Qisha represents, in many ways, both a commitment to the pop of yore — big looks, huge hooks, concept visuals — and a bold new frontier for the niche popstars of the Internet. She plays perfectly to the crowd of popheads obsessed with the perfect hook and a tight song structure, but she’s not the kind of digital native who’s going straight from a stadium show to livestreaming the postgame snack in bed on Instagram after. Rather, she’s still committed to the performance art of pop, one that’s aspirational, and one where access perhaps impedes the mission of the music rather than aids it. “I love the mystery. I love back when pop was more mysterious and you wouldn’t know what the inside of Beyoncé’s bedroom looked like,” she says and laughs.

As a kid in Malaysia, the pop Qisha grew up on that Beyoncé-style superstardom. She idolized ABBA, Katy Perry, and Ariana Grande, unashamed and unbothered by any indie kids who might have tried to claim her music taste was lesser-than for it. It was the pure confidence of their projects, the largeness and theatricality that thrilled her. “That was the beginning of my journey into becoming like a listener,” she tells me. “Does that make sense? And I do feel like those like early artists in my view as pop artists is kind of how I've maintained the perception of what it means to be a pop artist, which is quite a dated view of how pop artists are, you know?,” she explains. 

From her debut EP to now, Qisha has wanted her world to harken back to the days of MTV pop, something stylised to a tee, the kind of pop artist project where you’d wait up until midnight just to watch the new video drop. “There's a beauty in it, how pop artists are so accessible now… but equally, as we've seen from the Chappell Roans of the world, there is no boundary now,” she says.

“[I came] in with that energy of: I know what I want and I know where I stand, and these are the values that we hold,”  she explains. “And that slightly more elevated, stylised work. Visuals come hand in hand with the music. I think that's what I've taken from that era of pop stars.”