Mentrix has had a unique journey into music. Indeed, it would be hard to find someone further removed from the kind of career paths wed are used to seeing.

Mentrix is Iranian, emigrating from the country in the 1990's with her parents, before moving to France independently in order to go to school. She was just 9 years of age when she made that transition. "My life soon became a cycle of never-ending applications, temporary permits, standing in lines, providing proof of one thing or another. Almost overnight, I was rendered powerless. I was less than the ordinary citizen, with their ordinary rights," she writes, in a powerful piece that will help to shed new light on both Iran, and on the experience of immigrants.

Inspired by Sufism, her latest album, My Enemy, My Love is what she calls "post-immigrant pop", and reflects her relationship “between the contrasting worlds I lived in.” Among the tracks on the album is ’Nature’, for which she released an astonishingly beautiful video.

Read her extraordinary story – in her own precious words – in the new Hot Press. Pre-order the latest issue here.

• Feature image by Gilles Estève.