Before their first headline gig, the She Likes A Boy singer sat down with DIVA
BY YASMIN VINCE, IMAGE SUPPLIED
Valentine’s Day is all about celebrating the people you love. It seems only right that this is the day when Nxdia, the queer darling of alt-pop, will play their first headline show to a sold out crowd. If there is one thing the Egyptian-Sudanese singer knows how to do, it’s make the internet fall in love with them.
Last year, Nxdia blew up on TikTok after releasing snippets of their song, She Likes A Boy. Ever so relatably, Nxdia sings about their teenage crush: “She says something ‘bout liking his height. Suddenly worried ‘bout mine.” The song quickly amassed a cult following and just 12 short months later, the alt-pop singer has released a few more singles – enough to form a tracklist for a show at Camden Assembly. Ahead of the show, they sat down with DIVA to talk about their crazy year.
What’s it like seeing people love your music so much?
I think it’s unbelievable, if I’m being completely honest. I had this thing in my head growing up, because I was quite like an insular child – I was very loud but I liked to spend a lot of time on my own, just writing all this stuff that I felt like would never see the light of day.
You have no expectations when you put anything out, you just write stuff that connects with you and hope for the best. Seeing people be like: “Oh my God, this is my anthem, I’m obsessed with this right now” or “I’ve been thinking about this and I’ve not seen it in a song before”, that is crazy. It means the world.
You first started to gain traction on TikTok, but with this Valentine’s Day show, you’re going to see all these fans in front of you. What’s that anticipation like?
I can’t wait! I can’t wait for performing more and seeing people. I’ve been craving connection and I always felt like I was watching people through a glass wall, observing and trying to replicate what worked and what didn’t. That’s I think why the poetry and the music and stuff like that meant as much as it did.
But now? It’s been a year of people singing back to me. I remember being really shocked at a gig I was doing for Jodie Bryant at the end of 2023, because I was just singing some songs – this is just before She Likes a Boy had blown up as well – someone screamed in my face the lyrics, and I was shocked. So I stopped singing for a second. I was actually looking around and feeling bewildered, because I thought there was no way this was real. It’s insane, it’s the best feeling in the world. It just makes me feel like I’m so in the moment and it’s hard to feel present sometimes, so it’s beautiful.
Why do you think people have connected to your lyrics so much?
It’s hard to say, because so much of the stuff that I write is taken from diaries or notes pages that I’ve written erratically at 2am, where that is exactly how I felt in that moment and it needed to come out. I just try to be as transparent as possible and actually say the thing I want to say, rather than just like the thing that I think I should say, so when people reach out they surprise me with the way that they connect to different parts of the song. Even with She Likes A Boy, people have said: “Oh I know it’s about a sapphic crush, but I want to use it as someone who’s trans, I want to use it as someone who’s non-binary, I want to change the pronouns in this song.”
I say do it. This song is for you. If you feel connected to something, even if it’s not in a way that I intended initially, of course that’s valid and means something so beautiful.
That idea of just putting what you think on a page is what makes you so relatable, I think. Why do you like to be so honest in your songs?
Because I have the privilege of being in a position where I can be completely myself. I don’t like this idea that to be a queer artist or from a certain background means you must be ostracized from people who have been in your life. I understand that that’s a horrible reality for some people. But I have a lot to celebrate in terms of the life around me, showing what’s possible in terms of the love you can receive and the really amazing support you can have.
I owe it to myself to represent myself as fully as possible and then I owe it to people to then be as honest as I can in hopes that if there’s someone who maybe can’t be as transparent or can’t be as forthcoming with the things that they want to share about themselves, that they at least feel like there’s someone else that’s doing it and someone else that’s present and visible.
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