Özlem Tekin

Özlem Tekin — Biography

Özlem Tekin is one of the most prominent women of the 1990s Turkish rock scene, a singer who began in hard rock and moved on to house, punk, pop and folk. She reached a wide audience with the songs that followed her first album and also turned to acting from time to time. She has lived away from the stage since the mid-2010s; in 2026 the press reported that she had been offered a multimillion-lira comeback deal.

Born in California as the daughter of the Turkologist Talat Tekin, she came to Turkey as a child and studied clarinet at the Hacettepe University Ankara State Conservatory. She started out with the group Lokomotif and in 1992 joined Volvox, formed with Şebnem Ferah. Her first solo album, Kime Ne (1995), drew attention with "Aşk Her Şeyi Affeder Mi?" and "Duvaksız Gelin", a song about forced marriage. Öz (1998) and Laubali (1999) followed; Tek Başıma (2002) was an album whose songs she made entirely by herself in a week. She hosted Yaz Rüzgarı on Kanal D, acted in the series Sil Baştan and appeared in the films Hokkabaz (with Cem Yılmaz), Kaledeki Yalnızlık and Mavi Pansiyon. Her last album, Kargalar, came out in 2013, and in 2015 she released the Psyshe albums with Bahar Canca.

She is credited with the first fully electronic album recorded in Turkey.