Chloe Qisha is living out her fantasy

PHOTOGRAPHY Cal McIntyre
CREATIVE DIRECTION Tori West
WORDS & PRODUCTION Chiara Maculan
STYLING Baillie Jones
MUA Yolanda Dohr
HAIR Roman Sam Harris
PRODUCTION ASSISTANT & SOCIALS Finn Soley
TEXT DESIGN Lola Jacob
WITH THANKS TO Rob Charlton at Satellite 414

ON THE COVER Chloe wears Blouse: RAPARTO, Skirt: MYAT, Boots & Headpiece: MIISTA, Tights: WOLFORD, Bra: STYLIST’S OWN

When she appeared on my laptop screen last week, rising pop princess Chloe Qisha was just gearing up for the release party and performance of her first mixtape, Fantasize, at the legendary London club Heaven. As much a fashion darling as a pop one, it’s clear the London-based singer-songwriter has no interest in a slow burn, and she’s aiming straight for superstardom; she ended up filling the historic queer venue with an army of enthusiastic leather-clad and sequin-covered superfans, stomping on the stage wearing a corseted red cowboy outfit by beloved designers Agro Studio.

The Kuala Lumpur-born musician’s rise has been fast indeed – not long after she moved to the UK to finish her A-Level exams, she made her official debut in July 2024 with her self-titled EP out by that November, and her second, Modern Romance, the following year. Big stages followed: she supported Coldplay for three nights at Wembley Stadium in August 2025 and played Sabrina Carpenter’s British Summer Time show, also landing support slots with BRICKS former cover stars RAYE and Self Esteem.

As she rested ahead of the album release, we were both in our cosy cat-mum-mode for this interview, ready to dig into the wonderfully theatrical, comfortingly vulnerable and deliciously cheeky world of Fantasize. Like many modern London love stories, it all started with a doomed crush on a gorgeous gay man. “We’re friends now,” says Qisha of her music video co-star. “But that crush inspired a lot of the hot and heavy songs, and I think that helped funnel the concept for this album.”

Since her last offering, Qisha learned a lot about herself, her boundaries and her values, but also how to be less reliant on others in her personal and professional life. “I like driving this ship myself. I think the first two EPs were a really safe space for me; I had a lot of structure and a lot of help from people around me. Obviously, I was still driving the ship, but it just felt different,” she recalls. “These 10 songs are a true representation of who I am and the artistic vision that I had.”

These 10 songs are a true representation of who I am and the artistic vision that I had.

The final 10-track release became a journey she describes as “an odyssey through the last year and a half of her life”, making it part-diary and part-dance floor, with all-around playful, blithely horny songwriting and a bold disco-tinged production. Humorously, disco-era curveball ‘Rasputin’ by Boney M played a significant role in setting the tone for her writing process, and Qisha – suitably calling it “an odyssey of a song” – was fixated on it for the better part of two years, becoming the project’s unlikely north star. She’d walk into a recording session and ask, “Rasputin?” and the track would go on. Even when tracks veered elsewhere, it left its mark, blending in perfectly within the joyful, textured universe of Fantasize. “Having a funny kind of off-piste song to anchor yourself to is always good for the character of a project,” she smiled.

Interestingly, the visual worldbuilding and artwork ideas actually came before the majority of the songs were written, heartening the theatrical yet sophisticated spirit of the project with references to old Renaissance masters. Before the mixtape was even born, Qisha had been sending her creative director, Lillie Eiger, a steady stream of Caravaggio and Botticelli paintings, whose lighting techniques really fascinated her. Michelangelo’s The Creation Of Adam also appeared on the mood board – Qisha’s reinterpretation of it, to be precise, where she fittingly swapped Adam and God with images of herself and heartthrob actor Drew Starkey.

