’s so down-to-earth; she’s so not how you’d expect a child model turned DJ (there’s more of them than you’d think) to be. And so, when she rings me from the back of an Uber, signal sketchy, half-way between wherever sim0ne starts her Friday night and wherever she ends it, the interview is fun: less of an interview and more of a powwow, both of us gushing about the underappreciated (outside of Scotland, at least) greatness of happy hardcore, how Salford’s White Hotel is England’s finest club and about the timeless brilliance of Kylie Minogue.
Murphy hails from Edinburgh and first forayed into stardom when she finished fifth place on Britain’s Next Top Model’s eleventh cycle. Modelling is a profession she had been exploring since the age of two, when she appeared in the Scottish Herald’s fashion supplement. A Scottish Sun article, reflecting on her elimination from BNTM a decade later, rages about how the ousting of the “Edinburgh beauty” had sparked a national “outrage”. At least things have turned out alright for her since.
It was Murphy’s mother, a stylist, and father, a photographer, who initially clued her into the twin worlds of clothing and club music, helping to raise her on a diet of minor modelling gigs and northern soul. By 15, Murphy was running roughshod through Edinburgh’s nightlife: “My long-suffering parents can attest,” she tells me, “We’d get the 18-year-old boys we knew to come out with the wristbands, and we’d snog them to get them to give them to us.”
“When you’re out, you’re faced with something happening in front of you,” Murphy says, “there are people around you and you’re confronting the world around you. I think it’s important for young people to have third spaces like that.” She says she herself learnt a lot about the world this way – though, when I ask for specific memories, she validly concedes, “a lot of it is quite blurry”.
But sim0ne, a humanities graduate and perennial activist, understands the club’s latent radicalism well. She also understands the pertinent importance – both personal and political – of just being around other people, having started DJing in the mandated isolationism of lockdown. This is why she founded club zer0, her touring club night, a couple of years back. “It’s such a nice community,” she says, “I get to lock in with these smaller crowds who are all here for the same reason, hands in the air and dancing. I love seeing it because when I go out, I want it to be like that, dancing and having fun with my friends.”
Murphy knows that today is an anxious age: clubs are shutting; algorithms and AI are changing the way we exist in the world. But her existence is almost that of the cyborg, in nostalgic sympoiesis with the technology that raised her in a post-Y2K age when the world was still optimistic about the Web’s democratisation of cognition and connection. “I love that early 2000s style,” she says, discussing the metallic visual aesthetic of the EP, “when everybody was really excited about technology: the muted, glowy tones; the old PlayStation adverts.”
Murphy and I call at the end of 2025, as one year wraps itself into another. I ask sim0ne if she has any New Year’s Resolutions and she says no, that she just wants to keep travelling and playing music. In January, the following month, she’ll be taking club zer0 to Australia. As the clocks strike midnight and announce a new start, she’ll be playing to hundreds of shit-faced Melbournians who will be among the world’s first to enter 2026 due to their advanced time zone. She says she’s excited to play them Kylie.
But how to usher in the New Year? I ask if sim0ne yet has any clues on what song she’ll play as the first of 2026. But like with most answers she gives about the future, she prefers to be non-prescriptive. “Well,” she starts, “I am Scottish and it is New Year so I think I’m going to play a verse of Auld Lang Syne, it feels correct.” A cutesy laugh – it’s a surprisingly rustic pick. “And then,” she continues, “I’m going to drop it into heavy techno.” More on brand. “Or maybe,” she giggles, “I’ll treat them to one of my new tracks”.
Beatportal named sim0ne their artist of their month earlier in the year. In their in-depth interview, she “discusses injecting joy into hard dance and why protecting club culture matters more than ever”. Do make sure that you connect with this incredible artist. Someone who I feel is going to be around for decades more:
“Despite only teaching herself how to DJ and produce during lockdown, sim0ne has rapidly become one of the hottest names in dance music. “I was really late to the game,” she admits, “but because I have ADHD I'm not great at getting myself to sit down, especially if it's at the start of learning to do something.” Thankfully, everything clicked relatively quickly: “I remember thinking ‘wow, I can't believe I just figured this out in my bedroom’,” she says of the achievement changing her neuro-plasticity: “I thought ‘if I apply myself for long enough, then I'll be able to do this’.”
Having since honed her skills and become a regular fixture on festival line-ups, club posters and the fashion circuit, sim0ne has built a community of her own. “Everyone is so locked in,” she says of her club zer0 events, including a particularly memorable sold-out party at Village Underground in London. “People weren't going out for cigarette breaks. They weren't moving again. There wasn't a crazy amount of phones in there. In all the pictures, everyone is dancing and having a good time,” she beams. This, sim0ne explains, has always been the goal: “I wanted it to be about people who really wanted to leave the outside world behind and lose themselves. There's something so cathartic about dancing and jumping up and down with your friends. I love that club zer0 is a place where people can do that.”
