Saez spent most of his childhood in Marseille until he moved to Dijon when he was about eight years old, where he was raised by his Algerian mother, after she divorced her Andalusian husband.

His first single Jeune et con was broadcast on many radio stations and reached the general public, which earned him a nomination for the Newcomer of the Year award at the Victoires de la Musique in 2001.

Brian De Palma contacted him and asked him to contribute to the original soundtrack of the movie Femme Fatale that was released in April 2003.

On 22 April 2002, the day after the first round of presidential elections, he wrote the song Fils de France online, which was meant to be against French right-wing politician Jean-Marie Le Pen who qualified for the second ballot.

His musical style underwent a profound transformation from alternative rock to acoustic ballads, as his singing was accompanied only by three guitars and a piano.

At the end of 2006 and the beginning of 2007, Saez released four new songs in English (Killing the Lambs, Numb, Jessie and Yellow Tricycle) for free on his MySpace page.

Edited by the independent quality-label Cinq7, it was released on 21 April 2008 as a triple album (Paris was also sold separately), consisting of 29 acoustic songs.

The first two discs, Warsaw and Alhambra, bear a similar sound and were meant to pay homage to Jacques Brel, Léo Ferré, Barbara, Georges Brassens and other classic French songwriters.

In June and July 2008, accompanied for the first time by a string trio (violin, viola and violoncello), Saez launched, as part of various festivals, a new acoustic tour which was very short-lived: emotionally exhausted by the intimate nature of his songs, Saez decided to cancel his big summer tour and dedicated himself to writing new material.

J'accuse also sparked a controversy and a media debate when the posters with the cover of the album (depicting a nude woman in a shopping cart) were banned from the Paris subway.

[1] He presents Mélancolie in this short film: a sad clown, a mime dressed in black "populating the earth with flowers".

On the eve of 1 May, Damien Saez releases a new song for free download on his website culturecontreculture.fr entitled Premier Mai,[4] in which he denounces both the presence of the far right in the second round of the 2017 presidential election and that of the "banker" Emmanuel Macron.