The creative duo then had to ideate fast. Eiger had been noticing scaffolding in queer venues – the kind of temporary structures that architecture rave collective Temporary Pleasures in clubs – and it felt right for the explicit but stripped-back direction the popstar imagined for the artwork. The rest of the shoot unfolded from there: chiaroscuro-inspired single-source lighting, brutalist scaffolding, and plenty of beautiful boys and girls. “This sounds so weird, but we had so much skin on the mood board, we should start calling it the nude board, because it truly was,” she giggled. “There were lots of different skin textures and tones layered onto each other, and a lot of bodily fluids for some reason, like tears and sweat, but also dirt.” In her quintessentially tongue-in-cheek fashion, Qisha skillfully drew connections between the hedonism of these visuals and the tenebrism of the 1500s and Medieval-inspired aesthetics: “I guess it’s not exactly Medieval, but this combination is the equivalent to fairy smut in my brain.”

We had so much skin on the mood board, we should start calling it the nude board, because it truly was.

That quaint sensibility doesn’t stop at the visuals – her appetite for the romantic, the ornate, and the aching that drove the Caravaggio and Botticelli references also shapes how Fantasize talks about love. The mixtape reflects honestly on the ups and downs of dating, yearning and desire, and it arrives at a moment when romance has never been so easy to start or so hard to say out loud. ‘He Likes Boys’ – written about the aforementioned experience with her gay co-star – opens like a gloomy ballad, before the beat drops and the synths and piano ripple in, a bait-and-switch that turns heartache into a headbanger. ‘So Sad So Hot’ works the same melancholy with more straight-up pop panache, its arpeggiated synths nodding to stadium-pop drama.

Our conversation naturally leads to discussing our generation’s contemporary courting techniques, which Qisha suggests come in short bursts: a reply, a reaction, a slide into the DMs. Lovers in the last century had to put pen to paper to express their feelings, writing long letters after just meeting once, so the wait itself became part of the longing. “I think the DM thing is a bit bizarre,” pointed out Qisha. “Let’s be serious, this is the least romantic place.” She’s not wrong; the performed nonchalance and silent etiquette of DM-sliding is a minefield to those who long for candid declarations of affection, and we share in our concern that the art of conveying a crush in words is a skill that’s been lost on our generation. The singer, who calls period dramas her favourite comfort films, is firmly in favour of the slow burn. The 2005 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, with Matthew Macfadyen’s famous hand flex after assisting Keira Knightley’s Elizabeth Bennet into a carriage, is her go-to reference. “That is the epitome of yearning,” she asserted.

If yearning is the mixtape’s heart, desire is its pulse, and it runs straight back to that skin-heavy mood board. Fantasize is Qisha’s most explicit work yet, so we deemed it important to discuss how that openness lands in a climate that isn’t always kind to women who own their desire, with traditional ideas of womanhood creeping back into online relationship discourse, including Madonna-whore adjacent dichotomies that senselessly split women into the pure and wifely versus the sinful and unredeemable. “I do think it’s concerning that there’s a rise in that, but it’s also a rise in loser men,” she emphasised. “We’ve always had them, but they just somehow have access to phones and comment sections now.” Her patience for it is zero. “I have absolutely no time for it; crawl back into the hole you came from.”

There’s a rise in loser men. We’ve always had them, but they just somehow have access to phones and comment sections now. I have absolutely no time for it; crawl back into the hole you came from.

Nevertheless, Qisha is grateful for where the pop landscape has taken her, with women now writing and singing openly about sexual experiences, which gave her the nudge she needed to let go of the filter of ‘tastefulness’ to embrace the honest, and occasionally, brash. “Being in an era of pop girlies being able to speak more about sex, and quite explicitly as well, has definitely helped coax that out of me in my own songwriting,” she shared, and her candour comes naturally. “When it comes to sex and anything in that realm, I tend to overshare,” she admitted. Having surrounded herself with songwriting collaborators like Steph Jones and Julia Michaels (Sabrina Carpenter’s ‘Taste’, Justin Bieber’s ‘Sorry’) who are just as unfiltered, no lyric was off limits. Written in a session with Jones, Michaels and Ilya (Ariana Grande’s ‘Yes, And?’, Sam Smith’s ‘Unholy’), ‘Possessed (In A Hot Way)’ attests to this spirit. Spooky with a prowling bassline, the track delves into obsession and the euphoria of giving yourself over fully to desire, anchored by double entendres such as “light as a feather / stiff as a board”, twisting and turning through eroticism and playfulness.