Getting to curate the line-ups feels incredibly fulfilling, too. “That’s one of the funnest parts,” she says. “When I’m booking it, I’ll look at flyers for the local scene, see who is coming up and who is trying really hard to get their name out there.” Aside from local acts, she’s enjoyed having free rein to hand-pick some of her favourite artists to join her, including hyperpop-star Hannah Diamond. “It was slightly different musically but I love PC Music because seeing and hearing them gave me the confidence to get into making music,” she recalls of their unconventional methods. “I didn't grow up being musically trained and that’s how they all got into music,” she shares. “They were breaking a lot of rules that didn't matter, and it still sounded great and they were so cool.” Hosting Diamond to play after her, then, felt like a full circle moment: “I was really fan-girling,” she laughs, adding that “everyone stayed right through to the end; it was incredible to see”.
“Other than online?” she offers tentatively. “Being in the club really forces you into the present, and I think that's what's so nice about it.”
What can be done to stop, or at least prolong, this Black Mirror-esque prediction from becoming reality? Aside from Nadine Noor, founder of the queer club night Pxssy Palace, being appointed by Mayor Sadiq Khan to the independent London Nightlife Taskforce in February 2025, sim0ne says she “hasn’t seen anything like a huge interjection from the UK government. I’m aware it’s probably not their top priority… but I do think it's a really important space for young people to have”.
While they’re still open, then, you’ll continue to find sim0ne on the dance floor. “The only way to really see how a track feels is to be there yourself,” she suggests of the way raving informs her own BPM-building DJ sets; “you’ve got to keep getting involved!” A recent visit to Basement in New York springs to her mind: “my friends and I had been techno dancing for hours and then, out of nowhere, [Madison Avenue’s] ‘Don’t Call Me Baby’ dropped. I literally screamed and we were all grabbing each other… I think it's so great to have a moment of respite from the kick drums,” she continues. “People love a bit of melody, and I’m always incorporating that in my music.”
All this is at the core of her first full project, ‘zer0’, the dopamine-releasing tasters of which she has been sprinkling into her recent DJ sets. “When people get really excited when you play your own track, that’s the best thing in the world,” she concludes of the reactions she’s been getting. “It feels amazing because it’s like, ‘oh, you guys came to see me, and to see me play this”.
Let’s finish with Metal Magazine and their interview with the tremendous sim0ne. I think that she is one of our greatest D.J.s and artists. I am not sure what her summer plans are, though you know she is going to be pretty busy. A full diary looms I am sure. Do make sure that you follow sim0ne, as she is too good to miss out on:
“You’re completely self-taught when it comes to producing, singing, and DJing. What was it like to enter this scene without much formal knowledge and also with a lot of critical eyes watching, especially as a woman bringing feminine and “ridiculous, fun energy” into the space?
Honestly very scary, it’s intimidating to lay yourself bare in front of that many people. I came up through the clubs in a time where the DJ world had a lot of pretension and felt very gatekept so when I first started, I strove for perfection and would beat myself up over every mistake. You learn very quickly in front of that many people, though, and get a lot more comfortable which has allowed me to be a little more out-there. I’m more scared of not expressing myself properly than messing up a transition now and I can apply that mentality to the studio and creating music. Honestly, I find singing the most daunting now so that’s what I practice most. It would be cool to use less processed vocals in the future.
Can you tell us a bit about your club zer0 collective? What inspired you to create this and how do you assemble a lineup?
This might sound selfish but a lot of the time I’m just booking who I want to see. It feels important not to tie myself down to one genre or even just DJing. We had Coucou Chloe perform live at one of the London parties. We have more budget now than we did at the beginning, but I really enjoyed the process of finding local talent so that’s definitely a practice I want to continue.
How do you distinguish your roles of producer, artist, DJ, and now club curator?
They blur into one a lot, for better or worse, I don’t have a lot of separation between my work and personal life. I’m grateful to be booked and busy and this project was definitely made with the clubs in mind whenever I got a chance to be in the studio. Maybe it would be interesting to block off time to make a future project, but zer0 is definitely a love letter to the dance floor.
You’ve spoken about the importance of third spaces and being in contact with other people, with community and how that in itself is a political act. What does that look like in practice for you?
I always say I’ll fly anywhere for a good enough party but I’m probably a little extreme. Just being with people, moving your body, and knowing there’s some solidarity because you all enjoy the same thing is really good for the soul and that’s something you can do with friends or alone in a crowd.
It feels like there’s a bigger crowd of artists being open about clubbing, making going out cool again like in the 90s and 2000s. For DJs especially it’s important to stay in touch with the crowd’s experience. How do you model that?
I go out. I go out a lot. I think we’re all guilty to some extent of getting caught up in algorithms and metrics these days. Whenever I catch myself starting to think about crowd sizes or streaming numbers, that's when I know I need to go dance to music I’ve never heard before in a tiny club. Being on the dancefloor reminds me why I love music and pulls me out of the industry side which sometimes feels like a popularity contest.
The singles you’ve dropped thus far have an emotional, melodic yet upbeat outlook on different moments of a night at the club. What can people expect out of your upcoming EP?
A lot of 90s and early 2000s references sonically. Each track was made with the dancefloor in mind and I hope people can relate to each moment too”.
I have a lot of respect and love for the epic and truly awesome sim0ne. Everything about her upbringing, background and where she is now is awe-inspiring. A supernova who is going to go very far, I wanted to spotlight her here. A gem and treasure in the music scene, go and follow her now. Check out zer0, as it is one of the best E.P.s…
OF this year.
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