“Is it hot in here?”: Chloe Qisha is making existential dread look sexy

“Is it hot in here?”, Chloe Qisha pouts, a quarter of the way through her show at London’s OMEARA. The musician, playfully tugging at the collar of her oversized, pinstriped suit (à la David Byrne), is flirting with her crowd, and they, in turn, look just about ready to lay their lives on the ground for her. It’s the kind of onstage charisma and crowd-control you usually see from artists who have been on the gig-circuit for years.

Just over 36 hours earlier, the Malaysian-born, London-based pop singer released her latest single ‘Sex, Drugs & Existential Dread’, an infectious, funk-fueled dance track that wouldn’t feel out of place at a house party on a sweaty summer night. She doesn’t know it yet, but that evening the OMEARA audience will be singing every word of the song back to her: a testament to just how much of an impression she’s made since releasing her self-titled debut only five months earlier. The impact of the Chloe Qisha EP, which combusted into the airwaves seemingly out of nowhere, has reached far beyond Qisha’s base in London, even receiving a stamp of approval from American pop-legend Kelly Clarkson, who recently covered the EP’s opening track ‘I Lied, I’m Sorry’ on the popular ‘Kellyoke’ segment of her talk show.“It was the craziest thing,” the 26 year-old tells me, sitting in her dressing room a few hours before she’s set to take the stage. “I found out through Google alerts!”

It may have been a whirlwind past year for Qisha but, make no mistake, 2024 was just the warm-up, with the pop princess revealing that ‘Sex, Drugs & Existential Dread’ and previous single ‘21st Century Cool Girl’ are preludes to Modern Romance, a new EP due to arrive May 1st. “Right now, I’m rawdogging life,” she jokes. “And loving it…once I get the momentum going, I can’t stop.” Qisha describes the new EP as the spiritual sister of her debut, which was notable for its blend of moody-sexy alt pop sensibilities with a tongue-in-cheek embodiment of modern teenage hysteria (think Gregg Araki’s Teenage Apocalypse trilogy). “I just think it’s hilarious,” she says, when I ask about her interest in writing about her teenage years. “You have to laugh, because you’re such a mess of a human being when you’re a teenager. I’ve kind of accepted who I was during that time, despite the insecurities and anxieties, by making fun and poking fun at myself.”

It’s hard to imagine a world where music wasn’t on the cards for Qisha, considering her natural affinity for performing. “I did a talent show once or twice in high school,” she says. “In Sixth form they used to put on these unplugged, acoustic events, and that’s where I started to dabble in performing a little more. But then I got to Uni and, for a time, that part of me just ceased to exist, I thought that was the end of it for me. I didn’t have a pullback until literally last October [her first headline show, at London’s Bermondsey Club].” A self taught multi-instrumentalist, Qisha’s knack for crafting sounds, though apparent during her upbringing in Kuala Lumpur and later London, was a supporting character during her adolescence.. By the time she settled into recording her debut project, she had already jumped from a bachelors studying Psychology at UCL to a masters in Songwriting to a Communications masters at Goldsmiths (her favourite of the three). “It reveals my clear indecisiveness about what I wanted to do with my life.” She laughs. “But it’s reassuring to me that I was doing music part time alongside all those degrees. So, if anything, the one consistent thing in my life, the throughline, has been music.” 

 A Rabbit’s Foot caught up with Qisha to discuss her two latest singles, the movie that most inspired her music, and writing musical love letters to her teenage self.

LG: What’s your headspace been like since your first EP drop in November? You’ve already got a new project on the horizon. You haven’t really stopped. 

CQ: It’s been intense. I would love to say I was forced into it, but it was definitely my own psychopathic nature to go straight into a second project. But I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’ve been developing for so long, writing behind the scenes for so many years—I was always waiting. it got to a point where for the last two years I was itching to get to the next stage, whatever the next stage may be. So now that I’m in it, I do genuinely believe that this is the perfect way to do things. It’s important to keep feeding the children with new music. Right now, I’m rawdogging life and loving it. Once I get the momentum going, I can’t stop. 

LG: I love ‘Sex, Drugs & Existential Dread’. What do those three things have in common for you?

CQ: Existential dread is always the outlier. Sex and drugs is pleasure. Dabble in what you want to dabble. The song is both so about me and so not about me. I’m the most boring human being, and I wear that boldly on my sleeve. I love to stay at home with my cats and my partner and I don’t deviate from that. I don’t drink and I don’t do drugs, but I stay at home a lot, and existential dread plays a big part in that experience. It’s a duality. I like to think that the persona of Chloe Qisha is out there doing all the sex and all the drugs, and I’m at home doing the existential dread. 

LG: There is a rebelliousness to your music, though. What were you like as a teenager? 

CQ: One thing I can pride myself on is that I’ve always been steadfast as a human being. I think I’ve always known who I am in my core really early on. Maybe that was because I can’t drink—literally, though, my body physically won’t let me feel the effects, so there was no point in even trying. I’m a perfectionist, and I would hate to not be in control. I’ve always known what I’ve wanted to do and not wanted to do, which maybe makes me boring, but it lends itself well to being an artist because it sets boundaries for you. I see Chloe Qisha as an extension of myself—she’s not so far removed that she’s a persona, but she’s a version of me that I can switch on when I need to. I was a quiet kid.

