Chloe Qisha on playing Wembley, popstar ambitions, and latest single 'So Sad So Hot' for DIY's Class of 2026 • Neu • DIY Magazine

The internet might have made it so that, these days, there’s no one surefire way to create a star. But even by modern standards, Chloe Qisha has been going pretty rogue. Take the Malaysia-born, London-based singer’s summer 2025 checklist. This June, she clocked up three nights at Wembley Stadium at the behest of Coldplay - not just her first time gracing the UK’s biggest stage, but her first time supporting any established artist ever. Huddled backstage with Chris Martin and co before going on, the frontman had a few words for her: “He just turned to me and was like, ‘I think the music’s amazing. We think you’re amazing. We think you’re going to be huge’,” she recalls. So far, so insane.

If she needed even more encouragement for her stadium debut, however, then Chloe’s experiences over the preceding days would have done the job. Unintentionally, she notes, the previous week had encompassed a series of other increasingly escalating firsts. “I was headlining a tent at Leeds Festival, and then two days after I did the main stage at All Points East with RAYE, and then three days after that I did Wembley. And not that you can compare the feeling of those things, but it just really worked out in a stepping stone kind of way. It was doable,” she says pragmatically. “It didn’t feel intimidating; it didn’t feel scary. Which is a very psychopathic answer,” she laughs, “but I actually felt really at home on that [Wembley] stage. It was wonderful.”

Though, to the outside world, the singer’s explosion into the British pop sphere has been swift and skilful - the slick, cheeky, left-of-centre pop of breakthrough second single ‘I Lied, I’m Sorry’ arriving less than 18 months ago as a seemingly fully-formed entity - behind the scenes, Chloe has been building the bricks for years. Now aged 27, she jokes that she’s “basically a geriatric as a developing artist,” but that her patience has been the key to everything clicking so quickly into place (publicly, at least). “I think I would have completely messed it up for myself if the opportunities I’ve had and the songs that I’ve written now happened when I was a lot younger because I didn’t know who I was then,” she says. “I was constantly shaping and morphing and trying to copy other people from year to year. In my early twenties, I would literally throw out everything in my closet every summer and then reinvent myself. But now it’s stabilised because I’ve gone through more of life.”

“I’m a pop girly through and through.”

Before Chloe Qisha, the pop star, was Chloe Qisha the student. Coming from an Asian family where music wasn’t considered “a full-time salary job”, she spent years fighting the industry’s repeated calls, winding up with a pair of degrees in psychology and communications along the way. “I was very hellbent on doing other stuff because I did not know that music was an option for me. And then getting into it, I was always very tentative,” she explains. “I put some shit covers on YouTube and then I was getting emailed by A&Rs, and then I had to spend years after that teaching myself how to songwrite. It felt very backwards but I needed to hone that skill before I started writing music that I was actually really proud of.”

It’s notable that she hasn’t really had one big transformative viral moment but a series of more old-school wins. “I wish I was in the TikTok age of humans who use it as a second limb, but I am not, and I think that’s fine,” she says. Playing on bills alongside both RAYE and Sabrina Carpenter this festival season, Chloe felt a fitting kinship with the headliners. “For the two of them specifically, the grind has been happening for years. They’re not one-hit wonders online. They’ve put in so much groundwork to the point where these albums that they’ve come out with and worlds that they’ve built are so intentional and so sleek, and they look incredible,” she says. “You hear it in the music, and you feel it in the music. Seeing them on stage it was like, ‘oh, THIS is what it’s all about.’”

Even within her early releases - a self-titled debut EP last year and this spring’s follow up ‘Modern Romance’ - there’s a coherence and clarity of vision to her that signals the arrival of precisely this type of artist. Every nuance is thought through and considered, from the slicked-back hair and tailoring of her on-stage attire to the red and black colour palette that runs through her visuals. Most importantly, the songs sit in an already recognisable sonic world too: one that bounces between ‘80s uninhibitedness, modern pop smarts, and the occasional indie nod.

Her latest single ‘So Sad, So Hot’ reaches the apex of one of her favoured lyrical strands: being both horny and miserable (see also: ‘Sexy Goodbye’ and ‘The Boys’). “I just think we’re all super complicated beings in this world, and when are we ever not feeling more than two things at once? I certainly am most of the time,” she says. “And that is, at my core, just unequivocally, authentically me - always a bit sad and always feeling a bit hot.”

“It’s a psychopathic answer, but I felt really at home on stage at Wembley Stadium.”

‘So Sad, So Hot’ marks the first step towards a future project that, when we speak, Chloe is currently working on in Los Angeles. She’s still unsure of exactly what form it will take (“My perfectionist brain, I just want to have everything down before I know what to call it…”), but she’s been consciously moving to a sonic world that she describes as “centre pop”; one where she can unashamedly begin her bid towards becoming one of the UK’s main pop girls. “What we’ve been doing has been bridging the worlds of my slightly more leftfield stuff in the first two EPs, but then also trying to bring it back to this glorious pop chorus, because that’s who I am. I’m a pop girly through and through,” she says.

She cites Addison Rae’s recent debut album as a benchmark for where her ambitions lie. “Addison’s debut was just insane. It was so sleek; every song and every concept had its place, and it was really just telling a wonderful story that felt very authentic to her, and was very cheeky but also very serious,” she enthuses. “I really hope that whenever I decide to embark on [an album], it has at least 50% of the intentionality that she had with that project.”

As an inaugural move towards that point, ‘So Sad, So Hot’ is a superlative one - a purring disco verse which gives way to an insatiable chorus that lands somewhere between ABBA and Erasure’s ‘A Little Respect’. On it, she perfectly distils the hallmarks that are rapidly becoming Chloe Qisha staples: deadpan observational storytelling laced over timeless earworm melodies. “I guess the tears are bringing out the colour in my eyes,” she sighs over its soaring central hook; you can practically hear the wink. “I don’t intentionally mean to be funny but I do have quite a few people telling me that I’m just quite funny with my cynicism,” she shrugs. “I see myself as incredibly emotionless and boring, but apparently I’m emotionless and funny!”

The humour might be a handy by-product, but when it comes to everything else, the singer has her vision nailed. And, as proof of a successful recipe, her fan base has been showing up and showing themselves to be exactly what she’d hoped. “Because I only did two or three 100-capacity headline shows before we went straight into my first festival season this summer, I almost didn’t know who was going to show up. I remember thinking, ‘Who are the Chloe Qisha listeners and what do they look like? What are their vibes? What are their energies?’” she recalls. “And I’m happy to report that a lot of them are the gays and the gals and the theys, who we love. I think I’ve somehow attracted myself in fan form.”

Having meticulously sketched out the framework, in 2026, Chloe is preparing to lean into the details ever further. Chris Martin is already on board and, with an array of future classics already coming out of her LA writing room, chances are it won’t take too much longer for the rest of the world to follow suit.

“The first two EPs were setting the foundation and trying to figure out the edges of her world, and now I know what they are, I can really hunker down,” she says. “They say you have to do 10,000 hours [to hone your craft], and not to say that should be everyone’s journey, but I resonate with that a lot because I feel like I’ve been doing this a long time; I just didn’t put myself out there until recently. But when I fully locked in a year or two ago, I said to everybody on my team: ‘I do not have a glass ceiling’.”

‘So Sad So Hot’ is out now via Columbia.

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