On the Rise
Chloe Qisha

Those songs have their staying power, but a different hook snuck its way into my brain late this summer to join them. “All I ever wanted was your hands on my body,” Chloe Qisha repeats on “I Lied, I’m Sorry” from her debut self-titled EP, out this Friday. It’s hard to tell if she’s genuinely regretful. There’s a taunt and a smirk that comes with the breathy desire on the half-apology “when I said I didn’t miss you, yeah I lied, I’m sorry.” Maybe she means it, but she’s also definitely toying with you.

“The goal for me is always to write the best pop song and wrap that up in slightly more left-of-field references,” Qisha tells me while scurrying around Soho House, looking for a good place to video chat without being caught. The Chloe Qisha EP is varied yet familiar, its influences clear — there’s a messy, gritty pop rock sound with the crunchy guitars on “Evelyn” familiar to any Olivia Rodrigo or Paramore fan, and a lot of the funk and silliness of “Sexy Goodbye” comes from Talking Heads or ABBA. But she easily fits into the modern pop landscape that prioritizes storytelling above all: there’s a Swiftian sigh as she sets up the story in one song, singing, “in a London house, there’s the loneliest girl…”

That comes from “I Lied, I’m Sorry”, the buzziest of the pre-release singles, which comes across like a straightforward pop song, but its story is surprisingly convoluted. Qisha was watching Apple TV’s The Buccaneers when its credits song, a cover of LCD Soundsystem’s “North American Scum”, couldn’t leave her head. She brought it to her collaborator Rob Milton, who’s worked with Holly Humberstone and Alfie Templeman, and the two created the soundscape before writing the lyrics. “Once you sit in the sound and the world of that production, you get a better idea of what the songwriting could be,” she says.

Qisha moved from Malaysia to the UK at 16 to finish the last two years of high school, something that cemented her selfhood early. “You become a lot more sure of yourself and a lot more solidified in your values,” she notes. Hellbent on becoming a therapist, she got a degree in psychology but realised she was “probably way too emotional to be anyone’s therapist.” Music suddenly seemed like a viable career path, so she wrote songs while she was in school, and pivoted to a master’s degree in communication as a back-up plan, “which sounds absolutely mental.”

It would be mental only if she weren’t an exceptionally strong songwriter. “VCR Home Video” is a haunting ode to family and the act of self-parenting (“You were my blueprint, my first word I learned”), and “Scary Movie” documents her anxieties with going forward with a career in music. “The hope is that it all goes successfully,” she says, “and you’re taking these small, incremental steps into potentially changing your life forever.”

Nervous as “Evelyn” is, it’s also striking as a horror movie where the quiet girl goes berserk; amongst its claustrophobic production, she mentions wanting to crawl into another girl’s skin and being lit on fire, rife with jealousy. She’s over it now, actually — the song takes place in high school, the era she prefers to write from, since it’s terminally relatable to most. “I protect my peace so well these days that I generally have nothing to write about,” she says, “which is an amazing problem to have.”

But at Chloe Qisha’s heart are the pop songs — the bright, sticky lyricism and the catchy beats that people come for. “Sexy Goodbye”, a quirky, off-kilter number about leaving with your best foot forward, uses AutoTune and deadpan talk-singing to dish on an ex: “I’m waiting on your karma while you’re waiting on a booty call.” But it’s about another breakup — this one amicable — with a music company she just wasn’t feeling, and was confident enough to step away from. “I remember feeling like, ‘Wow, that was the first big-girl decision I made in my 26 years of living.’ I was really proud of myself, and came out the other end even better.” So it’s about both and neither a shitty ex or workplace misunderstanding. The girls’ names sprinkled through the song aren’t even real — she and Milton came up with them on a train back from Leeds. “Songwriting is so all over the place, there’s never really one thread of how it came to be,” she says. “It’s everything coming into one and melding and meshing and suddenly you have a song, which is very bizarre. I still don’t know how it happens. It’s still magic, every single time.”

That magic’s baked into the EP — a solid set of songs from a strong voice. Even though it wasn’t intentionally laid out like so, it acts as a sampler for a listener that might pick and choose which pop direction suits them. “VCR Home Video” is for the swaying, songwriter-y crowd, “I Lied, I’m Sorry” is a well-rounded banger, and something like “Sexy Goodbye” hints that there’s still more personality to discover in the future. The EP didn’t start to come together until they wrote “I Lied” at the beginning of this year, which set the ground of the world they wanted to build. “They all come from the same mom and dad, me and Rob, I think that’s why they’ve aged well,” she says.

When I mention that she’s debuting in a year full of bold, brash pop music, there’s no complaints about the stacked arena she’s entering. A self-described pop girlie “out of the womb,” her parents played her disco before hitting a sweet spot in high school with stars like Katy Perry, Lana Del Rey, and Lorde. Now, with the new A-team of Charli xcx, Chappell Roan, and Sabrina Carpenter taking over the charts, “I’m here for it, I’m hungry for more,” Qisha says. “Each of them have such strong touchpoints that a lot of other pop acts don’t seem to be holding onto. I could name you three main keywords for each of those artists that’d represent them perfectly. Not only are they lyrically sound, but also sonically and the world they’re building is so strong. And that’s something I hope to emulate.”

The groundwork for the new year has been laid, even days before her debut project drops — more music, more live shows, more music videos, more writing. She worked with a choreographer on the music video for “I Lied, I’m Sorry,” which was terrifying and tiring. Even though she says “it can’t get scarier than dancing on a bin van or upstairs to a drone in slippy socks,” she’s ready to eat her words and do something crazier.

But, of course, in the meantime, she’ll keep writing gems, authentic ones she says she “need[s] to hear on the radio.” I — we — need to hear them too. “I want to show people I’m a master of all pop, and I want it to be pushing the envelope,” she says, anything but complacent. “I want it to be taking risks and I want it to be doing something interesting, or at least for people to turn their heads and say, ‘Oh, that’s scratching an itch I didn’t know I had.’”