Trailblazing musician 潘PAN (real name Pan Wei Ju) has released her exhilarating new album Pan The Pansexual via Transgressive Records, after delighting fans with two EPs earlier this year. Boasting production from innovators Clams Casino and Bon Music Vision (Kojey Radical, Lucinda Chau, Tsunaina, Gaika), with David Wrench (Sampha, FKA Twigs, The xx) on mixing duty, the album is the inaugural project under this moniker, from the artist formerly known as Aristophanes. The LP and EPs were written in Hong Kong, Berlin and Taipei and recorded/produced in London and Melbourne, representing an emotional and physical journey across cultures and identities.

Across the releases, confident sexual expression mixes with tenderness, empathy and a particularly feminine sort of strength to create a world that Pan hopes will transcend language and connect her audience via something more innate. “The message that I want to carry through these two EPs and the album is to demonstrate the strength of accepting your own situations. When you can’t make things right but you’ve done your best, sometimes it’s really hard to admit that to yourself. It takes strength to do that. I use lots of sexual metaphors, but I feel like it’s more about the female need to be seen and heard. I want to build something more delicate and layered and connected to our life experience – to the trauma and the pleasure and the growth.”

Though Pan Wei Ju is an entirely new artist – new outlook, new message, new material and name – you may have met the woman herself before. Back in the mid-’10s, the Taipei-born rapper went by the moniker Aristophanes. After performing a career-changing feature on ‘SCREAM’, taken from Grimes’ celebrated NME Album of 2015 ‘Art Angels’, Aristophanes went on to build a cult fanbase, releasing her debut mixtape ‘Humans Become Machines’.

It’s perhaps no surprise that Pan needed a little more time to settle into herself and her art. Raised by a mother who “hated music” and refused to have it in the house, she recalls having almost zero access to pop culture until she moved out of the family home. Inspired by the storytelling of the Taiwanese rappers that she then began to listen to, the heavily male-dominated scene at the time, however, made it almost impossible for Pan to broach. Undeterred, she turned to the internet, reaching out to producers on Soundcloud and collaborating with artists across the globe and outside of her bubble.

Working with Grimes – a fellow self-taught female artist who produces and engineers everything herself – was the confidence booster that Pan needed. “If you’ve got ears and you’ve got a desire to express, then you can learn all the things from Youtube – it’s not just limited to men,” she says. “I can learn that and I can do what I want, I just need to do the work.” And so, for the past half decade, Pan has been doing exactly that. She’s moved to Lisbon, where she lives with her recently-adopted cat Truffle; she’s been working with other people and most importantly, she’s been writing.

Across a constantly morphing sonic palette that moves from metallic, apocalyptic beats to delicate nods to the traditional music of her Asian heritage, via heavy, industrial moments, spacious soundscapes and much more, the thread in Pan’s music is utterly mesmeric vocal. Performing in a mix of Mandarin and English, she says having the two languages to play with is “like featuring another artist who has a different way of describing things”.

Pan The Pansexual and her two recent EPs Reborn and Ghosts, mark Pan’s first new music in seven years, and have garnered support from Tara Kumar on BBC Radio 1’s Future Artists show, an X-POSURE playlist add from John Kennedy on Radio X and further spins from Matt Wilkinson on Apple Music 1. She has received widespread acclaim from publications including Pitchfork, i-D, The Line of Best Fit, Rolling Stone UK, Clash and The Skinny.

An entirely evolved artist with a new collection of music: all hail the long-awaited rebirth of Pan Wei Ju.