Inspired by Lady Gaga’s theatrical reinventions and the advanced emotional maturity that comes from therapist training, the London artist has been rightfully dubbed the next Sabrina Carpenter or Olivia Rodrigo.
Where were you during Hot Girl Summer? Chloe Qisha was everywhere: opening for Sabrina Carpenter at BST Hyde Park. Sharing an All Points East bill with RAYE and FKA Twigs. Warming up Wembley Frickin’ Stadium for Coldplay. A few months before she coined ‘Hot Girl Summer’ and made 2025 her plaything, Qisha sold out her first headline show in just four minutes. A month before that, Kelly Clarkson covered one of Qisha’s tracks during the ‘Kellyoke’ segment of her show: ‘I Lied, I’m Sorry’, the stupidly catchy dopamine-rush bop that marries Olivia Rodrigo’s brand of pop punk with ‘80s drum-machine dance.
Runaway momentum plus top-notch songs plus “‘fits” that fans are insatiable for equals Qisha being heralded as the next Sabrina Carpenter, Olivia Rodrigo, or Chappell Roan. “Sabrina is not the only girl who’s out here writing songs about being horny,” she recently quipped to Dork Magazine. On ‘21st Century Cool Girl’ she’s “getting freaky on hotel floors.” Elsewhere, her idea of a date is “we can watch the news and get naked.” That’s during ‘Sex, Drugs & Existential Dread’, which posits the revolutionary idea that all of the above is possible “from the comfort of your bed.” Its Talking Heads-like bass line is interrupted by keyboard klaxons landing like exclamation points. There are even discordant duelling saxophone solos that mirror her descent into maddening dread.
Qisha is so far from one-note – sonically, lyrically, she can do anything. She wrote more than 40 songs with 70 different collaborators – cycling through Phoebe Bridgers, Troye Sivan, and Frank Ocean phases – before she teamed up with Rob Milton (The 1975, Holly Humberstone). Once they got together, she scrapped all her songs and started from scratch with the collaborator who was able to focus her mad-scientist genius. The two EPs they co-wrote and released last year form a kind of sister act, Qisha has said. She’s garbed in nine-to-five attire on both covers, but her slacks are slipping off to reveal her underwear on Modern Romance, tie loosened, the single tear from The Chloe Qisha EP replaced with a steely, what-do-you-want glare. Both survey with formidable confidence the messy, sexy, whirlwind drama of being young and figuring out who you are. One of many conclusions: she’s the 21st Century Cool Girl.
This was never the plan: out-thirsting Sabrina, cooly conquering the 21st century. Qisha sang in talent shows hosted by the international school she attended in her native Malaysia, but moving to London a few years later, her focus was on training to be a therapist. Her accidental musical brilliance and the emotional maturity of psychology studies seem to have fortified her with fearlessness. She’s bold with her music, she’s playful, she’s colliding all of her phases and influences and lusts and lows and whims and wicked ideas – yet it’s all so cohesive and visionary. Because she makes it so. Because it’s all her. “I always thought of Chloe Qisha as a persona, a slightly crazier version of myself,” she recently said. “But the more I’m in it, the more I realise that Chloe Qisha is just me.”