If you’ve followed the team at Staged Haze for awhile, you know that we love finding those artists who are on the verge of “making it big,” whether it was Billie Eilish back in 2017 or Chappell Roan in 2022. It’s always fun scoping out the next crop of amazing artists and following their trajectories and knowing that we were there at the jump. And that’s exactly I feel about Chloe Qisha, the Malaysian-born, London-based pop artist who has opened for artists like Sabrina Carpenter and Coldplay and landed on BBC’s “Sound of 2026” list next to major players like Sombr, Royel Otis, and Geese.
Chloe, who’s 27-years-old, just wrapped up her first North American tour ever, which included shows in Brooklyn, Montreal, Toronto, Chicago, and San Francisco, the majority sold out months in advance. I knew that I had to catch her show at the Echoplex in L.A., and was impressed with her ability to sell out a 780 capacity venue during her first North American headlining tour. And if that isn’t impressive enough, she mentioned during her hour-long set that she only performed live for the first time roughly a year prior.
Chloe debuted with the track “VCR Home Video” back in July 2024, but I didn’t discover her music until her second song, “I Lied, I’m Sorry,” just a couple months later, which is still one of my favorite songs of hers. Her lyricism oscillates between sharp, funny, and self-deprecating, but also quite theatrical, delivering lines in almost a “sprechstimme” way, which I just learned to mean “a cross between speaking and singing in which the tone quality of speech is heightened and lowered in pitch.” Her musical style is glossy, big, and arena ready, but also introspective. self-aware, and very Gen Z (complimentary).
Chloe’s set started promptly at 9 P.M., introducing herself to the crowd with a “I’m here to gag you for 60 minutes,” which garnered a lot of cheers. She opened with a performance of “Modern Romance,” which set the tone of the rest of the show and the themes explored in the music. Next up was “Sexy Goodbye,” a confident ode to making peace about a ‘situationship’ coming to an end and choosing to say goodbye to it on your own terms, then “A-Game,” which is an invitation to Chloe’s love interest to, for lack of a better term, “put a move” on her.
Chloe performed the bulk of her released tracks (some of my favorites included “Sex, Drugs, and Existential Dread,” and “21st Century Cool Girl”), as well as four unreleased songs: “Baby Girl,” “Cry About It,” “He Likes Boys,” and “Surprise, Surprise,” which I’m assuming are all part of an unannounced bigger project or new EP.
What makes a Chloe Qisha show hit right now is the collective feeling that we’re watching “the next big thing” in the early days of stardom, a bubble that’s surely to pop in the next year. The venues are small enough that it feels organic, but still impressive. Her stage presence isn’t about commanding the room in a traditional pop-star sense, with glittery costume changes or back-up dancers, it’s about letting you in on a musician that’s complicated and imperfect, still very much in the developmental stage.
Chloe is set to perform at the Isle of Wight Festival in the U.K. in June and Reading & Leeds in August.
Photos by Deanie Chen
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