But despite having been crafted during a year of sensual exploration and freedom for Qisha, the real story of Fantasize is surprisingly introspective. “It’s never really been a super intentional thing,” she said of the project’s explicit streak, finding its roots in her own sense of self. Over the past year, she turned her attention to music full-time, discovering that the more connected she felt to the work she was making, the more clearly she understood parts of her identity and sexuality that had previously felt hazy. “It’s been a very inward, very personal journey of reconnecting with myself,” she explained. People might assume the record’s story draws from a string of steamy encounters, but it hasn’t. “It’s about learning to love myself and see myself as a sexual being, and that actually has nothing to do with anybody else.”

‘Baby Girl’ shifts the album into more intimate territory, exposing the emotional honesty beneath its outward confidence. The song is anchored in a familiar question for anyone whose sexuality doesn’t fit neatly into a box: do I want to be her, or be with her? Beneath its sunny melody lies a more conflicted feeling, as Qisha becomes transfixed by a beautiful girl in a bathroom, her desire to become her fuelled equally by lust and envy. The memory behind it comes from high school, and it took her years to make sense of it. “I wanted to be everything in her, with her, around her,” she recounted. At the time, she couldn’t explain the pull. “I remember thinking I was crazy, because she hadn’t done anything to me.” The girl was perfectly polite, making Qisha’s feelings harder to place. “Only years after the fact did I join the dots, and writing this song was a very cathartic moment.”

I wanted to be everything in her, with her, around her. I remember thinking I was crazy, because she hadn’t done anything to me… Only years after the fact did I join the dots, and writing this song was a very cathartic moment.

What she offers on the track isn’t a neat label or a revealing coming-out story; instead, it’s about not having one. “I think I’m just attracted to everybody, and I wouldn’t even know what to begin to call that,” she says. That refusal to define herself, and the confusion and clarity bound up in it, is what gives ‘Baby Girl’ its resonance. It has since become a favourite to perform for both her and her band. “I’m so glad that she exists,” she said of the song.

Part of discovering yourself is learning that you don’t need anyone else to tell you who you are. That sentiment runs through the album’s exploration of girlhood, which Fantasize approaches as something fluid, expansive and impossible to pin down. It’s there in the yearning and the horniness, in the audacious and the restrained, and most plainly found on opening track ‘YDH’. The song blends the melody of a secret ABBA track with the Renaissance charm of lush fabrics and elaborate courting rituals, asking whether a girl can be young, dumb and horny without being judged for her freedom. When asked what she would tell her younger self, she reflected on relying on others’ approval. “I wish I’d learnt not to be so reliant on external validation,” she revealed. “And not just men specifically, because I was strangely unbothered by most of the boys at school. It was about approval from people in general, and the strength that comes from finding and loving who you are before you go looking for it elsewhere.”

That self-assurance has only made her ambitions bolder and her fantasies more unrestrained. Professionally, she has one dream venue in mind. “I’d love to headline this venue in Colorado called Red Rocks. I just know I would slay the house down boots there,” she laughed. Romantically, she quotes a well-known meme: “You know that one of the woman in between two guys? You could interchange those two boys with anybody,” she smirked. “That’s what I want to create, essentially.” It’s a fantasy about being wanted and wanting back, with pleasure taking centre stage over any one specific identity. On Fantasize, desire doesn’t need to be explained to be understood.

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Enjoyed this story? Help keep independent queer-led publishing alive and unlock the BRICKS Learner Platform, our alternative education platform for emerging and aspiring creatives, hosted via Substack.