Chloe Qisha is building a world of her own

When we spoke to Chloe Qisha in 2025 for her Rolling Stone UK Future of Music cover shoot, she told us that she “fell into music backwards”. It’s safe to say she’s falling headfirst into it now. 

After our first catch-up at BST last year when she supported Sabrina Carpenter, we speak to Qisha, now with multiple undeniable pop bangers under her belt and two EPs, as she’s about to release her first mixtape, Fantasize. On it, she utilises all the tricks in the pop handbook while also throwing some of them out of the window. It’s a 10-song mixtape filled with cheekiness, flirtation and plenty of hooks. But alongside the sass comes vulnerability, as shown on tracks like ‘Surprise Surprise’. 

Here, she discusses the state of pop music, her career highlights and gives her verdict on who is the ultimate ‘Baby Girl’.  

You started releasing music in 2024.Why is now the right time for you to release a mixtape, Fantasize? 

I wish I could say it was planned, but really it was just the pace at which I wrote. I ended up with the 10 songs. It feels like the right time because a while has passed since the last project. I’m a bit of a slow writer, and it just took this amount of time to write X amount of songs for it to be out. 

Why did you decide to release a mixtape instead of a more traditional album?  

There’s a part of me that does look at this as an album, [but] I do like the idea that there’s also something that I’m now working towards. There’s an excitement there and a lot of room for exploration beyond this. 

Pink Pantheress’s last project was a mixtape and Charli xcx released a lot of mixtapes back in the day as well. You’re in good company.  

Agreed.  

You’ve created a strong visual identity around the mixtape. Can you walk us through the creative process behind it?   

There’s just so many layers. I feel like I’m such a visual artist now that I could yap on about the creative for days. For music videos, specifically, I always like to look at them as little worlds to illustrate the song itself, even if it doesn’t necessarily look and feel exactly like the overarching artwork or palette. It should serve the song specifically. ‘YDH’ is the one that does that the most. When we were writing it, I remember when we were writing the verses, it starts off like a fairy tale. Steph Jones [co-writer] in the room said jokingly, “Oh, this feels exactly like slutty Bridgerton,” and I was like, “It was like a [2000s US fantasy sitcom] That’s So Raven moment where I could just see into the future, and I was running around London in Renaissance outfits.”

It’s been over a year since you were featured on our Future of Music 2025 list. What has been your career highlight since then?  

My first US tour – there was something particularly magical about that. There’s something about going to a completely new continent, and booking shows, and literally not knowing who’s going to see you on the other side. I have kind of an idea of the listeners in the UK, just purely because I’ve done more shows here and I’ve done festivals here, but my first two shows in New York were the first time playing in North America, period. And that was really daunting for me. It was also a slightly new band that we were working with. There were so many wonderful moments that I was like, ‘This is exactly why I want to do this.’ I think that was such a triumphant moment of my career so far. 

We’ve been able to listen to some of the tracks from the mixtape and noted that Julia Michaels [‘Sorry’, Justin Bieber; ‘Taste’, Sabrina Carpenter] has been a writer on a few of them. How was it working with someone who is almost synonymous with great pop music?  

It was as crazy and mind-blowing as you would assume to be working with her. I’m 90 per cent sure I wrote, like, a 10-page essay about her songwriting and the impact that she’s had as an artist as well as on pop music in the 2010s. It was such a surreal moment, but also, I was just thrown into those sessions. The first song that we wrote was a song called ‘Mama’ on Fantasize. That song changed the direction and changed the game for writing for this mixtape. 

 The pop landscape is in an interesting place right now. Which direction do you feel it’s moving in?  

I don’t even think you could point to a specific sonic world that we’re moving in the direction of. I do think artists, in my opinion, are moving towards actual world-building, as opposed to maybe what we’ve just come out from, which is [more about] virality – let’s just push this one particular song and then be done with it. I at least hope, with the Adélas and the Slayyyters of the world, that you’re seeing a world being fleshed out beyond just a song.   

Who is the ultimate ‘Baby Girl’?  

This is so hard. Who is the ultimate baby girl? Dare I say Britney?