LG: You’ve mentioned before that some of your music is written from the perspective of your teenage self. What do you mean by that?

CQ: Even though I knew who I was, I still had a lot of teenage chaos inside me. I love writing from that perspective, because I just think it’s hilarious. You have to laugh, because you’re such a mess of a human being when you’re a teenager. I’ve kind of accepted who I was during that time, despite the insecurities and anxieties, by making fun and poking fun at myself.

LG: There are so many stories to be taken from being a teenager. Maybe because at that point you’re still figuring out the rules of the game.

CQ: Totally. It’s true for anybody experiencing biological teenagehood: even if you are cool, calm and collected outside, that’s not what’s necessarily happening inside. Just through the general ups and downs of anxieties and hormones, and exploring sexuality, and being obsessed with the super-mid guy who is incredibly mean to me and won’t give me any morsel of attention [laughs]. That’s a common theme in the next project. It’s about love, in all its ways, shapes and its forms. It’s about nostalgia, and dating in the modern day. Quite a few of the songs, if you listen to the lyrics, are me talking about being obsessed with boys who wouldn’t give me the type of day, but in retrospect, having experienced that is okay, it’s character building.

LG: What else can you tell me about the new EP?

CQ:I think sonically it’s a continuation of EP1, perhaps slightly more succinct, naturally. I always imagined my first two projects being a sister act, with one lifting the other. I think the project after that I’ll need a gear shift. 

LG: Tell me more about how the first seeds of that song were planted and what you wanted to express with it.

CQ: Rob [Milton, Qisha’s producer] was showing me a reference song that he really liked sonically, it was ‘Sex, Drugs & Rock n’ Roll’ by Ian Dury of the Blackheads. We were listening to the lyrics and trying to figure out what the modern equivalent of those three things would be now. Mary was like, ‘sex, drugs and a green juice’ and I said ‘sex, drugs and pilates’, and I don’t know if Rob was going through it that day but he said [deep voice] “sex, drugs and existential dread” [laughs]. And we were like, ‘that’s it!’ And it was as quick as that. The best songs come very fast because they so desperately want to be born.

From my perspective, it’s like, I’m this boring human being and i’m looking outward to everyone else, all my wonderful, beautiful friends who do love to go out and party and do love doing all the drugs and all the sex, which I’m a staunch supporter of, and I’m like, “but what do you mean? You can do all of that from here? With me? And you can chill with me and my cats? You don’t need to go out.” That’s how I’ve always seen the song. I’m the weird friend trying to lure everyone back inside.

LG: My favourite part of the song is the opening beat drop—that groan you let out before the drop that feels like the only appropriate way to introduce a beat as funky as this.

CQ: We were thinking of funny ways to open the song because it’s such a crazy, funky beat that it wouldn’t have felt right to just jump straight into it. It was so late and we were all exhausted, and I just let out this exasperated tired groan [laughs] we happened to be recording and Rob was like, ‘waaait a minute’, and cut it into the song.

LG: I love how you conceptualise your sound on a visual level. For example, your last few singles and previous EP cover featured you wearing a Byrnes-style baggy suit. 

CQ: I always knew I wanted suits to be central to the world I was building. That was the only thing I was certain about going in this time last year, when we were conceptualising what kind of artist I wanted to be with my creative director Lily. It’s all David Byrnes, and Bowie. I’ve come into myself a lot fashion-wise over the past year. It took me a while to get there, but I’ve been experimenting a bit more androgynously in fashion, and now feel more comfortable in those spaces than when I was dressing über feminine. I’m always freezing, I’m cold blooded. So it’s kind of a practical decision, too. 

LG: There’s a cinematic edge to your world-building, too. Are there any movies that have influenced how you approach your art?

CQ: I’m a creature of comfort, so I have my comfort movies. Any girl in their 20s will have Pride & Prejudice 2005 on their list, and I’m no exception. The recent adaptation of Emma. [laughs] I don’t know why they’re all period pieces. Blue Valentine was one I went back to a lot growing up. It was one of my first real glimpses into what a “real” relationship could look like. My first anti-fairytale ending romance, how you can be so in love with someone and end up hating them a few years later. It’s so real. Maybe that’s where the brutality in which I write about love comes from. 

LG: Tell me about the conception of ‘21st Century Cool Girl’, your first single from the upcoming project.

CQ: We wanted to write about the fact that I write a lot about my teenage years, and the song literally starts by reminiscing about all the silly boys that broke my heart. It’s about my relationship with my teenage self, and how now I’m ready to embrace her. It’s about me in my 20s telling my teenage self: “look at the person you are now, if only you knew who you would grow up to be, how strong you’d be, how confident. If there’s a third party love interest, they have to jump on your train now. Because you’re off to the races, and there’s no stopping you.” It’s a self-love anthem in that way. It’s a love song to myself.